Beyond Community Notes: A Framework for Understanding and Building Crowdsourced Context Systems

Abstract: Social media platforms are increasingly developing features that display crowdsourced context alongside posts, modeled after X's Community Notes. These systems, which we term Crowdsourced Context Systems (CCS), have the potential to reshape our information ecosystem as major platforms embrace them as alternatives to top-down fact-checking. To deeply understand the features and implications of such systems, we perform a systematic literature review of existing CCS research and analyze several real-world CSS implementations. Based on our analysis, we develop a framework with three distinct components. First, we present a theoretical model to help conceptualize and define CCS. Second, we identify a design space encompassing six key aspects of CCS: participation, inputs, curation, presentation, platform treatment, and transparency. Third, we identify key normative implications of different CCS design and implementation choices. Our framework integrates these theoretical, design, and ethical perspectives to establish a foundation for future human-centered research on Crowdsourced Context Systems.