Name
James Grimmelmann, "Community Notes as Bridging Counterspeech"
Date & Time
Friday, October 17, 2025, 1:10 PM - 1:35 PM
Speakers
James Grimmelmann, Cornell Law School and CornellTech "Community Notes As Bridging Counterspeech" In the last few years, major social media platforms including X and Facebook have adopted ”community notes,” a collaborative fact-checking system, as a partial substitute for traditional content moderation. Community notes are written by users; other users then rate the quality of those notes, and the notes that are rated as most helpful by a wide cross-section of users are shown alongside the posts. Proponents praise community notes as a way to tap into the wisdom of crowds and present it as a more speech-friendly approach than deleting false or misleading posts. But critics argue that community notes are ineffective and bias-prone, and that they represent an abdication of platforms’ responsibility for the quality of the content they present to users. These debates raise fundamental questions about the purpose of community notes, and how platforms and scholars should evaluate whether they are succeeding at that task.
We argue that community notes are best understood as a system for selecting bridging counterspeech. In free speech theory, counterspeech has long been the preferred approach to combat false speech. But in practice, counterspeech has faced numerous challenges, especially on the Internet. How can we be confident that people exposed to false speech will even see counterspeech? When will counterspeech be effective in persuading them? And how should those with power over the speech environment select which counterspeech to show? The theory of community notes is that platforms should answer these questions by promoting bridging counterspeech—i.e., counterspeech that members of diverse communities find to be relevant and persuasive. Bridging counterspeech is theoretically appealing because it respects users’ autonomy while also selecting for counterspeech that will actually correct their misimpressions, and community notes are practically appealing because they harness algorithmic approaches to select bridging counterspeech at scale. We describe community notes, explain why they are an appealing response to free-speech dilemmas, and describe the challenges that community notes will need to overcome if they are to be effective and legitimate at scale. James Grimmelmann is a professor at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech, where he directs CTRL-ALT, the Cornell Tech Research Lab in Applied Law and Technology. He studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power, aiming to bridge the gap between lawyers and technologists. His research spans search engines, digital copyright, online governance, content moderation, and other areas of computer and Internet law. Grimmelmann is currently working on a book, CPU, Esq.: How Lawyers and Coders Do Things with Words, which examines the linguistic parallels between software and legal texts.
Location Name
Kline Tower 14th Floor
Full Address
Kline Tower
219 Prospect St, 14th Floor
New Haven, CT 06511
United States
Session Type
Lecture
