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Comment by anunes | Hacker News Reader

Are community notes impartial?

In theory, it is designed to be resistant to being partial to any one side. And is pretty decent at it. However, being a social system it can be gamed, and sometimes is gamed.

Community notes are not impartial, they are written and approved by the users who sign up to do so (and actually take the time to do this unpaid labor).

Thus, they tend to reflect the biases of the kind of people who most want to (and have time to) write and approve community notes, drawn from the pool of people who use your site.

Now do democracy and voting. Or how about serving on a jury. Or serving on a school board.

By your definition those also must not be impartial and maybe that is a fair definition but what does it imply?

Do you similarly distrust democratic outcomes, jury decisions, etc.?

Jurors do not self-select into jury duty, though some try harder than others to get out of it. So the effect is less.

Voters are partial to the candidates they vote for; that's why they vote for them.

I was able to get out of jury duty by saying I tended to agree with police. This was advice given to me by a friend in law enforcement.:.

Yes, it's not difficult to get out of. You could also get out by saying that you don't trust the police, or any number of things that might affect your ability to be impartial in the case before you.

Would you prefer a trial by community notes or by jury.

It works quite well in practice. The unapproved notes are a bit all over the place in terms of bias and or being wrong but the ones that get enough votes to be shown are mostly fairly factually correct.

It is open source: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes

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