X to Directly Message Users About Community Note Corrections

X will update Community Notes so that anyone who interacts with a post that's corrected by a note will receive a direct message notifying them of the change, according to Elon Musk.

The SpaceX CEO didn't specify when the update will actually be released, but the tweak will presumably make it more likely users are made aware of potentially misleading information.

Currently, if you like, repost or reply to a post that receives a Community Note, you'll receive a notification in the X app or on the web. Notifications are only sent after a Community Note is determined to be helpful and it's been viewable for 24 hours. X also alerts the authors of posts that have received Community Notes once a note has been live for at least six hours. Depending on how you use X, notifications might be easier to ignore than a message, which could be one reason X is making this change.

X adopted Community Notes as its primary means of preventing the spread of misinformation in 2022, two years after the feature was originally introduced as Birdwatch. Crowd-sourced corrections to misleading posts may address Elon Musk's fears of platform overreach or censorship, but they're not necessarily the most effective way to stop the spread of misinformation. In a May 2026 study published in Nature Communications of 237,180 "cascades" (community-noted posts and their reposts), researchers found that "although community notes are broadly effective in reducing the spread of posts once annotated, they often appear too late to intervene in the early (and most viral) stage of the diffusion."