In response to opinion polls that disprove US President Donald Trump’s claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is incredibly unpopular in his country, Elon Musk has pledged to “fix” X’s fact-checking tool.
Rowing in behind Trump’s attacks on Zelenskyy on Thursday, Musk claimed that his social media platform’s “community notes” feature was being “gamed” by governments and traditional media.
Musk made the claim while reposting an unidentified right-wing X account that cast doubt on the legitimacy of a Ukrainian polling organization’s relationship to the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
“If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election. He canceled the election because he knows he would lose in a landslide despite having control of ALL Ukrainian media, Musk said on X, while refuting the unsupported claim that US intelligence agencies only estimate Zelenskyy’s approval rate is 4 percent.
“In reality, he is despised by the people of Ukraine, which is why he has refused to hold an election”, Musk said, referring to Zelenskyy’s decision to suspend elections after declaring martial law in the wake of Moscow’s 2022 invasion.
Zelensky’s campaign is being challenged to hold an election and refute that. He will not”.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, who is one of Trump’s most powerful allies and heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), did not provide any evidence of X’s community notes system’s manipulation, which assigns explanations to posts that are contentious based on user consensus.
Musk also did not back up a claim that widely reported polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology was “Zelensky-controlled” and “not credible,” as he later claimed at the Conservative Political Action Conference waving a chainsaw in homage to Argentina’s cutting-edge president Javier Milei later on Thursday.
Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches misinformation and disinformation, described Musk’s comments as “extremely concerning”.
According to Graves, “the accusations are a guideline for what we have to watch out for from the accuser – a world where private platforms like X can be systematically manipulated to favor the political interests and alliances of their owners,” as is frequently the case with this kind of rhetoric.
“A well-designed community notes system can be a useful check on misinformation. However, that requires transparent regulations that permit users to quickly access reliable information and that are unrestricted to individual preferences.
An inescapable feature of crowdsourced fact-checking models, according to John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University in Canada, is that the platform’s owner or management might not like the outcomes.
“That is part of the bargain you make when you implement , these kinds of mechanisms”, Wihbey told Al Jazeera.
“Overall, I think community notes is a good approach, but it should be blended with other tools. Ironic that leadership is now blaming the fact that it isn’t working well because X is now relying on it too much.
The Ukrainian leader and the Trump administration have been at odds with one another over Washington’s efforts to end the conflict in Ukraine with a deal with Russia, with Musk’s broadside against Zelenskyy coming as they have been speaking out in broad strokes.
After the Ukrainian leader refuted his claims that Kyiv was to blame for the war and expressed concerns about being cut off from Washington’s negotiations with Moscow, Trump accused Zelenskyy of being a “dictator.”
Zelenskyy was also alleged to be “very low” in the polls in his country, refuting a previous claim that he only had a 4 percent approval rating.
57% of respondents to a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology on Wednesday said they believed Zelenskyy, up 5 points from December.
The Ukrainian leader’s popularity, however, has waned as the war has gone on, dropping from 90 percent in March 2022 to 64 percent in February last year, according to the institute’s polling.
Since taking control of X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2022, Musk has been heavily criticised for allowing, and in some cases promoting, misinformation on the platform.
Nearly three-quarters of a sample of false or misleading posts about the US elections of 2024 did not show accurate notes correcting the record, according to an analysis conducted by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
“I think there’s a strong chance that X/Twitter becomes a propaganda arm for Musk/Trump – and, in fact, it’s already happening”, Gordon Pennycook, a professor of psychology at Cornell University who studies misinformation, told Al Jazeera.
Source: Aljazeera
Leave a Reply