Elon Musk Says X Will DM You About Posts That Receive a Community Note
X plans to update its Community Notes feature so that users who interact with a post will receive a direct message if that post later gets a correction note. The change aims to make misinformation corrections harder to ignore.
Elon Musk announced that X will update its Community Notes system to send a direct message (DM) to any user who has interacted with a post that later receives a correction note. This includes liking, reposting, or replying. Musk did not specify a release date for the update.
Currently, X sends a notification within the app or on the web only after a Community Note has been deemed helpful and has been visible for 24 hours. Additionally, authors of posts that have had a note live for at least six hours receive an alert. The new DM system is intended to be more noticeable than standard notifications, which users might easily ignore.
X introduced Community Notes in 2022, two years after the feature was originally launched as Birdwatch. It serves as the platform's primary tool for combating misinformation. However, a May 2026 study published in Nature Communications, analyzing 237,180 "cascades" (posts with Community Notes and their shares), found that while notes effectively reduce the spread of misinformation once applied, they often appear too late to intervene during the early, most viral stage of diffusion.
Despite its mixed effectiveness, the Community Notes concept has spread beyond X. In 2025, Meta ended its US-based fact-checking system and adopted community notes across its platforms. X has also continued to evolve the feature, now allowing contributors to request that an AI generate a note instead of writing it manually.
