Elon Musk's Social Notes: What X Users Need to Know About Fact-Checking Him

The first thing to know about social cues is Elon Musk's tweets: a must-have A lot More of them.

Social notes, the Twitter/X fact checks formerly known as Birdwatch, are often cited as one of the few good things that have survived. Musk had a tumultuous first year of ownership. These references are user-generated, usually including links to high-quality resources. Like Reddit posts, they live or die on upvotes (“helpful”) and downvotes (“unhelpful”) – enough of the latter and they disappear. Anyone can register to contribute if there are no objections against their account. Only contributors can view or vote on proposed notes before they are officially stamped on tweets.

Musk often makes social references as a sign that he cares about the quality of information on a service that is crawling with deliberate misinformation. He's smart to do so: a study found that social mentions boost trust in social media and help bring back X's estranged users. But he doesn't need to put his thumb on the scale of X method to avoid them.

With nearly 200 million people following him, if even a small percentage of his adoring fans have signed up to rate proposed social notes, they can swarm the computer, intercept and rate any proposed note on Musk's account as “not helpful” before he gets it. Shame on fact checking. As in this case, retweeting a false story about a bomb at a Trump rally was a step too far, even for his fans (the original tweet of the Musk quote has been deleted; reference remains).

The tweet may have been deleted

It helps the musk significantly. Because as any study of his tweets confirms, the bombshell story is not an outlier: Kasthuri continues to spread misinformation. The The New York Times I looked at a week's worth in September and found that a third were “false, misleading or missing important context.”

In July, the Center for Countering Digital Hate was identified by independent fact-checkers as 50 deleted Musk tweets in which Musk supported Trump. Not one of them received a social mention, and they were viewed a total of 1.2 billion times.

As things stand on the unofficial Social Mentions Leaderboard Kasturi is at #55 with 70 Social Mentions so far. Many of the accounts he most frequently replies to and retweets are in the top 10. At first count there are more than 800 mentions – but at a rate of 50 lies a month, if oversight is equal, Musk would have easily surpassed them.

So what can we learn from 70 fact-checks? did Does that really add up to Musk's account? Here's your TL;DR.

Musk's early threads weren't such a big deal.

The tweet may have been deleted

Just three of the 70 social references in Kasthuri's tweets date back to October 2022, when he brought up Singh on Twitter. That doesn't tell us much, as the birdwatching service was soft-launched in January 2021 and is now fully operational. A few weeks before Musk arrived.

However, we can see how small the revisions were at first. In his first post with Social Note, Musk said his Tesla Roadster is orbiting Mars; It actually orbits the Sun somewhere towards the asteroid belt (which is still very flexible). Two other pre-Twitter references are about EV tax credits and Hyperloop tunnels, which he says won't flood. About to use one of Musk's favorite words, but no big deal.

In Musk's first week on Twitter, he collected four more tips. But they are harmless, even useful. While Musk was joking, a couple points out, if it wasn't obvious. He calls the social references “awesome”; A note provides more information on how to join.

On November 4, 2022, Musk claimed that advertisers were fleeing the service and “trying to destroy free speech in America.” Social media pointed out that advertisers didn't care about Musk's safety and misinformation as he destroyed those teams. And a new hostile musky note is born.

His technical posts have more social references than his political posts.

In 2023, Musk will receive 31 notes. This is still his reality-checked year. May 2023 – Musk launched Ron DeSantis' campaign at X and falsely claimed that DeSantis had set an “all-time record for fundraising” – yet the month he was fact-checked.

But that doesn't mean he is being fact-checked on his political statements. Many social references appear in his statements about the world of technology and media, including many bizarre attacks on non-profits (see references to his tweets at the Wikimedia Foundation Internet Archive and NPR)

Kasthuri is the most vulnerable in the responses.

Of the 70 social references in Musk's tweets, a clear majority – 40 – were in tweets to which Musk responded. It makes sense. The X algorithm artificially boosts Musk's regular posts, ensuring he appears in your “For You” tab even if you're not following him. But the algorithm doesn't push his answers, so wrong ideas are more likely to get more votes from good-faith social reference volunteers.

What liars they are! His mother, Musk was the answer Denied knowledge of his father's emerald mining; Social media used his own words against him, digging up a quote admitting his father was a co-owner of the mine. In response to former employee Musk It says there is no evidence that plastics in the environment are harmful to us; It turns out that there is. “Why should you keep your home address?” He asks a verified user concerned about X sending him to the IDF; A note indicates that ID with address is required for verification.

And he can't be alone enough. When a supportive account posted a screenshot proudly demonstrating that X was justified because “even Elon Musk can be noticed in the community,” Musk responded that the reference in the screenshot was “false and the community has already voted.” And that gets him another social cue: No, it's still there.

Musk likes social cues, except when he doesn't.

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In seven of the 70 posts, Musk called himself a fact-checker. Always tagging @CommunityNotes in a tweet he wanted to quote, and clearly already believed. In a blunt statement he presses, “Is this true” or “Is this accurate?” He asks and adds a fig leaf. Almost every time, the mention of results provides context that Musk misses.

Yet Musk rarely responds to his invited fact-checking. Once he did, he dug in his heels. “Social cues fail here,” Musk wrote in February after saying it was impossible to log into a Windows PC without a Microsoft account. No, the hint in this answer is that you can do that – it just requires a solution that doesn't know about “average Andy”.

The implication: A tech billionaire who's been logging into Windows computers for decades isn't your average Andy.

This particular tech billionaire, at least so far, isn't as socially referenced as the average Andy. And it doesn't seem like the service will do anything to curb “dark maga” musk in the last month before the US election.

Why? Because, like a good social note, we need to address the range of social notes – using clear language and high-quality sources.

A complete debunking of Musk's repeated claim that “illegal” immigrants are voting in US elections here; None of his records in this matter were observed. (Ironically, Musk may have once been an “illegal” immigrant — you'd think the snide note writers would enjoy pointing this out.)

Here's his “You've told the real truth” response to an anti-Semitic screed from last year. A tweet so unpopular that advertisers fled, and yet it went unnoticed.

A snippet of his “Voter Fraud in Virginia” post last week is also not mentioned.

We could go on, but you get the point. If volunteers can't win over Kasthuri voters to add amendments to such nonsense, he has very little to say before election day. i will eat Need to check the truth.

Mentioned.