Elon Musk is arguing with his own Community Notes on X
Credit: Grzegorz Wajda/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images/X/Mashable composite
X’s Community Notes feature is a fact-checking tool that’s supposed to allow contributors to add context to “potentially misleading posts”. But on Sunday, the CEO himself was arguing with it publicly.
It started when Elon Musk shared a post moaning about his new laptop, which he said was forcing him to create a Microsoft account to use it.
“Just bought a new PC laptop and it won’t let me use it unless I create a Microsoft account, which also means giving their AI access to my computer!” wrote Musk. “This is messed up. There used to be an option to skip signing into or creating a Microsoft account.”
Soon, though, a Community Note had been added to the post saying he was wrong. “It is still possible to set-up the latest version of Windows without a Microsoft account,” read the note, which linked to a Windows 11 utility guide on process management platform process.st.
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Community Notes is supposed to work through crowdsourcing. Basically anyone who’s used X for more than six months, hasn’t recently broken its rules, and has a verified phone number can sign up to the program as a contributor.
“Contributors can leave notes on any post and if enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful, the note will be publicly shown on a post,” reads X’s official guidance.
Musk himself has praised Community Notes in the past, describing it as “awesome” and saying, “Our goal is to make Twitter the most accurate source of information on Earth, without regard to political affiliation.” He’s also been corrected by Notes in the past after sharing a screenshot of a fake CNN story. At the time, he said “they were right to add the label” to his post.
On Sunday, though, he was less impressed. “Community Notes is failing here,” he wrote in a reply to his original post. “This option no longer exists.”
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Somewhat amusingly, Musk’s reply has now received yet another Community Note.
“Yes it is,” reads the Note. “However, it’s not possible in the same, simple way it used to be on Windows 10 but rather requires some tricky workarounds that the average Andy might not be aware of.”
The Note then links to a recent forum discussion on how to bypass setting up a Microsoft account when installing Windows 11, with a number of users offering different solutions. Mashable has not independently verified if these methods are possible, but we’ve reached out to Microsoft and will update this story if we hear back.
Accuracy aside, Community Notes still has a problem with visibility. Given the time it takes for new Notes to appear on posts that are going viral, a Mashable investigation found that approved Notes will often only be seen by a relatively small number of X users who have seen the original post being corrected.
Sam Haysom is the Deputy UK Editor for Mashable. He covers entertainment and online culture, and writes horror fiction in his spare time.
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