What do I think about Community Notes?(vitalik.ca) |
What do I think about Community Notes?(vitalik.ca) |
Wut
Yes, the actual software runs at a single location. But apparently it's open enough that you could in principle run it in a distributed manner. As you can even cross-check the data and compute the same results deterministically, you could theoretically even do it as a blockchain, although it's unclear why you would. But you could, if there was value in P2Ping such a thing.
In that sense, Vitalik's point does land.
>Community Notes are not written or curated by some centrally selected set of experts; rather, they can be written and voted on by anyone, and which notes are shown or not shown is decided entirely by an open source algorithm. The Twitter site has a detailed and extensive guide describing how the algorithm works, and you can download the data containing which notes and votes have been published, run the algorithm locally, and verify that the output matches what is visible on the Twitter site.
Do I vote in the same or different place where my neighbor's botnet votes?
I don't think I'm alone to share all of this not-so-closely-related beliefs, so there perhaps a connection. I guess first of all its rooted in a fundamental trust of humans and human institutions more than anything. I think if you ask people "do you think politicians can generally be trusted to work for the common good of their constituents" then those who strongly agree probably also agree to some extents on the above issues.
Community Notes is an interesting example of collective moderation, but it’s an example of collective moderation, a long-standing thing that has nothing to do with decentralization as I think most people understand the term. The objection here, I think, isn’t to Vitalik’s interest in it — it’s to the “if all you have is a cryptocoin, everything looks a blockchain” mindset.
The correct answer is, I found that quote unintelligible and incoherent. I cannot see what one thing had to do with the other.
This is the guy that thought of Ethereum because he disagreed with a balance patch in an MMO and thinks that in a blockchain mmo you could just fork it.
Every take he has is about cryptolibertarian ideology and should be treated as such.
This reminds of a Michael Scott's quote from the Office which I find brilliant in it's irony:
"Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information."
Ultimate societies have inability to foster trust will be terminal and unlike why the crypto bros think, technology will not safe us.
I wonder if I myself should try to align my views with those who know more, rather than those who know less?
Recently Community Notes has been opened up to a significant enough % of the Twitter populous that you're starting to see a very large quantity of "spurious" notes (argumentative / sarcastic responses that aren't addressing facts - more appropriate as actual replies), with even one or two examples of such notes being approved, in many cases I'd guess because approvers found them entertaining rather than useful. That's lead to criticisms of CN as something "in decline".
I hope that's not the case - spurious notes don't actually do any harm (and are often very entertaining), but dismissal of CN as a system would: loss of reputation would mean a dilution of the impact of fact checks & context provision on rebutting misinformation.
Another possible concern is, while it seems obvious to most that CN isn't a feature that would have been conceived under Musk, and it's interesting to see it continue to thrive now, one wonders how long it will be tolerated (the example from the first screenshot in this article is telling). In possibly related news, Musk has recently shown an interest in influencing elections[0] in Ireland (Twitter EU HQ) in direct response to talks of EU "misinformation regulation".
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1695545217133490453 (Gript Media is a far-right publication based in Ireland)
This isn't obvious at all. A big part of why Musk got upset with Twitter under its previous management was his dislike of centralized journalist-driven fact checking. He might not have come up with the algorithm but you can't claim it's living on borrowed time whilst simultaneously criticizing it for scaling up too fast.
If Community Notes are maintained at their current pace, there is the potential for X to continue on a kind of life support for the majority of "normal" people. If Elon starts to limit Community Notes, e.g. if they start being used on his posts too much, then I think that X will surely die. X already smelled bad before Elon bought it, and its stench is intensifying. What was once a nice information platform with subcultures of toxicity and hate, is now perceived as a place where one cannot escape the worst parts of modern internet culture. Community Notes is the only thing stopping it from collapsing into fanatic esotericism.
Huh? I didn’t see any MLM or pump-and-dump in the community notes
I don't know but it shouldn't even be a possibility to train the algorithm to give animal torture videos
> Why would you get more than one or two after downvoting?
How do you downvote on X?
> And are the torture videos downvoted or removed by staff?
Again I don't know what "downvoted" means in the context of X. I can't see any kind of score or anything. In my experience they are not removed by staff unless the animal is mammalian.
> Mind posting an example?
