Major brands including Apple and Samsung have had critical notes attached to ads. Political advertisers have raised concerns about the tool heading into campaign season.
Fact-checking notes on X are making some advertisers more cautious about spending on the social-media platform.
X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2021 began allowing a group of volunteers to collaborate on “Community Notes” meant to provide additional context or information about both unpaid posts and paid ads on the platform. Notes first became visible to all Twitter users in 2022, but their prevalence has increased significantly this year.
Elon Musk, who acquired the company last year, has praised Community Notes as key to making X a more reliable source of information, but told CNBC in May that X had lost $40 million in revenue after two unnamed advertisers had notes added to their posts.
Ads for brands from Apple to Uber have in recent months been called out for making allegedly false or misleading claims. Results vary. Uber deleted an ad with a critical Community Note, while Apple’s Community Note later disappeared when other members of the notes community weighed in against it.
One note accused an ad for videogame company Evony of showing action that is different from what takes place in the game, telling X users, “This is a false advertisement.” Evony couldn’t be reached for comment.
Political ads will likely face even greater scrutiny as the 2024 election cycle heats up, according to experts.
X has published more than 21,200 Community Notes below posts and ads on its platform since the feature’s debut, though most proposed notes never become public, said Alex Mahadevan,director of digital media literacyorganization MediaWise, citing data provided publicly by X.
Notes are proposed and must be approved by a group of volunteers for the project, which is open to users who provide a verified phone number, joined the platform more than six months ago and have not recently violated its rules.
X requires that each suggested note be rated as helpful by a certain number of users with different points of view before it is approved, said Mahadevan.
Marketers and Elon Musk
A number of major advertisers paused spending on X around the time Musk acquired the company, citing Musk’s changes to content-moderation policies and his own controversial tweets.
Ad-industry veteran Linda Yaccarino, who became the company’s chief executive in June, has attempted to rebuild the business and repair relationships with buyers.
The possibility of receiving a Community Note is one more reason for advertiser caution, said Christopher Spong, an associate director of social media and communications at media agency Collective Measures. Spong’s agency has advised its clients against buying on the platform since last year.
An X executive said users get a notification in the app when one of their posts receives a Community Note.
Uber earlier this year deleted an ad promoting the idea that its drivers can be their own bosses and “#earnlikeaboss” after a Community Note cited a study that found that the average Uber driver earns $11.77 an hour. Uber didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Other brands have left their messages up even with critical notes attached.Samsung Mobile in April posted a message on X promoting the ability of the camera on its Galaxy S23 Ultra to take photos of the moon and night sky clearly.
Days later, a Community Note appeared, telling users that “Samsung phones digitally ‘fake’ images taken of the Moon to make them appear sharper,” listing a story from technology site the Verge as its source.
Samsung previously responded to such comments by detailing the steps Galaxy phones take to improve moon photos, culminating in using AI to “effectively eliminate remaining noise and enhance the image details even further.”
Samsung, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, hasn’t deleted the post.
The animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said critical Community Notes added to some of its recent unpaid posts have made the organization more skeptical of buying ads on the platform.
“PETA has spent minimal advertising dollars on X/Twitter in the recent past, and we’re likely to spend even less moving forward, given how easily community notes can be hijacked by trolls and industries that profit from cruelty to animals,” said a spokeswoman.
Political advertisers, who began spending on X after Musk decided earlier this year to reverse a ban on political ads that had been in place since 2019, also have raised concerns about Community Notes.
Several clients of FlexPoint Media, a firm that buys ads for Republican candidates and affiliated organizations, have recently contacted the firm with questions about how the Community Notes system works and how they might avoid public disputes over the accuracy of claims made in their ads, said Chief Executive Tim Cameron.
FlexPoint clients don’t, however, plan to stop spending on X, Cameron said.
Checking the fact-checks
Some published notes have triggered contentious exchanges among the program’s volunteers.
In August, an Apple ad promoting the sustainability of the iPhone received a Community Note alleging that Apple intentionally slows down older phone models to encourage sales. The note cited a 2020 lawsuit on the subject that was settled for up to $500 million.
The note later disappeared, however, after the number of volunteers labeling it unhelpful crossed an internal threshold, according to a screenshot provided by a current member of the program.
“Don’t abuse Community Notes to ‘get back’ on companies you don’t like,” read a subsequent message from one memberto those who had criticized the ad.
Apple declined to comment.
Later that month, X’s official Community Notes account said it had tweaked its algorithm to reduce incidents in which Community Notes appear and then disappear as more users weigh in, by raising the threshold required for notes to go public.
Some advertisers say the notes can be unfair or misleading.
MetaWin,a platform that runs competitions for nonfungible tokens and cryptocurrency prizes, ran a sponsored post last month promising users a free shot at winning $1 million by using its site.
X appended a note pointing out that while the entrance itself is free, consumers will have to pay the “gas fee” associated with the entry on the blockchain. A spokesman for MetaWin said the company believes that the note may have misled X users to think that MetaWin received some of that fee, which actually goes to miners who validate Ethereum transactions.
“While we welcome the X community guideline comments in principle, we do have a concern as to who monitors the accuracy of its work and how its output can always be fair and balanced to all advertisers,” the spokesman said.
Some X users say Community Notes help them avoid inflated prices in ads for products from housewares to gadgets. One account that advertised a miniature music box for $19.99, for instance, received a Community Note on the ad saying that the same product could be had on e-commerce site AliExpress for $1.67.
Ariel Ozick, a media entrepreneur, investor and longtime Twitter user, said he doesn’t believe critical Community Notes will make a difference to advertisers that prioritize short-term results more than brand-building and trust.
“If you’re doing direct-response [advertising], I don’t think you care so much,” Ozick said. “If you’re a brand, I would really be nervous.”
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This article first appeared on www.wsj.com
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