An inside look at X’s Community Notes | Keith Coleman (VP of Product) and Jay Baxter (ML Lead)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
The work that you guys do has had such a tremendous impact on the way the world works. I want to start with just giving people a brief understanding of what is Community Notes.

**Keith Coleman** (0:09)
Someone on X can see a post. If they think it's misleading, they can propose a note that they think other people might find informative. Other people can then rate that note.

**Jay Baxter** (0:17)
We actually look for agreement from people who have disagreed in the past. And what we see is when people actually have that sort of surprising agreement, that's what makes the notes so neutral and accurate and well-written really overall.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:31)
There's many people that are very polarized. How do you deal with people that are like super anti-vax, super JAN6?

**Keith Coleman** (0:36)
One philosophical thing that's important is that we want all of humanity to participate. And sometimes people are surprised by that. We have all of humanity. We then have the data to understand what notes will be helpful to actual humanity. Every post is eligible for notes. We shouldn't exempt Elon. We shouldn't exempt government figures.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:55)
We shouldn't.

**Keith Coleman** (0:56)
Everyone, even advertisers, can get notes.

**Jay Baxter** (0:58)
There have been external studies run by people totally independent of us who have found that if you take a post with or without a Community Note, that actually people's agreement with the core claims in the post does change if they see it with a note versus without.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:13)
Is there anything else along the lines of just working for Elon within an org, Elon runs that may surprise people?

**Keith Coleman** (1:18)
If I were to start a company in that company, it would be even leaner than I would have made it before. I've been amazed with just how much the team is able to accomplish with a small group and I think because of a small group.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:33)
Today, my guests are Keith Coleman, Product Lead for Community Notes and Jay Baxter, Founding ML Engineer and Researcher for Community Notes. This conversation may be my newest favorite podcast episode so far. Community Notes is one of the most impactful and clever and also under-appreciated products in the world right now. If you ever use X slash Twitter and you see a note underneath a tweet correcting the misinformation in that tweet, that is Community Notes. I've never heard a deep dive into the story behind the product and the team that built it and I'm excited to bring you just that. We get into the surprising origin story of the product, how the algorithm actually works, how the algorithm emerged out of an internal contest within Twitter, the principles behind Community Notes and why staying true to them has been so key to its success, also how it survived four different leaders including Elon and Jack and why it's now a big part of the solution to solving misinformation on the internet, including recently being adopted by Meta as their main fact checking tool. This is an incredibly special episode and I'm so excited to bring it to you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Notion and Superhuman and Granola and Linear and Perplexity Pro. Check that out at Lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Keith Coleman and Jay Baxter. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand, so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercell, Webflow and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com.
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