I've deleted my account, but I wouldn't post them here anyway
Not to mention the constant bot spam. Musk promised to "get rid" of it, and yet I have to block about 10-20 bots shilling porn via follows and likes on completely random tweets and replies a day... and they're all following the same 3-4 templates for their activities and bios. Had Twitter any moderation staff left, it would take a couple minutes to write a regex to catch these porn bot bios and to take all of their accounts down at once.
The problem got so bad in YouTube Comments that eventually third-party tools [0] were developed to help purge spam.
I agree that if you had a team monitoring spam they could write rules to drastically reduce spam. It's always going to be a cat and mouse game, but if the cat side was more proactive it would definitely lead to a better experience.
Always crypto scams.
It's not. I should have added more examples. Another one - how do you arrive at a single truth?
- self-interest
- intentionally since it protects their interests
- accidental since they've spent so much time they need it to be meaningful
- accidental since they want to please their fellow experts
- intentionally since they want to go with the herd
- historical bias
- most people are better equipped than experts to spot paradigm shifts because experts are over-indexed on the status quo
Ultimately, it's up to you how you weight people's opinion, and may each person's epistemology serve them appropriately.
What do we call the actual experts then so that we don't confuse them with nonexperts with credentials?
I doubt you're alone but my suspicion would be that you're in a very small minority.
> a fundamental trust of humans and human institutions
These are two separate things. In general, those who primarily trust the former do not place the same level of trust in the latter, and vice versa. Finding those who trust in both seems a rare thing.
> I think if you ask people "do you think politicians can generally be trusted to work for the common good of their constituents"
It's been my observation that many people who vote do so on a "least worst" basis. National statistics bodies collecting data on levels of trust in public representatives rarely post figures above 50%.
Click ellipsis, then block or mute
Like the field of psychology which surprisingly often produces results about very successful liberal-endorsed interventions (head start programs or growth mindset) that reliably return weaker results as they're tested more and finally stop reproducing altogether. These, sometimes massive, failures do impressively little to tame the smugness of their proponents.
Second, that is not what the comment was about. It was about repeated debunking of reality's supposed liberal bias from which its fans consistently refuse to learn.
https://gizmodo.com/twitter-x-elon-musk-vaccine-bronny-james...
May be it’s the false sense of being decentralized that makes it like crypto?
Looking at that specific note, it's obvious that the note was extremely open to dispute and that's why it was voted down. You don't need to invoke the spectre of The Terrible Elon to explain that. The medical establishment has by their own admission created an endless torrent of false claims about vaccine safety, so it's something where you just aren't going to get bipartisan consensus about anything at all.
At least, that’s what the centralized authority says.
No one outside Twitter can verify that claim.
Community Notes and crypto share a common thread of "complicated math that makes it both extremely powerful and totally opaque to 95% of people." Honestly, that's a pretty weak relationship for how much page-space it got in the writeup. Looks like Vitalik is writing a crypto blog, so I guess you gotta appeal to your readers. Great read nonetheless.
At best, a truly independent third party auditor has a mild philosophical incentive to recommend an open-source product over a closed-source one of similar quality. In practice, it's far more common for third party "stamps of approval" to be meaningless gold stars purchased by corporations to aid in marketing their product. A great example of this is the iF Design Award.
Its like a small note of shame in their posts, and it seens so far they been using it in politicians in all sides of the political spectrum.
Can anyone translate this from meme to English please?
Also, it would seem to be a very anti-crypto statement for Vitalik to be posting?
The other part of that sentence about crypto is a funny self jab though, apparently he's conscious about the research rabbit holes and mathematical abstractions the Ethereum team went through to get for example staking to work.
Had Ethereum not been near the top of every crypto exchange, and Vitalik not been somewhat of a known person, how difficult would it have been for the average crypto-interested person to tell Ethereum's "insane nerd traps and sky high abstraction ladders" from the scams?
"deep learning vs. crypto is a clear divide of math people vs creative people."
> the former offends theorycel aesthetic sensibilities but empirically works to produce absurd miracles
deep learning doesn't seem like it should work to people who are entrenched in theory, but somehow it produces great results.
> the latter is an insane series of nerd traps and sky high abstraction ladders yet mostly scams
crypto is full of interesting technical challenges but mostly produces scams.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel
Shape rotator = someone who can rotate shapes in their head, a proxy for IQ. Someone with good mathematical or STEM skills and who feels unvalued for it.
Wordcel = someone good with words/rhetoric who feels like their skill in this field isn't valued enough / it doesn't get them far enough.
