Elon Musk, Ceo of Tesla and Spacex and Owner of Social Media Platform X, Speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the GayLord National Resort Hotel and Convention Center in oxon hill, Maryland, Maryland, Maryland, 20, 2025.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
For x owner Elon muskThe solution to monitoring misinformation online has been the Community, Rather than a group of fact checkers. SINCE Buying The social media company formerly known as Twitter in 2022, he’s touted the Community notes feature as the best way to correct false posts.
That is, until he Didn’T Like the Results.
Musk Wrote in a post Thursday that he intends to “fix” Community notes, it “is Increasingly Being Gamed by Governments & Legacy Media.” He provided no evidence to support his claim.
What apparently set musk off was information members added in community notes correcting posts on x that claimd Volodymyr zelenskyy, the country’s election, the electry’s election among Citizens.
The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, or KiisPublished Survey Results This week, based on February polling, that found that 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted zelenskyy while 37% said they did not. The polling contradicted President Donald Trump’s Claim that zelenskyy is deeply unpopular in his country.
Tensions between the trump administration, which includes musk as a central figure, and the ukrainian government has escalated over the past week, NBC News ReportedBefore Bubbling Into Public View.
Echoing kremlin sentiments, Trump Has Accused Ukraine of Starting a War With Russia that Actually Began when Russian President Vladimir Putin Ordered His Troops To Invade The Neighboring Country in Fabrury 2022.
Senior White House Officials Met Their Russian Counterparts in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, with the aim of laying the groundwork for Peace Talks on Ukraine, While Excluding Kyiv’s Officials and Eu representatives from participating in discussions.
Trump has called on Ukraine to hold new elections.
Zelenskyy said he would reject any plan that did not include ukraine’s involvement. Under Its Constitution, Ukraine Can’t Hold Elections while IT’s at War and Under Martial Law.
In his post Thursday, Musk Wrote, “It should be utterly obvious that a zelensky-contrared poll about his own approval is not credible !!” However, there are other available sources.
A Consortium That’s Been Conducting Extensive Polling in Ukraine Since 2014 Found “63% of Ukrainians Now Approve of Zelensky’s Performance as President, A Notable Increase from the Previous Year,” Joe Stafford, The News and Media Relations Lead at the University of Manchester, Wrote in a post Wednsday.
High favorite ratings for zelenskyy undermine the narrative that Trump and Musk Want to Tell.
“IF “He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of all ukrainian media, so he canceled the election. In reality, he is despised by the people of ukraine.”
First introduced by Twitter in 2021 as Birdwatch, and Rebranded as Community Notes after Musk’s Acquisition The Following Year, The feature was meant to help the social Network Combort Mismration and disorder By enlisting users to flag misleading posts and provide correct information instead.
Community notes have worked in a manner Similar to wikipediaFacebook Owner Meta, Which has been aggressively seeking trump’s favorite In the early days of his second term in the white house, recently announced Its own version of communication notes. Alphabet’s YouTube has been testing A comparable tool since summer 2024.
Neil Johnson, A George Washington University Physics Professor Who Studies How Misinformation and Hate Speech Spread Online, Said the Community Notes Model Is Problematic, But Not Becaus It Can Beecaus Gamed by Large Institutes. Rather, Crowdsourcing is an inharently “imperfect system” for landing on the bus and is a poor substitute for “formal fact checking,” He Said.
“Like any browd, browds can be fickle, and crowds can be driven by Other Interests,” Johnson Said. “It’s not a paid person with the job of fact checking.”
Musk is not immune
Additionally, while musk has pitched communication notes as a way to replace fact checkers, a recent study By the spanish fact-checking nonprofit maldita showed that many x users still relay on information from professionals. The author’s of the study, published earlier in February, looked at more than 1 million notes from communication notes’ public dataset.
“The evidence from x clear shows that users relay on the work of fact-checking organizations often” when proposing communication notes, they Wrote.
Neither Musk Nor a representative from X Responded to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Musk’s latest comments on Community Notes Mark a Sharp Contrast to how He’s discussed the service in the past, and underscore the lends to which he’s will be in pursuit of traumps’.
When Talking About Community Notes in Earlier Posts, Musk Has Said That It Can’t Be Manipulated by Him or Anyone Else.
“The system is complete decentralized and open source, both code and data. Any manipulation would show up like a neon sore thumb!” Musk Wrote in a post Dec. 30. “No one at x, include me, has any editorial control.”
Musk has also accepted in past posts that he is not immune from being corrected in community notes.
And communication notes isn’t the only technology in musk’s portfolio that grown present problems by Responding in Ways He May Not Like. There’s also Grok, The Artificial Intelligence Chatbot that is Owned by Musk’s Startup Xai and is Used on X.
Fortune Published a story in January about the many negative responses Grok provides when users ask if musk is a good person. Grok’s Reasons for Saying He Isn Son Include Environmental Hazards from Spacex, Musk’s “ERATIC” ERATIC “Management Style and His Political Views, Fortune Reported, Citing GROKSPONSS. Futurism Published a similarly themed piece in December, with the headline “Elon musk’s Grok ai blasts elon musk as huge spores of misinformation.”
Musk calls Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” ai that is also “anti-woke.” Earlier this week, xai introduced its latest ai model, Grok 3Claiming it can outperform offerings from Openai and China’s Deepsek Based on Early Testing, Which Included Standardized Tests on Math, Science and Coding.
Musk did admit during the demo that the model isn’t perfect.
“We should emphasize that this is kind of a beta, meaning that you should expect some imperfections,” Musk said. “But we will improve it rapidly, almost every day.”
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