Elon Musk has pledged to “fix” X’s fact-checking tool following the release of polling contradicting United States President Donald Trump’s claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is deeply unpopular in his country.
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 amplifying an anonymous right-wing X account that questioned the credibility of a widely cited Ukrainian polling outfit because of its work with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being effectively dismantled under the billionaire’s cost-cutting drive.
“If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election. He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukrainian media, so he canceled the election,” Musk said on X, while sharing the unsubstantiated claim that US intelligence agencies estimate Zelenskyy’s approval to be just 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.
“I challenge Zelensky to hold an election and refute this. He will not.”
Musk, one of Trump’s most powerful allies as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), did not provide evidence of manipulation of X’s community notes system, which attaches explanatory notes to contentious posts based on the consensus of users.
The Tesla CEO, who later on Thursday appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference waving a chainsaw in homage to Argentina’s cost-cutting president Javier Milei, also did not substantiate a claim that widely reported polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology was “Zelensky-controlled” and “not credible.”
Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches misinformation and disinformation, described Musk’s comments as “extremely concerning”.
“As is often the case with this kind of rhetoric, the accusations are a guide to what we have to look out for from the accuser – a world where private platforms like X can be systematically gamed to favour the political interests and alliances of their owners,” Graves told Al Jazeera.
“A well-designed community notes system can be a useful check on misinformation. But that requires transparent rules that make it easy for users to surface reliable information, and that can’t be tweaked at the whim of one person.”
John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University in Boston, said an inescapable feature of crowdsourced fact-checking models is that a platform’s owner or management may not like the results.
“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. X is now relying on it too much, and it is ironic that leadership is now complaining that it isn’t working well.”
Musk’s broadside against Zelenskyy comes as the Ukrainian leader and the Trump administration have been engaged in a war of words over Washington’s efforts to reach a deal with Russia to end the war in Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Trump accused Zelenskyy of being a “dictator” after the Ukrainian leader rejected his claims that Kyiv was to blame for the war and raised concerns about being sidelined in Washington’s negotiations with Moscow.
Trump also claimed that Zelenskyy was “very low” in the polls in his country, echoing his earlier claim that the Ukrainian leader had an approval rating of just 4 percent.
In an opinion poll published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology on Wednesday, 57 percent of Ukrainians said they trusted Zelenskyy, up five 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.
An analysis published by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that nearly three-quarters of a sample of false or misleading posts about the 2024 US elections did not display accurate notes correcting the record.
“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.
“I think Musk wants to reform community notes because he doesn’t like being corrected, as is typical for authoritarian oligarchs.”
