Fact Checking Emerges as Latest Front in the Ideological Twitter Wars

Community Notes are the new battlefield of the Twitter wars. The left is complaining that the user-generated fact-checking tool is dominated by right wing accounts, and the right is celebrating that Twitter executives are no longer in sole control of what is deemed “misinformation.”Elon Musk bought Twitter in October with a mission to protect free speech on the social media platform. He restored many banned accounts, fired executives, and dismantled the Trust & Safety Council, a group charged with monitoring “hate speech,” misinformation, and “problematic” accounts.Mr. Musk also gave access to internal Twitter communications and data to a group of journalists, including Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, to shed light on censorship under the prior management. Their published findings, called the “Twitter Files,” disclosed that, despite protestations to the contrary from a former CEO, Jack Dorsey, and other top Twitter executives, the company did “shadow ban” or censor right-leaning accounts or those that challenge the orthodoxy on Covid policies and the like. What the company did was to tag accounts with labels like “Trends Blacklist” or “Do Not Amplify” to effectively mute those voices.“Free speech used to be a left or liberal value. And yet we see from the ‘left’ a desire to actually censor,” Mr. Musk said recently on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” “I think we need to be cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that results in the suppression of free speech. Those are two of the aspects of the woke mind virus that are very dangerous.”The Community Notes feature allows users to leave a fact-checking or context note under any tweet across the platform. If “enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful,” the service’s descriptor states, then the note will be publicly shown under the tweet. Previously called Birdwatch, a program established prior to Mr. Musk’s takeover, Community Notes has gained greater prominence on the site in recent months — and generated controversy.When Politifact tweeted an article four days ago defending the teachers union president, Randi Weingarten, saying she “advocated for reopening schools with pandemic safety measures,” the tweet was slapped with three Community Notes adding context and disputing these claims.Ms. Weingarten then tweeted a response to the Community Notes, writing, “What’s false is the community note, not @Politifact.” This tweet earned more Community Notes, linking to articles from the New York Times, the Guardian, and other outlets that disputed her allegation.Those opposed to Ms. Weingarten’s control of public schools and her pandemic response celebrated. “Randi then tried to defend her original tweet with more gaslighting and she was just hit with ANOTHER Community Note. Glorious,” an American Federation for Children senior fellow and self-described school choice evangelist, Corey DeAngelis, tweeted.The left, though, decried this as one more example of what they say is a new rightward slant to the social media site. “Community Notes is not a fact-checking tool but a rightwing propaganda tool on Musk’s Twitter,” a MSNBC host, Mehdi Hasan, tweeted in response.“Fact checking is inherently flawed as the bias of the fact checkers is always present regardless of the issue,” the chief communications officer of a technology company, Liberty Blockchain, Christopher Alexander, tells the Sun. “Crowd-sourced fact checking is certainly the lesser of two evils. A community of fact checkers is much less likely to be abused on a diverse platform like Twitter over an unelected elite.”Mr. Hasan, though, doesn’t see it that way, and he has of late become a vocal critique of Community Notes. “If you had any doubt that @CommunityNotes has become another weapon of the right on Musk’s Twitter, see the BS community note added to my Bill Maher clip, after MAGA folks demanded it,” Mr. Hasan tweeted above a screenshot from one of his shows in which he asserts white-on-white crime occurs at the same rate as black-on-black crime. That tweet, too, was slapped with a Community Note with links outlining how the context-adding service operates.“Ending censorship in guise of virtue, handing control of the narrative to the people and actually accurate fact-checking are essential goals,” Mr. Musk tweeted. “Naturally, those who used to control the narrative and censored views they disliked are less than thrilled. How tragic.”The user-generated fact-checking has also ruffled feathers at the White House. The official White House account tweeted in November, “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership.” Since the Social Security increase was actually due to inflation, users generated a Community Note that appeared under the White House tweet.“Seniors will receive a large Social Security benefit increase due to annual cost of living adjustment, which is based on the inflation rate,” the Community Note read. The White House promptly deleted the tweet.Community Notes also waded into the death of a homeless, mentally ill man, Jordan Neely, on the New York City subway last week. Congresswoman Rashida Talib, known as a member of the far-left “Squad,” tweeted an image of Neeley dressed as Michael Jackson with the tagline, “He was 30 years old. Black men deserve to grow old — not be lynched on the Subway because they were having a mental health crisis.”Ms. Talib’s tweet received more than 30,000 likes but also two Community Notes: the first clarifying that the image of Neely as a subway performer was from 2012; the second that Neely was restrained by passengers after exhibiting threatening and aggressive behavior and that he had 44 prior arrests, including a felony assault warrant.Twitter users have also fact-checked tweets on topics like the Arab-Israel conflict. A Human Rights Watch director tweeted an image earlier this month of a member of the Palestinian armed group, Islamic Jihad, with the text, “Make no mistake: Israel killed Khader Adnan.” Community Notes below the tweet clarifies that Adnan praised suicide bombers, was a member of the Islamic Jihad, and that he died from a hunger strike in prison, not at Israeli hands.Twitter users are not wading into only political battles. Over the weekend, a Community Note was added to a tweet about Elon Musk being self-made. The notes have also added comedy to the site by fact-checking advertisements. “When you drive with @Uber, you’re the boss. #Uber #earnlikeaboss,” an Uber ad reads. Users added the following note for context: “Uber advertises ‘earn like a boss,’ however, in realty Uber driver compensation averages $11.77 per hour.” Regal Cinemas also got fact checked on its “unlimited” movie pass, with a Community Note clarifying, “Regal reserves the right to designate any movie as ineligible.”Community Notes are user-generated and user-rated, so the side of the ideological aisle that engages more with the process will theoretically be more visible. “You should be seeing something closer to a 50/50 balance,” Mr. Musk tweeted in response to a prominent journalist writing that he sees more right-leaning content at the moment.Since Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter, prominent left-leaning account holders have declared the site dead, full of racists and right wingers, and vowed to move to alternatives like Post, Mastodon, or Mr. Dorsey’s new venture, Bluesky. Yet Twitter so far is the site with the most eyeballs and action. An NBC reporter, Ben Collins, tweeted recently, “This site is necrotic, fully diseased.” Yet he’s tweeted more than a handful of times since.While some on the left may be calling for changes to the Community Notes process and calling it biased, Mr. Alexander says the notes are unlikely to go away anytime soon. “First is the democratic angle, which is very appealing for social media users,” he says. “Second, I think Elon Musk probably loves watching the Fourth Estate get some comeuppance from the masses.”

Fact Checking Emerges as Latest Front in the Ideological Twitter Wars

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