Pri BenganiDec 21, 2023

Collab’d with Jeff (@ProPublica) on this study looking at verified accounts on X posting false claims and growing their following significantly in the first month of the current Gaza conflict. In some cases, these accounts surpassed the following of regional news outlets covering the conflict.

https://www.propublica.org/article/x-verified-accounts-misinformation-israel-hamas-conflict

How Verified Accounts on X Thrive While Spreading Misinformation About the Israel-Hamas Conflict

With the gutting of content moderation initiatives at X, accounts with blue checks, once a sign of authenticity, are disseminating debunked claims and gaining more followers. Community Notes, X’s fact-checking system, hasn’t scaled sufficiently.

ProPublica
Show threadPri BenganiDec 21, 2023
Meanwhile, Community Notes is X's primary mechanism to improve information accuracy on the platform. As the team improves the product, our data reflects some of these improvements: we see the median time for a note to become visible decrease to 5 hours in the first week of November (it was seven hours before). Third-party fact-checkers might well take longer.
Show threadPri Bengani

However, ~80% of tweets in our convenience sample of 2000 tweets covering 200 debunked claims didn't have a visible Community Note — despite some of them promoting the same claims using the same media as already-debunked tweets (see screenshot of multiple accounts posting the same AI-generated image).

Media-matching is non-trivial and the Community Notes team has highlighted that they don't want to inadvertently match media that's “meaningfully different,” instead focusing on high
precision.

Dec 21, 2023 at 6:30pmWeb
Show threadPri BenganiDec 21, 2023
One of the interesting things is, X's website says that the presence of Community Notes on a tweet doesn't affect how it's displayed, while other platforms including Facebook & Instagram tend to downrank fact-checked posts to limit their reach. (4/4)