Several major social media platforms have shifted toward crowdsourced fact-checking systems like Community Notes to combat misinformation at scale. However, these systems face criticism regarding which content is scrutinized and how visible that scrutiny is. To address these concerns, X allows users to request community notes for specific posts. When sufficient requests accumulate, X displays an alert, formalizing an interface cue intended to guide contributor behavior. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of request alerts. We infer the presence of request alerts at the time each note was written and identify 318 top writers who were repeatedly exposed to these alerts. Through analyzing their contributed 54,874 English notes written with and without request alerts, we find that at the individual level, writers fact-check more diverse and more political content under alerts. Nonetheless, at the collective level, these shifts direct contributions toward the already dominant Politics and Conflict category, thereby increasing content inequality within the Community Notes ecosystem. Finally, using a mixed-effects model that controls for both writer- and topic-level random effects, we estimate that notes written under alerts are between 8.4 and 20.2 percentage points more likely to be classified as helpful and thus visible to the public, compared to non-alerted notes. This visibility gain diminishes as topics diverge further from writers' prior interests, demonstrating a pivot penalty effect. Taken together, our findings show that request alerts function as an effective interface cue that increases both topical diversity and note visibility in Community Notes.

翻译：多个主流社交媒体平台已转向采用类似社区笔记的众包事实核查系统来大规模应对虚假信息。然而，这些系统在内容审查对象及其审查可见性方面面临批评。为解决这些问题，X平台允许用户为特定帖子请求社区笔记。当请求积累到一定数量时，X会显示提醒，形成旨在引导贡献者行为的界面提示。本研究考察了请求提醒的有效性。我们推断每条笔记撰写时是否存在请求提醒，并识别出318位反复接触这些提醒的核心作者。通过分析他们在有/无请求提醒条件下撰写的54,874条英文笔记，我们发现：在个体层面，作者在提醒条件下会核查更多样化且更具政治性的内容；但在集体层面，这些转变将贡献导向已占据主导地位的"政治与冲突"类别，从而加剧了社区笔记生态系统中的内容不平等。最后，通过控制作者和主题层面随机效应的混合效应模型，我们估算出提醒条件下撰写的笔记被评为有益（从而对公众可见）的概率比非提醒笔记高出8.4至20.2个百分点。随着主题偏离作者原有兴趣领域，这种可见性增益逐渐减弱，呈现出"转向惩罚效应"。综合而言，本研究表明请求提醒作为有效的界面提示，能够同时提升社区笔记的主题多样性与可见性。