X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking initiative, called “Community Notes”, is failing to curb the rise in misinformation related to the forthcoming presidential elections in the United States (US), according to a report.
The report was published on Wednesday by Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which tracks online hate on various social media platforms. It presents an examination of posts accompanied by Community Notes on X.
CCDH found that accurate notes written by X users on misleading and false posts related to the US elections were not displayed on 209 of 283 posts, which had been selected as a sample. This amounts to about 75 per cent of the posts lacking corrections made by users.
“The 209 misleading posts in our sample that did not display available Community Notes to all users have amassed 2.2 billion views,” says CCDH. Misleading posts without Community Notes — despite their availability — propagated various falsehoods. They claimed that the 2020 presidential elections were rigged and the voting systems in the US are unreliable, according to the report.
In response to CCDH’s report, Keith Coleman, who is in charge of Community Notes at X, said, “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.”
In August 2023, X filed a lawsuit against CCDH, accusing it of running a coordinated campaign to drive off advertisers. The legal action came after CCDH had reported a rise in hate speech on X following billionaire Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition. The case was thrown of the court.
