Twitter’s Community Notes feature is getting more restrictive

If you like the idea of community moderation on Twitter, you’re going to need to try a little harder before you’re allowed to get involved.

In a post on Twitter, the company announced that it is further limiting the number of users who can write a Community Note, the app’s community-focused content moderation feature. The Twitter account for Community Notes announced that it is requiring all contributors to “unlock” the ability to write a note.

In September, we began requiring that new contributors unlock the ability to write notes by first making valuable ratings. This increased average note quality so much that, today, we are retroactively requiring that all contributors meet these criteria in order to write notes.

In order to write a Community Note, contributors will need to earn a Rating Impact score of 5+. This is achieved by rating other notes and other actions as outlined in the Community Notes Guide.

If you were admitted to Community Notes before September and you’ve earned a Rating Impact score of 5+, or a Writing Impact score of 1+, you’ve unlocked writing ability — thank you for the great contributions! If you haven’t earned that impact yet, you can unlock writing ability by earning a Rating Impact of 5.

Community Notes has been around for a while. The feature used to be called Birdwatch under the prior Twitter administration but, when new owner and CEO Elon Musk purchased the company, the name was changed to Community Notes.

Speaking of Elon, a poll run by the Chief Twit last week resulted in most people voting for Musk to step down from his CEO position. While Musk originally said that he would abide by the result of the poll, Musk then backtracked, saying that he would stay on as CEO until he could find someone “foolish enough” to take over.