X Fails To Stem US Election Misinformation

Hate speech non-profit that defeated Elon Musk’s lawsuit, warns X’s Community Notes is failing to stem tide of US election misinformation

Content moderation questions are once again being asked about Elon Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter), ahead of the US Presidential election on 5 November.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a London-based non-profit that fights hate speech and disinformation, in a report stated that X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program, called Community Notes, isn’t addressing the flood of US election misinformation, the Associated Press reported.

The report, published Wednesday, had 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 percent.

Election misinformation

According to the AP report, the CCDH noted that 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.

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

Elon Musk’s X had introduced the crowd-sourced Community Notes feature after Elon Musk’s decision in January 2023 to axe most of Twitter’s external content moderation teams, along with 80 percent of the Twitter workforce, resulted in an advertising exodus from the platform.

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

Twitter response

The Associated Press quoted Keith Coleman, a VP of product at X who oversees Community Notes, as saying in a statement that the program “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.”

X also reportedly pointed to external academic research that has shown Community Notes to be trustworthy and effective.

Imran Ahmed, the CEO of CCDH, reportedly 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.”

Elon Musk is heavily promoting and backing Donald Trump in the US election, and has donated millions of dollars (up to $120 million) to his campaign, despite pledging not to fund any campaigns earlier in the year.

CCDH lawsuit

It should be noted that Elon Musk has something of a personal grudge against The Center for Countering Digital Hate.

In June 2023 the CCDH had published research about X’s alleged failure to take action against hate speech on its platform.

Twitter then threatened to sue the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, accusing the non-profit of making “a series of troubling and baseless claims that appear calculated to harm Twitter generally, and its digital advertising business specifically”.

Musk has always claimed himself to be “free-speech absolutist”, but days after his threat to sue was revealed, he ordered X in August 2023 to sue CCDH in a San Francisco federal court, accusing CCDH of deliberately trying to drive advertisers away from Twitter by publishing reports critical of the platform’s response to hateful content.

In September 2023 CCDH refused to back down, and reported 300 tweets to Elon Musk’s platform, that contained extreme hate.

In March 2024 a US federal judge Charles Breyer signalled he may dismiss X Corp’s lawsuit against the CCDH, and shortly after that the judge entirely dismissed X’s lawsuit, saying there could be “no mistaking” that the suit was about “punishing” the firm’s critics.