Billionaire Elon Musk pitches X as both a haven for free speech and a superior alternative to the mainstream media for keeping up with news and politics. Under his ownership, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter has pulled back on policing misinformation, relying instead on the wisdom of the crowd to debunk falsehoods.
Musk’s critics say that approach benefits the political right, with which Musk increasingly identifies. Under Twitter’s former management, conservatives often complained that the site was more likely to deem content they shared as misinformation than that from liberals.
This week a pair of falsehoods that originated and gained traction on X mostly among left-leaning users provided a reminder that online misinformation can come from anywhere in the political spectrum — and tested Musk’s commitment to letting users decide the truth for themselves.
The first one started as an absurdist joke. A pseudonymous X user with a modest following, whose account has since turned private, referred Wednesday to a nonexistent passage in Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which Vance admits to attempting to have sex with a couch. (The post used cruder terms.) The joke spread, gradually at first and then to millions, ultimately reaching many who either didn’t realize or didn’t care that Vance’s book contains no such passage.
An online Associated Press post that purported to debunk the claim served more to fan the flames than douse them. On Thursday, the AP retracted its fact check, drawing a fresh round of attention to the bogus post. Pointing out that it would be unfair to mentally associate Vance with couches became a bit like telling someone not to think of an elephant.
Crusaders against online misinformation tend to assume that everyone who likes or shares it must believe it. But the Vance episode illustrates a nuance crucial to understanding why even fantastical falsehoods can flourish online: Often, the people circulating them don’t care whether they’re true. They just find them funny or effective as a way to embarrass the other side.
A second falsehood that surfaced on Wednesday appears to have been a more classic hoax. Several X users posted screenshots of what they claimed was leaked, internal software code showing that the site had granted certain accounts special permission to post racial slurs. The fake list of accounts included those of Musk, Donald Trump and numerous other conservatives.
Both X and Okta, the cloud software company whose services X was supposedly using to whitelist Musk and other users, said the code was not authentic.
As of Thursday evening, the dubious story had found no traction in major U.S. media. Yet like the Vance smear, the screenshots were viewed by millions on X, while debunkings were few and far between.
One of Musk’s stated aims for X is to bring about a world in which the “legacy media” are supplanted by “citizen journalists” posting directly to his platform. The agenda dovetails with the efforts of Trump, whom Musk has endorsed for president, to discredit what he calls the “fake news media.”
Musk has often touted an X feature called Community Notes, which enlists the site’s own users to propose notes that fact-check or add context to a given post, as a swifter and surer source of truth than professional journalism or content moderation. But as the bogus whitelist for racial slurs circulated on Wednesday, it became clear that X was not about to leave this case to the amateurs.
Within hours, one of the first accounts that posted it was suspended — a response so rare and heavy-handed that some users took it as a sign the leaks must be real. By Thursday, posts containing the screenshots had been tagged by X with warning labels suggesting that they had violated the site’s policy on manipulated media. The company told The Washington Post it had suspended a few accounts that had shared the images, citing its rules against trying to evade a ban.
As of Thursday evening, few — if any — of the most popular X posts circulating either the Vance rumor or the false code leak appeared to have been labeled with Community Notes.
In rolling back content moderation at X and throttling links to media websites, Musk has made the site more freewheeling than ever — and more welcoming of hoaxes, baseless claims and conspiracy theories. So far, that trend has been largely welcomed by the right and decried by the left, who continue to be targeted by false claims on the site, including a fresh wave this week aimed at Kamala Harris.
But this week’s hoaxes show that liberals too share falsehoods, and conservatives aren’t immune from their consequences. When it comes to correcting the record, neither side can rely on much help from X — unless the misinformation happens to target the site or its owner personally.