Fact checks on X fail to counter US election misinformation – report

X’s crowdsourced fact-checking feature, called Community Notes, isn’t addressing the flood of US election misinformation on Elon Musk’s social media platform, according to a report published on Wednesday by a group that tracks online speech.

The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) analysed the Community Notes feature and found that accurate notes correcting false and misleading claims about the US elections were not displayed on 209 out of a sample of 283 posts deemed misleading – or 74 per cent.

Misleading posts that did not display Community Notes even when they were available included false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that voting systems are unreliable, the CCDH said.

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

Community Notes lets X users write fact checks on posts after the users are accepted as contributors to the programme.

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

The 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 he took over the site in 2022.

Last year, X sued CCDH, blaming the group for the loss of “tens of millions of dollars” in advertising revenue after it documented an increase in hate speech on the site. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in March.

Keith Coleman, a vice president of product at X who oversees Community Notes, said in a statement that it “maintains a high bar to make notes effective and maintain trust across perspectives, and thousands of election and politics-related notes have cleared that bar in 2024”.

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

San Francisco-based X also pointed to external academic research that has shown Community Notes to be trustworthy and effective.

Imran Ahmed, the CEO of CCDH, however, said the group’s research “suggests that X’s Community Notes are little more than a Band-Aid on a torrent of hate and disinformation that undermines our democracy and further polarises our communities”.