Elon Musk’s fact-checking function has failed

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Elon Musk's fact-checking function has failed
Elon Musk's fact-checking function has failed

X’ s crowdsourced fact-checking feature called Community Notes is not responding to the flood of disinformation about the US election on Elon Musk’s social media platform, according to a report released Wednesday by a group that monitors online speech.

The nonprofit Center to Combat Digital Hate (CCDH) analyzed the Community Notes feature and found that accurate notes correcting false and misleading claims about the US election did not appear in 209 of the 283 posts that were found to be misleading, or 74 percent.

Misleading posts that did not include community comments, even when they were available, included false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that voting systems were unreliable, the CCDH said.

In cases where Community Notes were displayed, the original misleading posts received 13 times more views than the accompanying notes, the group added.

Community Notes allows X users to write fact-checks on posts after they become contributors to the app.

These checks are then rated by other users based on their accuracy, sources, how easy they are to understand, and whether they use neutral language.

This feature was launched in 2021 by the previous leadership of the site, then known as Twitter, and was called Birdwatch. Musk renamed it Community Notes after taking over the site in 2022.

Last year, X sued CCDH, accusing the group of losing “tens of millions of dollars” in advertising revenue after it documented the rise of hate speech on the site. In March, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit.

Keith Coleman, vice president of products at X, who oversees Community Notes, said in a statement that the company “maintains a high bar to make posts effective and maintain credibility from multiple perspectives, and thousands of election and politics-related posts have passed that bar in 2024.”

“In the last month alone, hundreds of such posts have appeared on thousands of posts and have been viewed tens of millions of times. It is because of their quality that the notes are so effective.”

X, based in San Francisco, also pointed to external academic studies that have proven Community Notes to be credible and effective.

Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s CEO, however, said the group’s research “shows that Community Notes X is nothing more than a band-aid on a flood of hate and misinformation that is undermining our democracy and further polarizing our communities.”

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