"ChatGPT, invent some jargon to make people who've bought in feel like insiders, while making ungullible people^W^W I mean haters keep a safe distance."
Community Notes are not written or curated by some centrally selected set of experts; rather, they can be written and voted on by anyone ... It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly close to satisfying the ideal of credible neutrality...
Well, that's the optimistic pro. But the con is that if a particular demographic is more drawn to contributing to those notes (or comes to overwhelm Twitter itself), we will see the same problems of bias we see on Wikipedia in (say) social-cultural subjects which - whatever it results in - is certainly not "credible neutrality".
Anyone can review community notes and mark them as useful/not useful.
>For a note to achieve a high intercept term (which is the note’s helpfulness score), it must be rated helpful by raters with a diversity of viewpoints (factor embeddings)
https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/r...
That's most of the article. If you're asking yourself that, you should read it
I've ran into issues with Wikipedia mods ignoring sources and going off whatever priors they had, but at least then I was able to just passive-aggressively berate them on the talk page to get them to bend.
The community notes on the other hand, seem to be well place, pretty informative, and in a few places surprisingly detailed.
It's nice to see some effort behind distributed moderation, but this is still too centralized to realize that dream.
It's weird to me that the left right divide happened to appear, rather than a faith based/non faith based, or an authoritarian/liberal, etc dichotomy. Is there no public data on this we can use to prove it's true, just trusting the org at it's word?
Members of a prior generation may remember that voting features were introduced explicitly to improve engagement, not quality. Those little triangles next to this comment are there to give you something to do, and thereby hopefully increase the chance that you'll feel invested in this site to come back. Not to discover the truth, improve awareness of facts, or build community.
Voting is a mechanism by which people express their values. If people know facts and value them, then a voting mechanism will deliver facts. But if they don't, then it won't.
I will say it seems to take an impressive lack of introspection to spend thousands of words expertly fact-checking how Community Notes works, and yet still conclude that fact-checking by experts "seems risky."
Vitaly's personal values are expressed most clearly here:
> ultimately I come down on the side that it is better to let ten misinformative tweets go free than it is to have one tweet covered by a note that judges it unfairly
It should be noted that he is less sanguine about letting misinformation run free when he is complaining about inaccurate press coverage of cryptocurrency. (Pretty much like anyone who complains about inaccurate press coverage, honestly.) It's always easier to be sanguine about someone else's misinformation that affects other people.
The removal was probably due to brigading of the "Not Helpful" feedback button, but for how good the Notes concept is, it doesn't take into account such a common opinion manipulation strategy.
Wikipedia is facing similar issues, and I see the same happen with the flagging feature on HN.
NATO assuring Soviet leaders not to expand eastward "one inch" is backed by documents provided by the National Security Archive, a trustworthy organization.
Please provide sources to prove the information was factually incorrect.
It was much better when it was applied on just a few tweets but much higher quality.
Just another thing Musk has ruined.
There has been some interesting research done around the effectiveness of false information labels.
I wonder how much of their findings extend to community labels?
a) Twitter has too many overlapping actions. Community Notes is just "credibility-oriented reply" in the same way that retweet is "quote tweet without comment".
When you see a tweet you disagree with and wish to correct, there are now three different ways to register that disagreement -- QT, Reply, and Notes. That's kind of clumsy.
I feel like from an ergonomic perspective, better integration and surfacing of credibility scores as related to replies (and better integration of the QT and Reply features) would've been cleaner.
b) I'm done with X/Twitter now that it's a monument to Musk's internet poisoning.
The rest of the analysis seems to be even-handed, but the intro...
IMO the author made good points for his "this is a good example of applied crypto-values" viewpoint, and also stated quite clearly what he ment by that (i.e. "algorithmic" moderation, transparent and retraceable results).
It was absolutely worth reading-- this was a genuinely interesting blog post, not some cryptobro pushing the latest scam-- don't be discouraged from reading this!
(Apologies to the person who actually manufactures nails. I know it’s not fair to compare your useful industry to crypto.)
Someone else said it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37292374
Most crypto projects fail on one of those axis, so it's worth studying the project that have those properties and actually succeed.
I think twitter is especially fortunate to have the audience diversity it has to make this work - there seems to be a good mix of both left and right wing leaning users. A consensus model with such diversity encourages compromise.
I feel like the strength of using this model is that it's low stakes - at the end of the day it's a tweet. People are willing to make concessions, because it's a tweet. As soon as, say, money is involved, I think that willingness to find a middle ground goes away.
