X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system, Community Notes, will be updated to send users direct messages alerting them whenever a post they have interacted with has received a correction. The change, which is not yet live, was announced by X owner Elon Musk. He did not share a time frame for its launch.

The update attempts to address one of the bigger criticisms about Community Notes — that corrections arrive too late to matter. A misleading post can accumulate views and reposts while its accuracy is disputed, and by the time it’s corrected, the damage has been done. By proactively notifying users when a post receives a correction, X is trying to extend the reach of the note beyond the original post. This could also allow users who spread false information to issue their own mea culpa, if they had been duped.

X’s Community Notes system was first established when the company was still known as Twitter, before Musk’s acquisition.

The idea was to introduce a different way to address misinformation on the platform, rather than require Twitter (now X) to be the centralized authority for moderation decisions. Instead, Community Notes contributors could suggest corrections and add critical details or missing information to posts. Consensus is achieved when people who rate the note as helpful are those who typically have different perspectives, and the note goes live.

A similar system has since been adopted by Meta as part of its broader moderation overhaul last year, which saw the company eliminate its partnerships with fact-checkers.

Though Community Notes makes sense for a company that wants to distance itself from the business of fact-checking, it’s also proven difficult to scale. A 2025 study of the feature by Spanish fact-checking site Maldita found that 85% of the proposed notes on X remain invisible to users, and only 8.3% get published and become visible. A separate study conducted by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which encompassed 1.76 million notes published on X between January 2021 and March 2025, put the figure for unpublished notes even higher at 90%.

This weakens Community Notes as a system that surfaces information when it’s most needed, critics have pointed out. Plus, they’ve argued, people aren’t aware when a post they saw or boosted receives a correction later on, as there’s been no way to bring that information to their attention.

Musk’s proposal to send users alerts via X Chat (DMs) would address the latter issue, at least, assuming it goes live. X was asked for comment, but a response was not immediately available.