A study in Japan found that a feature on the social media platform X that allows users to give different viewpoints to potentially misleading posts had little effect in a gubernatorial election last year.



The spread of disinformation and misinformation on social media was a big issue in the November election in the western prefecture of Hyogo.



The feature called Community Notes allows contributors to add contextual information to potentially misleading posts, which becomes visible to others when it has been marked as "helpful."



A group made up of engineers and others from Code for Japan and researchers led by Hosei University Professor Fujishiro Hiroyuki extracted and analyzed Community Notes posted during the campaign.



Most of the 165 notes created were not visible to X users. Only 5 of the notes were temporarily visible to all users.



One post claimed that a win for candidate Inamura Kazumi would lead to foreigners getting the right to vote. Even though some Community Notes said Inamura herself refuted that, they did not appear on X. But the original misleading post had more than 500,000 views.



The group says most notes were probably not visible because voters' opinions tend to differ, even on something obviously untrue about candidates.



Professor Fujishiro said the Community Notes feature turned out to be not a very useful tool to flag disinformation or misinformation during an election campaign.



He said that just like social media, traditional media should spread more election information and that both social and traditional media should complement each other to curb the spread of false information.