Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

X’s Community Notes was sold as 'people checking people' a form of digital citizenship. However, with AI Note Writers, the platform introduces a form of digital authoritarianism that governs public knowledge by automating the production of context and narrowing citizen agency to procedural approval.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines X’s 2025 pilot of AI-generated Community Notes as a shift in how public meaning is produced and governed on digital platforms. Community Notes was presented as a participatory citizen-led alternative to top-down content moderation: users, as digital citizens, perform civic duties by collectively writing, rating, and deciding which annotations are helpful, and the transparency of that process confers legitimacy. The key question is who gets to author, legitimise, and circulate context in a platform now functioning as a civic infrastructure.

By introducing AI Note Writers the platform owners alter this democratic imaginary by relocating part of the labour of contextualisation while maintaining the appearance of community deliberation. AI drafting shifts the civic agency of contextualising X from digital citizens to algorithms and models. With this shift, Community Notes becomes an AI-scripted form of digital citizenship legitimised through platform definitions of credibility and usefulness.

The paper uses the concept of enclosure to describe how shared civic processes become platform-managed resources. Here, what is being enclosed is not content but the practice of collective interpretation: who is authorised to explain events and under what rules. AI-written notes shift this practice into a proprietary pipeline: models generate the framing, users validate it, and the platform governs visibility and criteria. This makes civic sense-making more scalable but less public and less contestable.

The paper argues that AI-written Community Notes risks turning participatory verification into an authoritarian enclosure of civic sense-making, with direct consequences for trust, democratic agency, and information access.