Jay Baxter: belief

Transcript context

…All along, we saw it working. We wanted to be confident whenever we expanded it to new audiences or new countries or whatever, we wanted to be confident it was going to work. So maybe held our breath a little bit just to see that it would do what we expected, but we always expected that. But that said, there were definitely stress cases. The one that comes to mind is the start of the Israel Hamas conflict in 2023 in October. That was probably the largest deluge of misleading information I've ever seen shared on the internet at one time. It was overwhelming. A number of photos and videos and whatever coming out related to that, it was insane. And just to give you an example, I think it was first three days or something of that conflict, we had 500 notes covering all sorts of different... out of context imagery. Someone would say, "Hey, this is happening here." It's actually from 2013 in Syria. There were people making fake battle footage in the video game simulator Arma 3. So there were notes explaining, this stuff looked realistic. And unless you saw the note, you wouldn't really know. There are all sorts of claims about what was going on in the ground, and that was definitely... The product was still pretty new at that point. We'd expanded in the U. S. less than a year before that. We had been rolling out throughout the world that year and then this large event happened. And I felt like we were just enough prepared at the right time for the system to be able to handle that. Probably one of the most important things we did right before that was launch the ability to write notes on images and videos and have those matched to other posts. I remember at that time thinking, "Wow, I'm glad we launched that feature a few months ago versus still had it on the shelf," because it was really important in that conflict. And I think even it was just a few weeks before we had launched a major speed up in notes too. When we first built the product, the number one focus was always quality. We knew that the product would live and die by the quality of the notes. That was the thing we could never give up on. We also knew it needed to deliver speed and scale, but we're like, "We will get the quality in the right place, and we can speed it up and scale- Get the quality in the right place and we can speed it up and scale it out over time. And we had actually just launched a speed-up that took three hours off the time it needed to go live, and it was I think a matter of weeks before that conflict happened, so again, super glad that was out there. In the first few days of the conflict the median time from a post going live to a note showing up was five hours, which is like crazy fast. Typical fact checking is like two to four, at least it's really common to see it take two to four days. These notes were showing up in five hours and we're like, we are so glad we got those things out before this happened, it made the service a lot more helpful. One other thing that was, I think, nice to see working then was, one criticism of Community Notes some people bring up is, well if you always need agreement from people who typically disagree, then in these super polarized settings, that conflict being probably number one, then you wouldn't see any notes. But actually the reality was there were tons of notes about that conflict. So I think there was this kind of nice property where actually, and maybe this is a surprising fact, that there's more agreement out there across polarized divides than maybe conventional wisdom says, and the places where people agreed were really objectively true and verifiable. I guess maybe this is more true the more polarized the setting is, but where the agreement actually lends you, and basically notes that are very neutrally written, very focused on the facts and easy to verify information. There's this talk for a while of just there's no more facts, nobody believes there is a single true fact anymore, everything is subjective, and I think Community Notes proves the opposite. Facts matter, there are facts that we can all agree with even on the most controversial topics.…

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