Twitter and Content Moderation

How's that working for you?

Mark Zuckerberg made a lot of noise when he announced that Facebook was getting rid of “fact checkers.” The usual critics screeched that not correcting “misinformation” could be the end of democracy. Elon Musk said that Twitter would rely on “community notes” to reach the truth. I’m one of those official Community members. How’s it working, you ask? Well, it’s the hell of social networking but raised to another level.

Elon ad Social Security Numbers

Here’s a tweet from Elon (or part of it):

The first thing you discover as a big-time Community member is that everything that Musk or Trump or Vance says gets a “suggested Community Note.” There is a crew of left-wingers whose mission is apparently to “correct” everything they say.

Here are the two most recent “corrections.” There are 12 in all, but I won’t screenshot them all and you probably wouldn’t read them anyway.

The gist of most of the suggested Notes is: the Social Security Administration is aware of this problem, and, as one Note says:

“This problem has been known since at least 2015, and according to an audit carried out that year, only 13 of 6.5 million Americans appearing in the records as at least 112 years old were still getting Social Security benefits.”

Other people argue that having SS numbers for dead people could certainly lead to fraud. The SSA is afraid that removing them from the rolls could lead to denying benefits to someone who deserves them. Others say they should remove them anyway. And the argument rages on. Someone always says, “No Notes Needed. This is what Replies are for.”

This is boring.

Elon and Illegal Immigrants

Here’s another Elon tweet:

Here are first two proposed Community Notes:

There are three comments so far.

Trump

Naturally, anything President Trump says gets a Community Note. It’s like the 2024 campaign being litigated all over again!

There are seven posts about this. Here’s the first:

“Fact Checking”

Occasionally I do get a Notification like this:

OK, I did check that one out, and the Suggested Note was correct. But most of the “Suggested Notes” are nothing more than people disagreeing about a Tweet. And this backs up Zuckerberg’s getting rid of the “fact checking” industry: most of these “facts” are just matters of opinion, or plain old political hyperbole. That’s what Replies are for.

If you look at the View Count (an innovation Elon created) of a Reply, you see that almost no one sees the Replies. Maybe that should tell you that no one cares about the Community Notes, either, unless it’s something indisputable like “who is the CEO of Shopify?”