X’s fact-checking system, Community Notes, will be updated to send users direct messages alerting them whenever a post they’ve interacted with has received a correction. The change, which has not yet been published, was announced by X owner Elon Musk. He did not share a timeline for its release.

The update attempts to address one of the biggest criticisms about Community Notes: that fixes arrive too late to matter. A misleading post can rack up views and reposts while its accuracy is questioned, and by the time it’s corrected, the damage is done. By proactively notifying users when a post receives a correction, X attempts 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 misled.

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 of addressing misinformation on the platform, rather than requiring 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 the people who rate the note as useful are those who typically have different perspectives and the note is published.

Meta has since adopted a similar system as part of its broader moderation overhaul last year, in which the company eliminated its partnerships with fact-checkers.

While Community Notes makes sense for a company that wants to distance itself from the fact-checking business, it has also proven difficult to scale. A 2025 study on the feature by Spanish fact-checking site Maldita found that 85% of proposed notes on X remain invisible to users, and only 8.3% are published and become visible. An independent study carried out by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), which covered 1.76 million stories published in X between January 2021 and March 2025, placed the figure of unpublished stories at an even higher 90%.

This weakens Community Notes as a system that displays information when it is most needed, critics have noted. Additionally, they argued, people don’t know when a post they viewed or promoted receives a correction later, since there has been no way to bring that information to their attention.

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