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Beyond the Crowd: LLM-Augmented Community Notes for Governing Health Misinformation

Authors: Jiaying Wu, Zihang Fu, Haonan Wang, Fanxiao Li, Min-Yen Kan

Published: 2025-10-13

arXiv ID: 2510.11423v1

Added to Library: 2025-10-14 04:02 UTC

Risk & Governance

πŸ“„ Abstract

Community Notes, the crowd-sourced misinformation governance system on X (formerly Twitter), enables users to flag misleading posts, attach contextual notes, and vote on their helpfulness. However, our analysis of 30.8K health-related notes reveals significant latency, with a median delay of 17.6 hours before the first note receives a helpfulness status. To improve responsiveness during real-world misinformation surges, we propose CrowdNotes+, a unified framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to augment Community Notes for faster and more reliable health misinformation governance. CrowdNotes+ integrates two complementary modes: (1) evidence-grounded note augmentation and (2) utility-guided note automation, along with a hierarchical three-step evaluation that progressively assesses relevance, correctness, and helpfulness. We instantiate the framework through HealthNotes, a benchmark of 1.2K helpfulness-annotated health notes paired with a fine-tuned helpfulness judge. Experiments on fifteen LLMs reveal an overlooked loophole in current helpfulness evaluation, where stylistic fluency is mistaken for factual accuracy, and demonstrate that our hierarchical evaluation and LLM-augmented generation jointly enhance factual precision and evidence utility. These results point toward a hybrid human-AI governance model that improves both the rigor and timeliness of crowd-sourced fact-checking.

πŸ” Key Points

  • The paper introduces CrowdNotes+, a framework that enhances the Community Notes system using large language models (LLMs) to address latency and improve the governance of health misinformation
  • Two complementary modes are proposed within CrowdNotes+: evidence-grounded note augmentation and utility-guided note automation, facilitating faster and more accurate note generation
  • The study analyzes over 30,000 community notes and identifies significant delays in achieving helpfulness ratings, motivating the need for system improvements
  • The work includes the HealthNotes benchmark, a dataset of annotated health notes that aids in evaluating the performance of LLMs in note generation and assessment
  • Experiments demonstrate that LLMs can surpass human contributions in note accuracy and helpfulness, revealing flaws in current human evaluation processes.

πŸ’‘ Why This Paper Matters

This paper presents significant advancements in the rapid governance of health misinformation by combining crowd-sourced knowledge with cutting-edge AI technology. By improving the Community Notes framework through the introduction of CrowdNotes+, the authors address critical issues of latency and effectiveness in misinformation correction, which is vital for public health and safety in an increasingly digital landscape.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is relevant to AI security researchers as it addresses the intersection of AI with misinformation governanceβ€”a critical area of concern in the context of misinformation campaigns that can affect public health and safety. The framework proposed here investigates how AI can be employed to improve the rigor and efficacy of community-driven moderation efforts. This research underscores the importance of reliable evaluation methods for AI models, which is essential for ensuring that AI technologies are trustworthy and effectively combat misinformation.

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