Anarcho-capitalists and radical leftists strongly disagree on the vast majority of things, but both groups passionately support defunding the police (for very different reasons). Would the algorithm unfairly see a false note as having "bipartisan support" when these two opposite-radical groups manage to have their biases line up?
So when we say left or right we're not really referring to any sort of static values, or even fundamental values. It all just keeps shifting and often in self-contradictory ways. So the terms just become a proxy for the ever-shifting divides in society. This makes it essentially a tautology that any fair sampling of society will end up divided on those terms.
I think this is almost to be expected if you have a 2 party political system, because each party is trying to align with as many voters as possible; so you can fully expect that the republican/democrat split is a "good" cut through alignment space.
Basically, the algorithm explicitly looks for the "best" polarity axis (i.e. the one that contains the most information about whether a user is going to find something agreeable or not), while a 2 party political system implicitly alignes across such an axis (as an emergent property of party-politics-shifting).
That's not my reading. The negative polarity is clearly the US Democrats, but as Vitalik notes, the opposite polarity isn't anything obviously specific to the Republicans. His posts for negative were simply the first three posts and they're all of a very consistent political ideology and region. But he had to cherry-pick posts for positive polarity to try and sustain the claim that this is the opposite of the negative polarity, as Brazilian politics and Tesla people isn't something anyone would have picked if asked to guess what the posts would be about ahead of time.
Then there's the clear content differences between the positive vs negative polarity posts. The negative polarity posts are all highly subjective opinions, usually about the tone of what some famous people said. Their references are simply left-leaning US media articles which are themselves opinion. They could be easily disputed and frequently are. The positive polarity posts are cherry picked for the purpose of making a point, yet are mostly specific factual claims with hard data and references, except for the second, which is apparently disputing the claim that child trafficking doesn't even exist? I don't see any way to dispute any of the claims in the positive polarity notes. You'd have to fall back on "well that may be true but in wider context..." type responses.
So it's not really clear exactly what this algorithm is picking up on. The differences may just reflect the inherent nature of politics in which left and right are often presented as polar opposites, but which in reality is more like the left being relatively homogenous and consistent at any given point in time, whereas the "right" is more like a coalition of people who aren't on the left than a specific set of policy or cultural concerns.
http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenvectors
It would be interesting to repeat this today, either with the same or different questions.
In politics voting methods can defuse this somewhat by allowing the smaller tribes stick to their own values and not loose out too heavily in the power grab. First-past-the-post amplifies the larger tribes, proportional representation (or similar systems) can partially reduce their effect.
Unless I have misunderstood it, this algorithm sounds particularly bad, because it's either only able to see the world through a single dimension, or worse, it's even forcing it into the same dimension (criticizing from competent mathematicians/staticians would be welcome).
But in the end, I guess it doesn't change much : it's worse than useless, just like Twitter and the people that use it, for the last decade and counting.
The notes and rating data is released to the public every day: https://twitter.com/i/communitynotes/download-data
Feel free to run the matrix factorization code on the data, and then try to interpret the resulting latent dimension it finds for yourself! And also, you can read the code to verify that it really is running a matrix factorization rather than hardcoding a particular left/right split.
Anecdotally, most community notes I've seen appear to take the form of "anti-establishment claim -> community note refuting the anti-establishment claim". But what's nice is that when it's the opposite, they still seem to work well.
No it doesn't. It's explaining that to you. It's explaining code that is available for you to read yourself. It is not trying to sell you anything.
To me, the examples make a convincing case that the emergent [-1, +1] range ended up aligning with what most people call right/left.
Americans have a particularly confusing form of "liberal" today, but at least my understanding of the two terms has them pretty specifically at odds with one another. I'm not sure how an authoritarian would have centralized so much power when the focus is on individual rights and freedoms.
P.S. But you can add more dimensions, it's just that you cannot go below two without having nonsense as a result.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
I’m a total crypto skeptic but I didn’t find the brief mentions of crypto to detract from the rest of the post.
It's the unfortunate attraction of the Ponzi grifters and get-rich-quick influencer types that tainted the whole ecosystem.
He never actually questions his own system, because he's ultimately an engineer. He's clueless on social structures or systems.
Quadratic funding is also interesting in its own way, you don't have to use crypto to implement it
Only if you take the label "expert" as given and not itself subject to fact checking.
