• Community Notes access is arriving for South African users who have applied.
• Previously X users in African countries could not recommend or write Community Notes to combat misinformation.
• Users who are more often on X and have “trustworthy” phone carriers will be accepted into Community Notes sooner than others.

In November last year, users in South Africa could start signing up to become members of the Community Notes team on X, and now nearly a year later Community Notes invitations have finally started rolling out for local users.

The feature, previously known as Bird Watch, allows users to police the platform themselves, not having to wait for the official X moderation team to note if a post contains misinformation.

Community Notes was previously only available in 44 countries, including the US, the UK, New Zealand, Ireland, Australia, the whole of the European Union and others, but it was lacking in African countries where users could post content without fear of having their posts tagged by a note.

We signed up for Community Notes in November last year, and received our access to join the feature on Tuesday this week. It is likely that other South African users who signed up for notes at the same time are also receiving access.

If you are interested in signing up for Community Notes and live in South Africa, now is the time as local users are receiving access. However, not everyone will necessarily be admitted into Community Notes.

As X says, “We will admit all contributors who meet the required criteria, but if we have more applicants than slots, we will randomly admit accounts, prioritizing those more likely to participate due to having been recently active on X, and those that tend to follow and engage with different posts than existing contributors do — so as to reduce the likelihood that contributors would be predominantly from one ideology, background, or interest space.”

Users that are on X more often will be prioritised to receive access first, and then there is also the issue around cellphone numbers. Some carriers are considered “trustworthy” by X like Vodacom, while other carriers like MTN were considered untrustworthy when signing up last year.

So it may also depend on what telecommunication firm you are using.

While being allowed into Community Notes recommends other notes for you to consider if they are valid or not, it also allows you to ask for a Community Note to be written on a certain post or write a note yourself to be checked by other users accepted into Notes.

You will first need to rate notes until you reach an impact score of five or higher to be able to write your own notes on posts.

As misinformation and fake news are rife among social media users on the African continent, allowing local users access to Community Notes is welcome.