(Credit: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)
Elon Musk is annoyed that X's Community Notes feature is fact-checking tweets with information that runs counter to his and President Trump's worldview.
The X owner this week said Community Notes is "increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media." X is now "working to fix this," he added.
At issue are tweets about the popularity of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Earlier this week, President Trump claimed that Zelensky's approval rating was at 4%, without citing a source. As the BBC notes, polling is hard to come by in Ukraine these days given the ongoing war with Russia, but a recent poll from Ukraine-based Kyiv International Institute of Sociology put Zelensky's approval at 57%.
Musk seized on a tweet that said the institute received USAID funding, a target of Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). "It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!" he tweeted.
It's clearly not obvious to Community Notes writers. The crowdsourced feature dates back to 2022 and allows users to debunk misleading or factually incorrect posts by leaving a note explaining why it's inaccurate. The community votes on these notes and the one deemed most accurate is displayed underneath the offending tweet.
The system works well enough that Meta did away with its official fact-checkers last month and announced a Community Notes model of its own. “We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global affairs head, said at the time.
It remains to be seen how Musk plans to “fix” Community Notes on X. But he's complained about them in the past. Last year, he got into a spat over a more innocuous subject—being forced to create a Microsoft account when setting up a new PC. When Community Notes pointed out that he could set up the computer without a Microsoft account, Musk tweeted: "Community Notes is failing here."
The news comes at a time when Musk's approval ratings are sinking. According to a Pew Research Center survey released Wednesday, 54% of respondents viewed him unfavorably.