Elon Musk is not happy with Community Notes, the crowdsourced fact-checking program that adds notes to correct misinformation on his social media platform X. And the billionaire says he’s now going to “fix” Community Notes so that it agrees with him, claiming without evidence that it’s being manipulated by governments and the media.
“Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media. Working to fix this,” Musk tweeted Thursday.
Why is Musk upset? It looks like the billionaire doesn’t like notes that have appeared under tweets about Ukraine in recent days, which are fact-checking several lies being spread by the U.S. government. President Donald Trump has cozied up to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, alarming European allies, and has said a number of false things about Ukraine and the country’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump, for instance, called Zelenskyy a “dictator” in a post to Truth Social on Wednesday and has repeatedly suggested this week that Ukraine was the one to actually start the war. In reality, Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022 without provocation and continues to occupy parts of the country while waging war against the Ukrainian people.
Trump has also claimed that Zelenskyy has just a 4% approval rating among his own people, something he said twice on Wednesday but simply isn’t true. As CNN notes, a poll from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology says 57% of Ukrainians trust their president. Technically, Ukraine polls don’t ask about “approval” but trust. It’s not clear where Trump heard the 4% number.
But Musk doesn’t like anyone pointing out stuff like this in Community Notes, going on a tirade Thursday about how the Ukrainian president isn’t actually popular.
“It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!! If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election,” Musk said.
The reason Ukraine hasn’t held any elections since the start of the war is that hundreds of thousands of people are fighting and dying, a fact that some MAGA conservatives don’t think is sufficient.
“He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukrainian media, so he canceled the election,” Musk continued. “In reality, he is despised by the people of Ukraine, which is why he has refused to hold an election. I challenge Zelensky to hold an election and refute this. He will not.”
Musk went on to write that President Trump is, “right to ignore him and solve for peace independent of the disgusting, massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers.”
Musk has a long history of messing with X, formerly known as Twitter before he bought it, to fit his worldview. The platform has become a cesspool of racist hate and extremism thanks to tweaks made by Musk, like allowing anyone with $8 to spend a blue “verification” checkmark that gets users boosted in the algorithm. X doesn’t actually verify the identity of people who buy a checkmark.
In recent weeks, Musk has posted screenshots of Community Notes that don’t actually appear for all users as a sneaky way to make it look like his opinion has been validated. Potential notes appear only to contributors and must be voted on to appear publicly for everyone. And the billionaire hasn’t been getting the fact-checks that suit his worldview, like in a recent fight over 60 Minutes reporting on USAID.
It’s interesting that Musk will now screenshot tweets he doesn’t like that include “proposed” community notes that back up his opinion. As you can see, the community note doesn’t actually show up for the average user because not enough people voted it true.
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) February 16, 2025 at 6:58 PM
Musk has also messed with the X algorithm in other ways, like when he rather infamously threw a tantrum when a Super Bowl tweet of his received less attention than a similar tweet from President Joe Biden back in 2023. Biden’s tweet received 23 million impressions while Musk’s tweet got just 9 million. And according to tech news outlet Platformer, Musk flew from the Super Bowl game in Arizona to San Francisco that night to meet with engineers and make sure this problem was “fixed.”
As Platformer explained at the time:
By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.
Internally, this is called a “power user multiplier,” although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass Twitter heuristics that would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the core ranked feed, now known as “For You.”
That explains why people opening the app Monday found that Musk dominated the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who did not. Over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to one internal estimate.
Many people try to credit Musk with inventing Community Notes, but it actually launched in 2022 under the name Birdwatch. Musk didn’t create the program, he just changed the name.
It’s no surprise that Musk wants to tinker with X and the content people see. He did that a lot in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election and now acts as an agent of the government, destroying programs he doesn’t like in an oligarchic coup. The only surprise might be that Musk didn’t change the Community Notes program sooner.
