The first thing to know about the community notes on Elon Musk's tweets: there should be a batch more of them.
Community Notes, the Twitter/X fact checks formerly known as Birdwatch, are often touted as one of the few good things to have survived Musk's chaotic first year of ownership. These notes are user-generated and usually include links to high-quality sources. Like Reddit posts, they live or die on upvotes (“helpful”) and downvotes (“not helpful”); enough of the latter and they disappear. Anyone can sign up to contribute, if they have no strikes on their account. Contributors are the only ones who can view or vote on proposed notes before they are officially posted to tweets.
Musk often touts Community Notes as a sign that he cares about the quality of information in a service that is rife with deliberate misinformation. It's smart to do it: One study has found that Community Notes increase trust on social media, so it could help bring back users who flee from X. But you don't even need to put your thumb on the X algorithm scale to avoid them. same.
With nearly 200 million people following him, if even a small percentage of his fans sign up to rate proposed community notes, they can invade the system, intercept and rate any proposed note in Musk's account as “not useful” before it receives other. fact checking shame badge. Like in this case, where retweeting a false story about a bomb at a Trump rally was a step too far even for his fans (the original tweet Musk cites was deleted; the note remains).
The tweet may have been deleted.
This helps Musk significantly. Because, as any study of his tweets confirms, the bomb story is not an outlier: Musk constantly spreads misinformation. He New York Times looked at one week's worth in September and found that a third were “false, misleading or missing important context.”
In July, the month Musk endorsed Trump, the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified 50 tweets by Musk that had been debunked by independent fact-checkers. None of them gained any attention from the community and were viewed a total of 1.2 billion times.
As things stand on the unofficial Community Notes Leaderboard, Musk is ranked 55th, with 70 Community Notes so far. Several accounts he frequently replies to and retweets are ranked in the top 10. The main account has more than 800 notes, but at a rate of 50 falsehoods a month, Musk would have easily surpassed them if oversight were equal.
So what can we learn from the 70 fact checks that did Is it really added to Musk's account? Here's your TL;DR.
Musk's first lies were no big deal.
The tweet may have been deleted.
Only three of the 70 community note tweets about Musk were before the date he brought them to Twitter in October 2022. That doesn't tell us much, as the Birdwatch service was soft-launched in January 2021 and it was only fully implemented. weeks before Musk arrived.
Still, we can see how minor 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 toward the asteroid belt (which is still a big flex). The other two notes above to Twitter concern tax credits for electric vehicles and Hyperloop tunnels, which he claims cannot be flooded. Worrying, to use one of Musk's favorite words, but no big deal.
Elon Musk's X will no longer pay creators based on ads but on engagement
In Musk's first week on Twitter, he racked up four more Notes. But they are harmless and even useful. A couple point out when Musk is joking, in case it's not clear. He calls Community Notes “awesome”; A note provides more information on how to join.
Crushable speed of light
Then, on November 4, 2022, Musk claimed that advertisers are “trying to destroy free speech in the United States” by abandoning the service. Neighborhood Notes chimed in to point out that advertisers were concerned about Musk's lax approach to security and misinformation as he gutted those teams. And a new type of note from Musk, more conflictive, was born.
There are more community notes on his tech posts than on his political posts.
In 2023, Musk would receive 31 tickets. It continues to be their year with the most verified data. May 2023, when Musk launched Ron DeSantis' campaign on
But that doesn't mean their political statements are being fact-checked. More notes appear from the community about his claims about the world of technology and media, including a series of strange attacks on non-profit organizations (see the notes in his tweets on the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet Archive, and NPR).
Musk is weaker in answers.
Of the 70 community notes on Musk's tweets, a clear majority (40) are tweets in which Musk responds to someone. That makes sense. Algorithm But the algorithm doesn't drive your answers, so falsehoods are more likely to receive upvotes from Neighborhood Notice volunteers acting in good faith.
And what falsehoods they have been! In response to his mother, Musk Denied knowledge of his father's emerald mine; Neighborhood Notes simply used his own words against him, unearthing a quote acknowledging that his father was a co-owner of the mine. In response to a former employee, Musk claims there is no evidence that plastics in the environment harm us; It turns out there is. “Why would we have your home address?” asks a verified user concerned about the possibility of X sending him to the IDF; A note notes that verification requires identification with an address.
And he can't leave it alone. When a support account posts a screenshot proudly demonstrating that ”. That gives it another note from the community: 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 invited himself to verify the facts. He invariably tags @CommunityNotes in a tweet he wanted to quote and clearly already believed. To the crude claim you are pushing, you will add a fig leaf asking “is this true” or “is it accurate?” Almost always, the earnings note provides context that Musk has overlooked.
However, Musk rarely responds to the fact-checking he is invited to do. The one time he did, he stood his ground. “Neighborhood Notes is failing here,” Musk wrote in February after stating that it was impossible to log into a Windows PC without a Microsoft account. No, the note in this response said, you can do it; it just requires a workaround that “the average Andy” may not know about.
The implication: A tech billionaire who's been logging into Windows machines for decades isn't your average Andy.
This tech billionaire specifically also doesn't get the attention of the community like the average Andy would, at least so far. And it doesn't look like the service will do anything at all to stop “Darkish MAGA” Musk during the final month before the US election.
Because? Because, as a good community note, we must take into account the limit of community notes: use clear language and high-quality sources.
Here is a complete debunking of Musk's repeated claim. that “illegal” immigrants are voting in US elections; None of his publications on this topic have been noted. (Ironically, Musk himself may have at one time been an “illegal” immigrant (you'd think edgy note writers would like to point this out.)
Here's a debunk of his “you told the real truth” response to an anti-Semitic rant last year. A tweet so infamous that advertisers ran away and yet it went unnoticed.
Here is a debunk of his “Virginia voter fraud” post from last week. It is also not noted.
We could go on, but you get the point. If volunteers can't beat the negative Musk voters to add correctives to this kind of nonsense, there is very little I can say before Election Day that willpower be verified.
Noted.