Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Spacex and owner of the X Social Media Platform, speaks at the Conservative Conference of Political Action at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel and the Oxon Hill Convention Center, Maryland, February 2025.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
For the owner of X Elon Musk, the solution to monitoring online misinformation has been the community rather than a group of fact control. Since the purchase of the social media company previously known as Twitter in 2022, it has defended the function of community notes as the best way to correct false posts.
That is to say, until he liked the results.
Musk wrote in a post on Thursday that he intends to “fix” community notes because “is increasingly being taken by governments and heritage media”. He gave no evidence to support his request.
What apparently shared Musk was the members of the information added to the community notes that corrected the posts on X claimed Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country’s elected president, had low estimates for approval among its citizens.
The International Institute of Sociology Kyiv, or Kiis, published the results of the survey this week, based on February’s vote, which revealed that 57% of Ukrainians said they believed Zelenskyy while 37% said they did not. Voting opposed President Donald Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy is deeply unprofessional in his country.
Tensions between the Trump administration, which includes Musk as a central figure, and the Ukraine government have escalated over the past week, NBC News announced before it bubbles publicly.
Echoing the feelings of the Kremlin, Trump has accused Ukraine of starting a war with Russia that actually began when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to conquer the neighboring country in February 2022.
High White House officials met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, aiming to lay the groundwork for peace talks in Ukraine, while excluding KYIV officials and EU representatives from participating in discussions.
Trump has called on Ukraine to hold new elections.
Zelenskyy said he would refuse any plan that does not involve Ukraine’s involvement. According to its Constitution, Ukraine cannot hold elections while in war and under military law.
In his post on Thursday, Musk wrote, “It should be completely clear that a Zelensky -controlled survey for its approval is not reliable !!” However, there are other sources available.
A consortium that has been conducting extensive surveys in Ukraine since 2014 revealed that “63% of Ukrainians now approve Zelensky’s performance as president, a significant increase from a year ago,” Joe Stafford, The News and Media Leaded Relations At the University of Manchester, he wrote in a post on Wednesday.
High estimates of favor for zelenskyy undermine the narrative that Trump and Musk want to show.
“If Zelensky were really loved by Ukraine people, he would develop a choice,” Musk wrote, again without evidence. “He knows he will be lost in a landslide, despite having captured the control of all Ukraine media, so he canceled the election. In reality, he has been despised by Ukraine people.”
Present for the first time by Twitter in 2021 as Birdwatch, and reprinted as community notes after Musk’s acquisition next year, the feature aimed to help misinform and misinform the social network by registering users to flag fraudulent posts and provide accurate information in the country.
Community notes have worked in a way similar to Wikipedia. Facebook Meta, who has aggressively sought Trump’s favor in the early days of his second term in the White House, recently announced his own version of community notes. Alphabet YouTube has tested a comparable tool since summer 2024.
Neil Johnson, a professor of George Washington University Physics who studies how misinformation and internet hate speech spread, said the community notes model is problematic, but not because it can be taken from major institutions. On the contrary, the source of crowds is a natural “imperfect” system to descend to the truth and is a weak substitute for “official control of the official fact,” he said.
“Like any crowd, the crowds can be unclear, and the crowds can be driven by other interests,” Johnson said. “There is a person paid with the fact of control of the fact.”
Musk is not immune
Moreover, while Musk has marked community notes as a way to replace fact controllers, a recent study by Spanish non-profit Maldita checking the fact showed that many Xs users are still relying on information from professionals. The authors of the study, published earlier in February, viewed more than 1 million notes from the public data of the community.
“Tests from X clearly show that users rely on the work of fact -control organizations often” when proposing community notes, they writes.
Neither Musk and a representative from X did not respond to CNBC requests for comment.
Music’s recent comments on community notes mark a sharp contrast to how he has been discussed in the past and underlines the length at which he is ready to follow the Trump agenda.
When we talk about community notes in previous posts, Musk has said that it cannot be manipulated by him or anyone else.
“The system is completely decentralized and open source, both code and data. Manipulation manipulation would appear as a strong neon finger!” Musk wrote in a post on December 30th. “No one on X, including me, there is any editorial control.”
Musk has also admitted in past posts that it is not immune from correction to community notes.
And community notes are not the only technology in Musk’s portfolio that can present problems by responding in ways it may not like. There is also Grok, an artificial intelligence chat that is owned by the start of Musk Xai and is used in X.
Fortune published a story in January about the many negative answers Grok offers when users ask if Musk is a good person. Grok’s reasons to say he is not a good person involves environmental risks from Spacex, Musk’s “messy” management style and his political views, reported Fortune, citing Grok’s answers. Futurism published a similarly theme part in December, with the title “Grok he of Elon Musk explodes Elon Musk as a large spread of misinformation”.
Mus calls Grok a “maximum truth” he is also “anti-Woke”. Earlier this week, Xai introduced her latest model of him, Grok 3, claiming it could exceed the offers from Openai and DEEPSEEK of China based on early testing, which included standardized tests in mathematics, science and coding .
Musm admitted during the demonstration that the model is not perfect.
“We should point out that this is a beta type, it means you have to expect some imperfection,” Musk said. “But we will improve it quickly, almost every day.”
lookout: Elon Musk Xai reveals the new Grok model
