X Uses Community Notes on Election Posts, but Misinformation Spreads

Less than an hour after President Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate for president on Sunday, users on X falsely claimed she was “ineligible” to run for office because her parents were not born in the United States.

The false assertion spread quickly. Under one post with the untrue claim about Ms. Harris, which was shared thousands of times and received nearly 137,000 views, another X user quickly added a warning that the post was wrong and that Ms. Harris was eligible to run as a U.S. citizen.

“Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California, USA,” the note said. “This makes her a natural born citizen. Eligible to run for President of the United States.”

But on dozens of other posts containing the same misinformation, no such corrections appeared.

Elon Musk has done away with most content moderation rules on X since buying the social network in 2022. He has instead relied on a program called Community Notes, which lets a group of users write fact-checking labels and vote on whether they are helpful. Those approved are added to misleading posts by an algorithm. X has determined that the program is sufficient to police most misinformation about the presidential election in November, two people familiar with the company’s plans said.

But Community Notes has been far from consistent. Even with a corrective label attached, misleading claims can spread across X, according to misinformation researchers. And because users from across the political spectrum have to agree on how to correct posts, some comments and fact checks about divisive topics never surface at all.

Nearly 8,000 fact checks have been drafted about immigration on Community Notes, but only 471 of them have been approved by users and made public on X, according to MediaWise, a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute. Only 4 percent of Community Notes about abortion have been made visible.