Posts by Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly Twitter, have been hit with more community notes than Russian state news outlet TASS.
Musk ranked 55 on Community Notes Leaderboard—a site which showcases the X users who have received the most notes. He had notched up 89 Community Notes.
By comparison TASS, a Russian state-owned news agency and the largest outlet in the country, ranked 59th, with 84 notes.
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Community Notes are just that—anyone signed up as an eligible contributor can make one, and posts by influential figures with a wide following on the platform are more likely to be seen, and thus receive a note. They can be embarrassing for the poster in the complexities they raise and are seen as something to avoid.
One post from Musk that received a Community Note was when he wrote in 2022: “I love Barbara Streisand lol.”
Even though he should probably have received a note for misspelling “Barbra,” this prompted a contextual Community Note which read: “Elon Musk is alluding to comparisons that are being made of Twitter banning accounts to the Streisand Effect, which is when to attempting [to] conceal information results in further exposure of said information.”
Musk had been facing backlash after the accounts of multiple journalists were suspended, despite him previously touting his dedication to “free speech.”
Musk would later suggest that the accounts had violated the platform’s recently updated terms of service regarding “doxxing”—disclosing someone’s personal details online—although it was unclear at the time which rules had been broken. The unintended extra publicity given to Musk’s locations as a result of the dispute could arguably have been an example of the Streisand effect.
Among TASS’s posts that received Community Notes was a May 28 link to an article which read: “The only legitimate power in Ukraine is Verkhovha Rada (national parliament) and its speaker, Russian President Vladimir Putin said.”
A community note said that “[Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky is the elected president of Ukraine. Although his term has technically ended, the Ukrainian constitution forbids elections while martial law is declared due to war,” linking to an article by the BBC on the topic.
Newsweek has contacted Musk for comment via X’s press email.
According to X’s official website, the system aims to “create a better informed world by empowering people on X to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading posts.
Other notable figures who ranked highly included political activist and self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer, who ranked 15th with 189 notes.
In September, the Russian Embassy in South Africa received a brutal fact check from the X community after seemingly claiming Russia was responsible for the downing of an F-16 fighter jet over Ukraine.
The claim was swiftly discredited when X added a community note stating: “The photo shows a USAF F-16 that crashed in 2019.” The note also contained links to articles about the incident, which contained the same picture of the fighter jet that the Russian Embassy had used in its post.
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