Cause of contributor activity during May 2025 visibility outage

Determine whether the observed drop to 57% of usual contributor activity during the May 2025 period when Community Notes were not visible on X was primarily due to contributors being unaware that the program had temporarily vanished or due to contributors’ willingness to continue participating despite the lack of public note visibility.

Background

The paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate a causal effect of note publication on subsequent author activity, finding that first-time authors whose initial notes are published are about 5% more likely to continue contributing. To complement this causal evidence, the authors examine an exogenous event in May 2025 when Community Notes were temporarily not visible on X.

During this downtime, contributor activity fell to 57% of its usual level but did not stop entirely, prompting the authors to explicitly state uncertainty about why some contributors persisted. They pose two leading explanations: users may not have realized notes were invisible, or some continued contributing irrespective of publication visibility.