Very few people have a problem with expert fact checking, if that person is actually an expert. Hence why most people will listen to specialists doing work on their home, or their accountant when receiving tax advice. It's not controversial and doesn't differ by political stance. In this case Vitalik is clearly qualified to read, understand and explain ML Python; he is agreed upon by all to genuinely have expertise (relative to the average layman at least).
The reason that expertise has become so controversial nowadays is due to the left's habit of automatically labelling any academic or civil servant an expert, and continuing to insist on the unquestionable nature of their expertise even after widely publicized and very basic failures. To other people expertise is something you have to prove via unambiguous and exceptional results, not merely assert via title, and the public sector's general lack of quantifiably positive results makes academic expertise frequently subject to dispute.
What are you basing this on? Was this written by some website owner, or is that just how you feel about it? Given you can engage by either voting or replying, I feel like voting is much more about molding and curation than engagement. Replying is a much stronger form of engagement: people can see that it is you specifically who engaged, and you can express your opinion more fully.
I agree that "quality" is subjective and so isn't the right concept, but it's about a community shaping a platform's content based on the average of their preferences and therefore making it more likely any of them will want to continue using the community in the future. It of course doesn't necessarily optimize for truth, but it optimizes for the feedback loop of a site's users turning the site into what they want to see and being more likely to use (and vote on) the site more actively as a result. I disagree that the mere act of feeling like you're making a difference is what's actually enticing to people and what brings them back.
How can you conflate someone expressing an opinion on their "micro-blog" to their followers who have opted in to hear such opinions with the idea of having tweets arbitrarily interjected with "expert opinions".
Even though Vitalik is one of the world's experts on crypto and cryptocurrency and blockchain systems, he would never suggest to be given the authority to directly annotate incorrect tweets about crypto with his own expert opinion. It's pretentious to believe that such a thing is desirable or could ever be neutral. Such a system is ALWAYS capturable and corruptible. So of course it's risky. That's why free speech being a social and cultural value is as important as it being a law for governments to respect. Meaningless is the law if a culture is too prudish or too conforming to begin with.
If Vitalik wishes to persuade people away from bad opinions about crypto, doing so at his leisure on his own micro-blog or regular blog is certainly a preferable option to acting as some sort of Minister of Truth.
Well put. Have an upvote. ;-)
Forums never had this issue and there was no way to downvote an unpopular forum comment, other than banning the poster entirely. There was a lot more room for friendly debate.
This comment is cynical to the point of ignoring reality.
Ultimately, it's telling on one's self that one is a bad communicator. One might generally perceive any use of -cel neologisms to be a projection of the speaker's own feelings of impotence.
My favourite example is the community note on Musk's block removal tweet, which argues that App Store wouldn't let them do it.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1692558414105186796
And if you actually open the App Store rules link, it says "To prevent abuse, apps with user-generated content or social networking services must include [...] The ability to block abusive users from the service". As in, X needs the ability to ban users from X.
It seems to me like community notes are a great way to push whatever reactionary narrative someone manages to cook up when they oppose the person tweeting / the topic at hand.
It is the standard internet psychology: someone says something that seems dubious or they are generally a dubious person, a "sensible" person or agency (Community Notes) comes along with a lot of popular support to offer a rebuttal, a vast majority then assume the latter is true without bothering to check. The act of professional sounding, assumedly popular rebuttal, given with sources, is enough for people to accept a random thing as a fact. Almost no one checks the sources.
EDIT: I am unsure why you were downvoted
I'm sorry, but that is a false dichotomy and downright ridiculous assessment. Being a good engineer does not disqualify you from deeply understanding social organization or dynamic systems.
I am an engineer and those two topics are among the most critical which guide my work. I'm obsessed with these topics. Being an engineer makes thinking about these things easier, not harder.
Are you next going to proclaim that actors are clueless about politics?
Binding international commitments heritable by successor states are made in formal instruments, treaties and the like, for a reason. Other representations apply at best to the specific parties and narrow contexts where made, until and unless they are solemnized into a treaty.
To the extent such a representation was made to the USSR prior to and in the context of efforts to get the Soviets to the table on terms for permitting German unification, it would not be binding beyond that process unless included in the eventual treaty, which is was not, and it even more clearly would not be something that one ex-Soviet successor state could, after pursuing and then abandoning pursuit of NATO membership itself, claim any entitlement under, especially against the interests of other former ex-Soviet states.
To the extent the existence of such representations might be fact, it is very much not relevant context to much of anything happening since long before Twitter existed.
