Tech billionaire Elon Musk said his company was looking into claims that the Harris-Walz presidential campaign was trying to manipulate community notes on X in order to push more favorable narratives.
Musk reposted the accusations on X, the platform he owns, from an account with screenshots from a report in the Federalist documenting the alleged efforts from organizers of the Harris campaign on other platforms, including Discord and Reach.
The report showed how paid Harris staffers on the Harris Discord were writing their own community notes and calling on volunteers to vote them positively in order to spread their propaganda.
Community notes were added to Twitter after Musk purchased the platform in order to allow crowdsourcing to determine the truthfulness or falsity of viral claims. Sometimes the community votes up contradictory information and data to avoid misinformation from gaining traction without pushback.
The report however, found that X had filtered out bad actors enough that one Harris-Walz Discord user lamented that they were blocked from effectively pushing their propaganda as much as they desired:
It’s because the [community notes] system is looking for notes that get people who normally disagree with each other to agree the note is worthwhile. So a [community note] needs people who normally believe misinformation to cross over and agree that, in fact, this case is misinformation.
The report noted that the efforts were a “gross violation” of the Terms of Service on X prohibiting the artificial amplification of information.
“We are investigating this,” Musk said Wednesday.
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Harris community note manipulation, Harris walz propaganda push, Harris campaign dirty tricks, Community notes manipulation, Politics
