X’s Community Notes feature has one job, and it’s failing to do it

It’s no secret that X has become an even bigger cesspool of misleading information, unchecked claims and flat-out falsities since Elon Musk took over. Two new reports from The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and The Washington Post reveal that the safeguards Musk removed and replaced aren’t controlling X’s problems with misinformation.

The CCDH published a report on its investigation into X’s Community Notes feature, a user-driven reporting system in which anonymous users write and rate correction for misleading posts. Researchers took a sample of 283 misleading election posts from the social media platform that received proposed Community Notes between January 1 and August 25. The report says that 209 of those misleading sample posts did not show the Community Notes correction to all X users. Even more alarming, the 209 misleading posts in question racked up 2.2 billion views.

The Washington Post followed the CCDH’s report with its own investigation into X’s Community Notes feature and found that X’s problems with misinformation go far beyond the election.

Former President Donald Trump made the bold claim during his only presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that Haitians were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Moderator and ABC news anchor David Muir corrected Trump’s statement as false because no such cases were reported to local police or government entities. The fact checking website Politifact rated Trump’s claim its lowest false rating of “Pants on Fire.” That didn’t stop this falsehood from spreading across X among conservative-leaning users.

The Post found that an account called End Wokeness with a following of 3.1 million X users started disseminating the former President’s claim about Haitian immigrants. The post remained unchecked for four days until one Community Notes user flagged the post as incorrect, citing five different articles to back up the correction. Unfortunately, the note failed to garner enough votes to label the post as false and it went uncorrected. As of Wednesday, the post is still on @EndWokeness’ account with a Community Note where it’s racked up 4.9 million views.

Musk’s account hasn’t helped the problem. The Post reports that he’s become “one of the X users most often targeted with proposed Community Notes” with one of 10 posts receiving a proposed correction note.

The publication cited a July post from @elonmusk containing a manipulated video of Harris spouting about President Joe Biden’s “senility” and how she became the nominee because she’s “the ultimate diversity hire.” You know where this is going. There’s no Community Notes or correction and the post is still on X even though thousands of replies from other X users are pointing out that it’s a fake. The post has a whopping 136.6 million views.

"Community Notes 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," Keith Coleman, VP of product at X, said in a statement. "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." Coleman, who oversees Community Notes, pointed to previous academic research into the feature. That research includes studies that found posts with a Community Note were 60 percent less likely to be shared, and that Community Notes result in an 80 percent uptick in post deletions.

The CCDH is one of Musk and X’s most vocal opponents. The British non-profit continually monitors Musk’s account for false posts that failed to earn a Community Note, particularly when it comes to the presidential election. CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed said in August that X “is failing woefully to contain the kind of algorithmically-boosted incitement that we all know can lead to real world violence. X took the CCDH to court over claims the non-profit created a “scare campaign” to bring down its advertising revenue. A US district court judge dismissed the lawsuit in March.

Update October 30, 2024, 9 PM ET: This story has been updated to add a statement and additional information from X VP of Product Keith Coleman.