Elon Musk Community Notes: What you need to know about fact-checking X users

The first thing to know about community notes on Elon Musk’s tweets: There should be one batch more of them

Community Notes, the Twitter/X fact-checkers formerly known as Birdwatch, are often held up as one of the few good things that have survived the chaotic first year of Musk’s ownership. These notes are user-generated, usually including links to high-quality sources. Like Reddit posts, they live or die by upvotes (“helpful”) and downvotes (“unhelpful”); enough of the latter and they disappear. Anyone can sign up to contribute, if they don’t have taps on their account. Contributors are the only ones who can see or vote on proposed notes before they are officially stamped on tweets.

Musk will often tout community notes as a sign that he cares about the quality of information on a service that’s crawling with deliberate misinformation. It’s a smart thing to do: a study found that Community Notes boosts trust in social media, so it could help win back users who run away from X. But you don’t even need to put a finger on the scale the X algorithm to avoid them itself.

With nearly 200 million people following him, if even a small percentage of his adoring fans sign up to rate proposed community notes, they can swarm the system, intercept and rate any proposed note on Musk’s account as to “not useful” before I get another one. fact check badge of shame. Like in this case, where retweeting a fake story about a bomb at a Trump rally was a step too far even for his fans (the original tweet citing Musk was deleted; the note stands).

The tweet may have been deleted

This helps Musk significantly. Because, as any study of his tweets confirms, the bombshell story isn’t too atypical: Musk is constantly spreading misinformation. The New York Times analyzed a week’s worth in September and found that a third were “false, misleading or missing vital context”.

In July, the month Musk endorsed Trump, the Center for Combating Digital Hate identified 50 of Musk’s tweets that had been debunked by independent fact-checkers. None of them received a mention from the community and were viewed a total of 1.2 billion times.

As things stand on the unofficial Community Notes leaderboard, Musk sits at number 55, with 70 Community Notes so far. Several accounts he replies to and retweets often rank in the top 10. The main account has over 800 notes, but at a rate of 50 fakes a month, Musk would have easily surpassed them if the oversight was the same.

So what can we learn from the 70 fact checks? he did are they really added to musk’s account? Here’s your TL;DR.

Musk’s first mistakes weren’t that big.

The tweet may have been deleted

Only three of the 70 community notes on Musk’s tweets were before the date he introduced this toilet to Twitter in October 2022. That’s not telling us much, since the Birdwatch service was launched in soft in January 2021 and only fully launched. out weeks before Musk arrived.

Still, we can see how small the corrections were at first. In his first post with a community note, Musk claimed that his Tesla Roadster was orbiting Mars; it’s actually orbiting the sun somewhere in the asteroid belt (which is still pretty flexible). The other two previous tweets are about tax credits for electric vehicles and Hyperloop tunnels, which he says can’t flood. As for, to use one of Musk’s favorite words, it’s not a big deal.

In Musk’s first week on Twitter, he racked up four more notes. But they are harmless, even useful. A couple point out when Musk is joking, just in case it wasn’t clear. He calls Community Notes “amazing”; a note provides more information on how to join.

Then, on November 4, 2022, Musk claimed that advertisers were “trying to destroy free speech in America” ​​by fleeing the service. Community Notes chimed in to point out that advertisers were concerned about Musk’s lax approach to security and misinformation when he removed these teams. And a new, more conflicted kind of Musk memo was born.

There are more community notes on their tech posts than their political posts.

In 2023, Musk would receive 31 tickets. It’s his most proven year yet. May 2023, when Musk launched Ron DeSantis’ campaign at X — and incorrectly claimed DeSantis had set “a fundraising record” — remains his most verified month.

But that doesn’t mean his political statements are being checked. More notes from the community appear about his claims about the world of technology and media, including a series of strange attacks on non-profit organizations (see notes about his tweets about the Wikimedia Foundation, the Archive of the Internet and NPR).

Musk is more vulnerable to the responses.

Of the 70 community notes on Musk’s tweets, a clear majority, 40, are on tweets where Musk is responding to someone. That makes sense. Algorithm X artificially boosts Musk’s regular posts, making sure he appears in your “For You” tab, even if you don’t follow him. But the algorithm doesn’t drive their answers, so falsehoods are more likely to receive upvotes from Community Note volunteers acting in good faith.

And what falsehoods they have been! In a response to his mother, Musk he disavowed knowledge of his father’s emerald mine; Community Notes simply used his own words against him, unearthing a quote that acknowledged his father co-owned the mine. In a response to a former employee, Musk states that there is no evidence that plastics in the environment harm us; turns out there is. “Why would we have your home address?” asks a verified user who is concerned about the possibility of X doxxing him to the IDF; a note notes that verification requires ID with an address.

And it can’t be left well enough alone. When a support account posts a screenshot proudly proving that X is fair because “even Elon Musk can be known by the community,” Musk responds that the note on the screenshot “is wrong and that the community already voted for her.” This earns it another community note: no, it’s still there.

Musk loves community notes, except when he doesn’t.

The tweet may have been deleted

In seven of the 70 posts, Musk himself invited fact-checking. Invariably, he tags @CommunityNotes in a tweet he meant to quote, and he clearly already believed it. To the raw statement he is pressing, he will add a fig leaf asking himself “is it true” or “is it accurate?” Almost every time, the resulting note provides context that Musk has missed.

However, Musk rarely responds to the fact-checking he has invited. The one time he did, he dug his heels in. “Community notes are failing here,” Musk wrote in February after claiming it was impossible to sign in to a Windows PC without a Microsoft account. No, said the note on this answer, you can do it; it just requires a workaround that “average Andy” might not know about.

The implication: A tech billionaire who’s been logging into Windows machines for decades isn’t your average Andy.

Nor does this particular tech billionaire get a grade from the community like the average Andy would, at least so far. And it doesn’t look like the service is doing anything to slow down “Dark MAGA” Musk in the last month before the US election.

Why? Because, like a good community note, we need to consider the limit of community notes, using clear language and high quality sources.

Here is a comprehensive rebuttal of Musk’s repeated claim that “illegal” immigrants vote in US elections; none of his posts on this topic have been noted. (Ironically, Musk himself may have once been an “illegal” immigrant; you’d think snarky memo writers would like to point that out.)

Here’s a rebuttal to his “you told the real truth” response to an anti-Semitic regulation last year. A tweet so infamous, advertisers ran away, and yet it went unnoticed.

Here’s a rebuttal to his “voter fraud in Virginia” post from last week, which is also not noted.

We could go on, but you get the point. If the volunteers can’t overcome Musk’s negative voters to add correctives to this kind of nonsense, there’s very little he can say before Election Day. will be verified in fact.

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