Fact Check: Post on X Claiming [insert claim here] is True

Elon Musk's X Corp sued a startup on Tuesday after it sought to cancel X's Twitter trademarks so it can "bring Twitter back" as a new social media platform.

The civil trial in San Francisco centered on a class-action lawsuit filed just before Musk took control of Twitter, which he later renamed X. Jurors were asked to decide if two tweets and comments Musk made on a podcast in May 2022 amounted ...

Elon Musk, who has long had a fascination with the letter X, is taking another step in turning the social platform into an "everything app."

That's all been publicly known and widely reported on over the past two years. The material shared by Musk paints a more vivid picture of the scramble inside Twitter to figure out what to do — but does not fundamentally alter that picture. ... And it does not show any evidence that there was government involvement in the move to block the New York Post story, despite assertions by Musk and others.

They are only a handful of the many misleading diatribes and conspiracy theories that regularly appear on X. Not long ago, those two would not have been able to publish those posts through their accounts. Ms. Greene and Mr. Jones are among a large set of users who were barred from the site for spreading misinformation, inciting violence or otherwise violating its rules — and were reinstated after Elon Musk bought the platform, then known as Twitter, two years ago.

On Monday, Grok uncritically repeated debunked allegations of wrongdoing related to the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems. Grok produced a “story for you” titled “Public Scrutiny of Dominion Voting Systems,” which aggregated posts accusing the company of “election rigging” and “fraud.” Dominion has previously denounced similar accusations as lies, and last year Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion.

Just how much Musk had to learn about news was shown by this since-deleted tweet after the 7 October Hamas atrocities. The recommended sites were both quickly shown to have spread fake news and @WarMonitors had made antisemitic comments. In the following days, X was flooded with unverifiable content, which overwhelmed its new “community notes” feature, (in which an approved group of users adds fact-checked commentary to unreliable tweets).

Family name, INITIAL(S) (or organisation). Year. Full text of tweet. [X]. Day and month tweet posted. [Date accessed]. Available from: URL · View citation cribsheet

The data are wrong because, as Musk knows, the “Firehose” from which the data were collected reflects many Twitter accounts that are not included in mDAU and, at the same time and as Musk admits in footnote 2, does not reflect the majority of those accounts that are included in mDAU because those accounts, though logged in, are not Tweeting or taking other actions. Confirming the unreliability of Musk’s conclusion, he relies on an internet application called the “Botometer”—which applies different standards than Twitter does and which earlier this year designated Musk himself as highly likely to be a bot.