Elon Musk has a problem with Community Notes, a crowdsourced fact-checking feature that started as Birdwatch and was launched on a large scale after he acquired Twitter.
“Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being used by governments and legacy media,” Musk wrote. “Working to fix that…” Judging by the rant that his tweet goes on to, his problem seems to be with the way X’s Community Notes contributors are handling disinformation about President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the war in Ukraine. Musk quotes a post from the X account claiming that polls showing Zelenskiy having a 57 percent approval rating in Ukraine are “not credible.” The information disputed on X is inconsistent with President Trump’s description of Zelenskiy as a “dictator” or with Musk’s desire to use the platform as an unofficial arm of the current administration.
What the “correction” of the community notes will look like remains to be seen, but the fact that Musk is uncritically quoting a post that cites no sources other than an image with the small text “Confidence in Authenticity: Normal” is hopefully enough proof that community notes are the bare minimum. Of course, the criticism of this feature fits into the overall picture of Musk’s tenure at X, which is characterized by his manipulation of the platform’s algorithm and removal of features that helped determine credibility, such as verification. If he believes that you can’t even trust crowdsourced fact-checks, then there is no source of truth left on the platform.
The concept of Community Notes is no longer unique to X – Meta recently opened a waiting list to use the feature on its platforms – but how long Community Notes will survive in its current form is obviously an open question.
