It’s no secret that since Elon Musk took office, X has become an even bigger cesspool of misleading information, unverified claims, and outright falsehoods. Two new reports from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the Washington Post reveal that the safeguards Musk removed and replaced are failing to control Company X’s misinformation problem. .
CCDH has published an investigation into X’s Community Notes feature, a user-driven reporting system where anonymous users write and rate corrections to misleading posts. Researchers took a sample of 283 misleading election posts from social media platforms that received the proposed community note between January 1 and August 25. The report said 209 of the misleading sample posts did not show all X users the corrections in the community notes. Even more alarming is that the 209 misleading posts in question have been viewed 2.2 billion times.
Following the CCDH report, The Washington Post conducted its own investigation into X’s Community Notes feature and found that X’s misinformation problems go far beyond elections.
Former President Donald Trump boldly claimed that Haitians are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, during his only presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. Host and ABC News anchor David Muir corrected Trump’s statement, saying no such incident had been reported to local police or government agencies. The fact-checking website PolitiFact gave Trump’s claim the worst possible rating, calling it “pants on fire.” Still, that didn’t stop this falsehood from spreading across X among conservative users.
The Post found that an account called End Wokeness, followed by 3.1 million X users, began promoting the former president’s claims about Haitian immigrants. The post went unchecked for four days until one of the Community Notes users flagged the post as incorrect, citing five different articles to support the correction. Unfortunately, the memo did not receive enough votes to declare the post false, and it remained uncorrected. As of Wednesday, the post was still on the @EndWokeness account and had 4.9 million views as a community note.
Musk’s account doesn’t solve the problem. According to the paper, he became “one of the most frequently targeted User
The publication includes a doctored video in which Harris spouts about President Joe Biden’s “senility” and how she became the nominee because she is the “ultimate diversity recruit.” Quoted from @elonmusk’s July post. I can see where this is going. There are no community notes or corrections, and the post is still posted on X despite thousands of replies from other X users pointing out that it’s fake. This post has been viewed 136.6 million times.
CCDH is one of the most vocal opponents of Mr. Musk and Mr. The British nonprofit group continues to monitor Musk’s account for false posts that fail to garner community notes, particularly regarding the presidential election. The company’s CEO Imran Ahmed said in August that “We have failed,” he said. X took CCDH to court alleging that the nonprofit created a “scare campaign” to reduce advertising revenue. A U.S. District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit in March.
