The owner of X, the everything app, has announced a new feature that might be useful but also annoying.
In a standalone post on X, Elon Musk announced that Community Notes will get a new feature at some point soon. If a user interacts with a post that has since been corrected via Community Notes, a bot will send them a direct message about the correction.
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Musk’s posts were pretty vague and raised a few questions. For starters, we don’t know when this feature will launch. More importantly, though, Musk didn’t specify what kinds of interactions will prompt one of these automatic DMs. Will any interaction, such as a like, trigger one, or does the user need to repost or quote the post for the bot to send a message?
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Beyond that, it’s worth asking how effective this will actually be in curbing the spread of misinformation. Oftentimes, a post will gain a ton of traction before a Community Note corrects it, and sending messages to people who helped spread the post will only work if the users actually check their DMs, and then actually feel like removing whatever interactions they made with the corrected post.
Still, some accountability is better than none, I suppose.
