Community Notes and Project 2025

In which multiple users attempt to spam X's Community Notes fact-checking system with duplicate notes denying a connection between Project 2025 and Donald Trump

nothing to see here, just an attempt to create duplicate politically-motivated Community Notes

Over the course of the last two months, repeated attempts have been made to spam X’s crowdsourced Community Notes fact-checking system with duplicate notes promoting the misleading claim that the set of right-wing political proposals known as Project 2025 has no connection to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. These notes frequently rely on Donald Trump and Project 2025’s authors at the Heritage Foundation as sources, and several of the accounts submitting these notes have never attempted to write Community Notes on any other topic. Thus far, the Community Notes algorithm has successfully prevented any of these spammy notes from being displayed.

(Note: Although it is true that the Project 2025 document was not produced by Trump’s campaign, he has previously expressed support for the endeavor, and many of the Heritage Foundation staffers who worked on it are former members of his administration.)

attempts were made to attach these Community Notes to various popular posts

The scale of this particular spam effort is not particularly large; thus far, 30 Community Notes users have submitted a total of 117 repetitive Community Notes denying any connection between Project 2025 and Trump. These submissions only include 32 unique notes, with each note repeated verbatim between 2 and 20 times. Thus far, none of these notes have been rated helpful and shown on the corresponding posts, one has been rated unhelpful, and the remaining 116 linger in limbo due to insufficient user votes. (The Community Notes dataset used was downloaded on August 26th, 2024 and is current through August 24th, 2024.)

the bulk of the attempted Community Notes spam was submitted in July

All but five of the duplicate notes were written in July or August 2024, with the majority written between July 5th and July 20th. The activity appears to be ongoing, with the same note authors occasionally attempting (and failing) to attach the same notes to additional X posts. The authors of the spammy proposed notes focus on popular posts, with the posts in question having an average of 10956 likes each.

one might expect an Intellectual Roots Egret to have more varied interests; alas, it is not so

Although some of the spammy notes were written by longtime Community Notes contributors, others are the work of accounts that have mostly or exclusively written notes denying any connection between Project 2025 and Donald Trump. Three contributors, “Chipper Moonlight Shearwater”, “Intellectual Roots Egret”, and “Punctual Oak Ostrich”, have solely written notes on this topic, all of which are duplicates. On average, the accounts that submitted repetitive notes regarding Trump/Project 2025 devoted 29.7% of their overall Community Notes contributions to the subject. Unsurprisingly, some of the spammy contributors upvoted spammy notes from other contributors.

nothing says “trustworthy source” like taking the word of a political campaign at face value

One of the expectations of the Community Notes system is that note authors will support their notes with links to sources that are generally considered trustworthy. While the majority of the repetitive notes regarding Trump and Project 2025 do indeed contain links to sources, many of these sources are far from unbiased. Two of the three most frequently-cited sources are Trump’s own Truth Social account and the Trump campaign website, and the official Project 2025 and Heritage Foundation websites turn up prominently as well.

As mentioned earlier, Community Notes has thus far been resilient against the attempts to attach these spammy notes to posts; none are presently rated helpful. If this changes, and the repetitive notes do start being displayed, this article will be updated accordingly.