Twitter’s ‘Community Notes’ — a system which allows “fact checks” to be added beneath some tweets — are being weaponized in the run-up to the Republican presidential primary, with some users even having opinions fact-checked under the guise of adding ‘context.’
The outgoing CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, initially introduced Community Notes “to create a better informed world by empowering people on Twitter to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading Tweets.”
The function has quickly begun to operate as a means of fact-checking posts that partisan readers disapprove of, whether inaccurate or not. One such example involves the “Trump War Room” account’s assertion that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis kept businesses closed until September 2020.
Notably, DeSantis lifted COVID restrictions on business, including bars and restaurants, in September 2020, as reported by Reuters at the time, yet Community Notes was quick to “add context,” which, in turn, implied the claim was false.
Another example concerns Chris Pavlovski, CEO of video platform Rumble, who was subjected to a Community Note after arguing:
“Community Notes on Twitter is a really bad idea. It’s a fancy word for fact checking, which will eventually be gamed, hijacked and/or cause more harm than good.”
Despite Pavlovski merely opining on the subject, Community Notes “added context” about the tweet. This encouraged another Republican primary hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy, to tweet his fear that opinions becoming tagged by Community notes “is more eerie and Orwellian than what you’d expect from a “free speech platform.”
The Notes system is reliant on users, particular those who register, to add “fact checks” to tweets, which they are then circulating to friends to vote up. This adds a Note to a tweet, and is being used to try to deflect from criticism of their preferred candidate.
To date, the DeSantis campaign appears to be mass weaponising the system in the style of corporate media “fact checkers” in order to save their candidate from online criticism.
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