Influence of Community Notes on User Attitudes on Social Media

Social media has increasingly been recognized as guiding public opinion and shaping attitudes towards a variety of topics. While moderation efforts such as Community Notes are primarily used for fact checking to counter misinformation, we investigate its ability as a vehicle for attitudinal change, using a neutral case study of a commonly disliked animal species exhibiting natural behavior in human environments. We discuss results of a between-groups experiment investigating whether dislike can be neutralized using community notes moderation, and to what extent lexical style of the community note may affect neutralization. We found that a tweet accompanied by a community note explaining the gull behavior as natural led to a significantly less negative attitude towards the gull by reducing polarity, and discuss what implications this holds for a broader important use of media moderation to reduce polarization on social media.