Just wanted to give props to a well-crafted argument - even if I’m a bit irked for apparently getting caught in the “countries act like people” cognitive shortcut that usually drives me nuts when it’s about economics.
Basically it took you 158 words to say: Don't trust NATO.
Also this doesn't change the fact that the information is factual and correct. Might not be relevant you say, I say it is, but that's where we enter the territory of opinions.
No, the USSR was a big grown up country governed by people that understood the difference between representations prior to neogitarions and treaty commitments and who choose what was and was not important to pursue in a treaty once they decided to engage in that process, and not only choose to sign treaty without any restriction on NATO expansion, but who did not include the issue in negotiations toward the treaty at at all, per Mikhail Grorbachev, the Soviet leader who signed the treaty.
> Also this doesn't change the fact that the information is factual and correct.
The standard for notes is to provide relevant context.
„ But then, the reform process in Russia slowed and distrust began to grow. “
„ Leading Clinton to ultimately decide to expand the alliance. In doing so, the West didn’t break any treaties…“
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-e...
The troublesome part of that note is that "the movie accurately depicts" the issue. The following note has "these books are obscene." The first is a little bit different in that it is straightforward and factual, but with the (missing) context of the tweet it was probably thought to be an irrelevant insult i.e. I bet the tweet wasn't about the proportion of black children in single-parent households.
It's obviously a party split in a way, but to my eyes it isn't about assigning people to a party - it's finding people who hate current parties rather than people who love them. That is to say: polarized individuals. I think it's an accident of history that people who despise Republicans currently have their opinions fairly well-represented by the Democratic Party, but on the other side, people who hate Democrats aren't very well represented by the Republican Party. The Democrat-hating base is unruly, and I think it contains far more people who also dislike or are neutral toward Republican politics and politicians.
The last post reflects ideological values, but appears to be a factually unambiguous claim about US law. The images show cartoons of men sucking each other's dicks. In law "obscene" is used to mean something like "overtly sexual", which at least the first book clearly meets.
edit: so saying that the books depicted explicit sexual acts would be indisputable, but the determination that the books were obscene would happen in court. And if drawings of two people sucking each other's dicks were judged obscene, a lot of things would instantly become illegal in that jurisdiction.
> Whether a reasonable person finds that the matter, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
I'm not sure where you actually disagree with me.
I'd be very careful though about drawing conclusions about what exactly polarity means here because 3 examples are not nearly enough-- especially for conclusions like which polarity is more "fact based".
My viewpoint is that the polarity in the algorithm should be akin to a principal component in alignment space (because of how the algorithm works), and you would expect the political parties to be split along a very similar axis in a 2 party system (an emergent property-- if they were not, one party could gain voters or improve cohesiveness of its voter pool by shifting its alignment).
So to rephrase it: never trust NATO's word.
> The standard for notes is to provide relevant context.
And I say it is relevant. NATO claims to be strictly a defensive alliance, the note adds contextual information to show that NATO is both expanding and waging wars of aggression.
What can be more relevant than that?
If “trust” to you means “invent application far beyond the context to which a commitment applies”, sure, otherwise, no, that’s not a rephrase.
Many people rightfully complain about the lack of specificity and clarity in the third prong, but that is even more evidence for why it is a bad community note because there is obvious room for interpretation and the note leaves none. Thus, even if you agree with its conclusion, it lacks sufficient context which is one of the voting criteria.
I think the claim in question is about the first amendment issue. If the material was judged obscene then it could still be allowed, or disallowed, or disallowed in some contexts (i.e. schools, what's in dispute here) but such laws wouldn't get tripped up by the bill of rights.
more charitably, but still repetitious: when one says that something is obscene, that's saying that it should be illegal in any context; that it has no value. A drawing of two people sucking each others dicks has surely met that bar in the past - information about birth control has met that bar in the past. But I do not think the suggestion was that drawings of gay men having sex should be illegal, what was being suggested was that it is not appropriate for children. That's not a question of obscenity.
You took "not making a bad decision" to mean "making a good decision", but there is another way to not make a bad decision.
In this case, Twitter after Elon acquired it decided to continue with the beta feature. I have no idea how that decision was made internally and can't peg it on Elon, though I can assume he had the authority to spike the project if he wanted to. Assuming Twitter has competent PMs, they made the active choise to move the project out of beta when the testing phase was complete and they evaluated whether it met goals.