Elon Musk has a problem with X’s Community Notes when he disapproves of the results

For X owner Elon Musk, the solution to invigilator misinformation online has been the community, rather than a group of fact checkers. Since buying the social way company formerly known as Twitter in 2022, he’s touted the Community Notes feature as the best way to correct false positions.

That is, until he didn’t like the results.

Musk wrote in a post Thursday that he intends to “fix” Community Notes because it “is increasingly being gamed by controls & legacy media.” He provided no evidence to support his claim.

What apparently set Musk off was information members added in Community Notes adjusting posts on X that claimed Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the country’s elected president, had low approval ratings among its citizens.

The Kyiv Worldwide Institute of Sociology, or KIIS, published survey results this week, based on February polling, that initiate that 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted Zelenskyy while 37% said they did not. The polling abrogated 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 have escalated to the past week, NBC News reported, before bubbling into public view.

Echoing Kremlin sentiments, Trump has accused Ukraine of starting a war with Russia that absolutely began when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade the neighboring country in February 2022.

Higher- ranking White House officials met their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18, with the aim of laying the groundwork for cordial talks on Ukraine, while excluding Kyiv’s officials and EU representatives from participating in discussions.

Trump has called on Ukraine to operative new elections.

Zelenskyy said he would reject any plan that did not include Ukraine’s involvement. Under its constitution, Ukraine can’t prove elections while it’s at war and under martial law.

In his post Thursday, Musk wrote, “It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky-controlled canvass about his OWN approval is not credible!!” However, there are other available sources.

A consortium that’s been acting extensive polling in Ukraine since 2014 found “63% of Ukrainians now approve of Zelensky’s performance as president, a unmatched increase from the previous year,” Joe Stafford, the news and media relations lead at the University of Manchester, wrote in a assign Wednesday.

High favorability ratings for Zelenskyy undermine the narrative that Trump and Musk want to tell.

“If Zelensky was indeed loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election,” Musk wrote, again without evidence. “He knows he would displace 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.”

Blue ribbon introduced by Twitter in 2021 as Birdwatch, and rebranded as Community Notes after Musk’s acquisition the following year, the high point was meant to help the social network combat misinformation and disinformation by enlisting users to flag misleading posts and prepare for correct information instead.

Community Notes has worked in a manner similar to Wikipedia. Facebook owner Meta, which has been aggressively seeking Trump’s favor in the antiquated days of his second term in the White House, recently announced its own version of Community Notes. Alphabet’s YouTube has been examination a comparable tool since summer 2024.

Neil Johnson, a George Washington University physics professor who studies how disinformation and hate speech spread online, said the Community Notes model is problematic, but not because it can be gamed by large institutes. Rather, crowdsourcing is an inherently “imperfect system” for landing on the truth and is a poor substitute for “formal fact checking,” he required.

“Like any crowd, crowds can be fickle, and crowds can be driven by other interests,” Johnson said. “It’s not a paid person with the job of reality checking.”

Additionally, while Musk has pitched Community Notes as a way to replace fact checkers, a modern study by the Spanish fact-checking nonprofit Maldita showed that many X users still rely on information from professionals. The architects of the study, published earlier in February, looked at more than 1 million notes from Community Notes’ in the open dataset.

“The evidence from X clearly shows that users rely on the work of fact-checking organizations often” when soliciting Community Notes, they wrote.

Neither Musk nor a representative from X responded to CNBC’s requests for comment.

Musk’s last comments on Community Notes mark a sharp contrast to how he’s discussed the service in the past, and underscore the lengths to which he’s delighted to go in pursuit of Trump’s agenda.

When talking about Community Notes in earlier posts, Musk has said that it can’t be managed by him or anyone else.

“The system is completely decentralized and open source, both code and data. Any manipulation would confirm up like a neon sore thumb!” Musk wrote in a post Dec. 30. “No one at X, including me, has any editorial control.”

Musk has also acknowledged in finished posts that he is not immune from being corrected in Community Notes.

And Community Notes isn’t the only technology in Musk’s portfolio that could largesse 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 utilized on X.

Fortune published a story in January about the many negative responses Grok provides when users ask if Musk is a yard goods person. Grok’s reasons for saying he isn’t a good person include environmental hazards from SpaceX, Musk’s “flighty” management style and his political views, Fortune reported, citing Grok responses. Futurism published a similarly themed hell in December, with the headline “Elon Musk’s Grok AI blasts Elon Musk as huge spreader of misinformation.”

Musk justifications Grok a “maximally truth-seeking” AI that is also “anti-woke.” Earlier this week, xAI introduced its latest AI model, Grok 3, claiming it can outperform sacrifices from OpenAI and China’s DeepSeek based on early testing, which included standardized tests on math, subject and coding. 

Musk did admit during the demo that the model isn’t perfect.

“We should emphasize that this is indulgent of a beta, meaning that you should expect some imperfections,” Musk said. “But we will improve it rapidly, on the brink of every day.”

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