- Elon Musk in a Thursday post bashed Community Notes, the content-moderation platform he helped institute at his social network, X. Musk said, without evidence, that the program was being manipulated.
After once touting X’s Community Notes as the future of content moderation, Elon Musk now claims the initiative is being manipulated and his team is “working to fix this.”
Musk, the owner of social media platform X, seemed to take issue with a series of Community Notes on posts about Ukraine, as well as his own posts. In response, he said he would take a closer look at the program despite previously being its biggest advocate.
“Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media. Working to fix this,” Musk wrote Thursday.
The post came in reply to another anonymous user’s post echoing Musk and President Trump’s claims that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a 4% approval rating, despite a recent poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology showing 57% of Ukrainians “trust” Zelenskyy. Musk said the poll was not to be trusted.
It’s unclear how Musk will “fix” the supposed manipulation he claimed without evidence exists, but it’s obvious he doesn’t like being rebutted. In recent days, Musk’s statements have been both directly and indirectly commented on by Community Notes on X.
X user @Acyn posted a video this week of a Fox News interview with Musk and President Trump, in which Musk claimed the two NASA astronauts, Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore, who have been stuck on the ISS since last September, were “left up there for political reasons.”
A Community Note under the post, which had disappeared as of Friday, refuted Musk’s claim from the interview.
“The astronauts were scheduled to return in Feb, but that has been delayed to late March due to testing of SpaceX Crew-10. The Crew-9 mission was reduced to 2 astronauts to leave room for Suni and Butch. That ship arrived in Aug and all astronauts have a return ship on the ISS,” the note read.
The astronauts, Williams and Wilmore, have told CNN they don’t feel stranded or abandoned.
Yet Musk replied to the post, saying that the Community Note was false and that SpaceX could have brought the astronauts back last year were it not for former President Biden. He also added, “Legacy media is NOT a reliable source,” a claim which attracted its own Community Note.
“X is not supposed to be choosing what community notes show up, it is the community that decides what sources are reliable. Additionally, ‘legacy media’ is included in good examples of community notes on the community notes guide,” read the note, which included links to examples of helpful notes citing legacy media outlets on X’s own Community Notes guide.
Musk has been known to meddle with X’s tech before. In 2023, when a post he made about the Super Bowl got fewer views than a post by former President Biden, Musk flew from Phoenix to the Bay Area to meet with some of X’s engineers in the middle of the night. To fix the issue, the engineers reportedly deployed code meant to boost Musk’s posts, according to Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter.
Musk’s recent spat with Community Notes comes after he helped change X’s content moderation after buying the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022. Although what would become Community Notes was piloted in 2021 as a way to combat COVID-19 disinformation, Musk later mass-launched the crowdsourced fact-checking feature.
As recently as last November, Musk boasted in interviews about Community Notes’ advantage over other content-moderation systems.
“Community Notes is awesome. Everybody gets checked. Including me. All the Community Notes software is open-source, and all the data. So you can re-create any given note independently,” Musk told Joe Rogan.
