South Asian languages massively underrepresented on X: Report

South Asian languages are massively underrepresented in X’s Community Notes feature in South Asia, according to a new report from the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), a Washington think tank.

The report, “X’s Community Notes and the South Asian Misinformation Crisis”, critically examines the performance of Community Notes with a focus on adoption, linguistic representation, and impact in the region.

The analysis of 1.85 million public Community Notes reveals a stark disparity with only 1,737 notes, a mere 0.094%, written in South Asian languages.

This is despite the region accounting for over 25% of the world’s population and approximately 4.9% of X’s monthly active users, it says. Even Hindi, the most represented South Asian language on the platform, makes up less than five-hundredths of one percent of all notes.

The report finds that fewer than 40% of drafts in South Asian languages meet the platform’s “helpful + bridging” criteria, compared to ~65% for English.

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Notes often fail for non-content reasons—no divergent-cluster endorsement, not enough raters—showing that low reviewer density, not poor note quality alone, throttles coverage.

The requirement that those who rate the notes must have disagreed on other tweets is seemingly an arbitrary one, which fundamentally misunderstands what ‘neutral’ community notes should be.

Key Findings: 

Election weeks drive nearly all activity spikes: Historically, weekly counts for Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and other languages remain in single digits until a national or state poll approaches, then jump 10-to 20-fold for approximately two to three weeks before falling back to their original rates.

Isolated non-election spikes confirm the pattern. Most South Asian language authors engage only when politics is on the ballot or a sensational local rumor spreads.

Notes often fail for non-content reasons—no divergent-cluster endorsement, not enough raters-showing that low reviewer density, not poor note quality alone, throttles coverage.

The requirement that those who rate the notes must have disagreed on other tweets is seemingly an arbitrary one, which fundamentally misunderstands what ‘neutral’ community notes should be.

Misuse attempts reveal onboarding gaps: Case studies below show contributors submitting notes that contain personal insults (“Italian-mafia supporters”) or blanket abuse of public institutions (“every last one is a haram-khor [parasite/cheat]”), according to the report.

Although both examples were ultimately blocked—one by the helpfulness screen, one by the bridging test-the effort and latency expose weak guidance on tone, sourcing and scope, especially in polarised environments, says the report.

English-only interface and opaque crisis rules sap trust, says the report as Community Notes interface, guidelines, and sign-up flow are still heavily English-centric, creating barriers for contributors who write in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Nepalese, Bengali, and other South Asian languages. X has also not released a crisis-response playbook explaining how Community Notes would function during floods, communal violence, or national elections.

Low coverage enables unchecked misinformation: The scarcity of Community Notes in South Asian languages leaves significant informational gaps, especially in fast-moving or high-stakes contexts.

With few localized corrections and limited reviewer engagement, misinformation in these languages faces less resistance, allowing false narratives to circulate more freely than in English or better-covered regions.

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Community Notes has yet to serve South Asia at the scale the region warrants, says the report, noting despite 31 million of X monthly active users, it has produced only 1,737 vernacular-language notes—0.094% of the global corpus.

Even at the height of India’s 2024 general-election cycle, all South Asian languages combined averaged fewer than 100 notes authored per week, while during the same period, English-language notes peaked at over 22,000 per week globally, driven largely by concurrent events in North America and Europe, it notes.

The shortfall leaves rumors circulating for days or in perpetuity without on-platform context, creating an information gap between English-speaking users and everyone else.

The data show why the gap persists. Because so few people rate notes in Hindi and Urdu, about 6 out of 10 Hindi submissions and 7 out of 10 Urdu submissions never gather enough feedback to move forward.

The report suggests a public crisis-response playbook backed by a lightweight dashboard and periodic third-party audits would align X with peers like Meta and YouTube and reassure South Asian users that the system will not vanish when a natural disaster, election, or other major event makes trustworthy information most critical.

A multilingual, transparently governed note system would give South Asian users the same rapid, crowd-vetted context now available to English-speaking users, reduce the runway for sectarian hate and misinformation, and prove that crowdsourced fact-checking can scale across the linguistic and political complexity of the world’s most populous region, it says.