“Large language models show promising capabilities for contextual fact-checking on social media: they can verify contested claims through deep research, synthesize evidence from multiple sources, and draft explanations at scale. However, prior work evaluates LLM fact-checking only in controlled settings using benchmarks or crowdworker judgments, leaving open how these systems perform in authentic platform environments. We present the first field evaluation of LLM-based fact-checking deployed on a live social media platform, testing performance directly through X Community Notes’ AI writer feature over a three-month period. Our LLM writer, a multi-step pipeline that handles multimodal content (text, images, and videos), conducts web and platform-native search, and writes contextual notes, was deployed to write 1,614 notes on 1,597 tweets and compared against 1,332 human-written notes on the same tweets using 108,169 ratings from 42,521 raters. Direct comparison of note-level platform outcomes is complicated by differences in submission timing and rating exposure between LLM and human notes; we therefore pursue two complementary strategies: a rating-level analysis modeling individual rater evaluations, and a note-level analysis that equalizes rater exposure across note types. Rating-level analysis shows that LLM notes receive more positive ratings than human notes across raters with different political viewpoints, suggesting the potential for LLM-written notes to achieve the cross-partisan consensus. Note-level analysis confirms this advantage: among raters who evaluated all notes on the same post, LLM notes achieve significantly higher helpfulness scores. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can contribute high-quality, broadly helpful fact-checking at scale, while highlighting that real-world evaluation requires careful attention to platform dynamics absent from controlled settings.”
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