X

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DOGE staffer’s YouTube nickname accidentally revealed his teen hacking activity

A SpaceX and X engineer, Christopher Stanley—currently serving as a senior advisor in the Deputy Attorney General’s office at the Department of Justice (DOJ)—was reportedly caught bragging about hacking and distributing pirated e-books, bootleg software, and game cheats.

The boasts appeared on archived versions of websites, of which several, once flagged, were quickly deleted, Reuters reported.

Stanley was assigned to the DOJ by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While Musk claims that DOGE operates transparently, not much is known about who the staffers are or what their government roles entail. It remains unclear what Stanley does at DOJ, but Reuters noted that the Deputy Attorney General’s office is in charge of investigations into various crimes, “including hacking and other malicious cyber activity.” Declining to comment further, the DOJ did confirm that as a “special government employee,” like Musk, Stanley does not draw a government salary.

The engineer’s questionable past seemingly dates back to 2006, Reuters reported, when Stanley was still in high school. The news site connected Stanley to various sites and forums by tracing various pseudonyms he still uses, including Reneg4d3, a nickname he still uses on YouTube. The outlet then further verified the connection “by cross-referencing the sites’ registration data against his old email address and by matching Reneg4d3’s biographical data to Stanley’s.”

Among his earliest sites was one featuring a “crude sketch of a penis” called fkn-pwnd.com, where Stanley, at 15, bragged about “fucking up servers,” a now-deleted Internet Archive screenshot reportedly showed. Another, reneg4d3.com, was launched when he was 16. There, Stanley branded a competing messaging board “stupid noobs” after supposedly gaining admin access through an “easy exploit,” Reuters reported. On Bluesky, an account called “doge whisperer” alleges even more hacking activity, some of which appears to be corroborated by an IA screenshot of another site Stanley created, electonic.net (sic), which as of this writing can still be accessed.

DOGE staffer’s YouTube nickname accidentally revealed his teen hacking activity Read More »

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Even Trump may not be able to save Elon Musk from his old tweets

A loss in the investors’ and SEC’s suits could force Musk to disgorge any ill-gotten gains from the alleged scheme, estimated at $150 million, as well as potential civil penalties.

The SEC and Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) did not respond to Ars’ request to comment. Investors’ lawyers declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.

SEC purge may slow down probes

Under the Biden administration, the SEC alleged that “Musk’s violation resulted in substantial economic harm to investors selling Twitter common stock.” For the lead plaintiffs in the investors’ suit, the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System, the scheme allegedly robbed retirees of gains used to sustain their quality of life at a particularly vulnerable time.

Musk has continued to argue that his alleged $200 million in savings from the scheme was minimal compared to his $44 billion purchase price. But the alleged gains represent about two-thirds of the $290 million price the billionaire paid to support Trump’s election, which won Musk a senior advisor position in the Trump administration, CNBC reported. So it’s seemingly not an insignificant amount of money in the grand scheme.

Likely bending to Musk’s influence, one of Trump’s earliest moves after taking office, CNBC reported, was reversing a 15-year-old policy allowing the SEC director of enforcement to launch probes like the one Musk is currently battling. It allowed the Tesla probe, for example, to be launched just seven days after Musk’s allegedly problematic tweets, the SEC boasted in a 2020 press release.

Now, after Trump’s rule change, investigations must be approved by a vote of SEC commissioners. That will likely slow down probes that the SEC had previously promised years ago would only speed up over time in order to more swiftly protect investors.

SEC expected to reduce corporate fines

For Musk, the SEC has long been a thorn in his side. At least two top officials (1, 2) cited the Tesla settlement as a career highlight, with the agency seeming especially proud of thinking “creatively about appropriate remedies,” the 2020 press release said. Monitoring Musk’s tweets, the SEC said, blocked “potential harm to investors” and put control over Musk’s tweets into the SEC’s hands.

Even Trump may not be able to save Elon Musk from his old tweets Read More »

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UK online safety law Musk hates kicks in today, and so far, Trump can’t stop it

Enforcement of a first-of-its-kind United Kingdom law that Elon Musk wants Donald Trump to gut kicked in today, with potentially huge penalties possibly imminent for any Big Tech companies deemed non-compliant.

UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) forces tech companies to detect and remove dangerous online content, threatening fines of up to 10 percent of global turnover. In extreme cases, widely used platforms like Musk’s X could be shut down or executives even jailed if UK online safety regulator Ofcom determines there has been a particularly egregious violation.

Critics call it a censorship bill, listing over 130 “priority” offenses across 17 categories detailing what content platforms must remove. The list includes illegal content connected to terrorism, child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, illegal drugs, animal welfare, and other crimes. But it also broadly restricts content in legally gray areas, like posts considered “extreme pornography,” harassment, or controlling behavior.

Matthew Lesh, a public policy fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, told The Telegraph that “the idea that Elon Musk, or any social media executive, could be jailed for failing to remove enough content should send chills down the spine of anyone who cares about free speech.”

Musk has publicly signaled that he expects Trump to intervene, saying, “Thank goodness Donald Trump will be president just in time,” regarding the OSA’s enforcement starting in March, The Telegraph reported last month. The X owner has been battling UK regulators since last summer after resisting requests from the UK government to remove misinformation during riots considered the “worst unrest in England for more than a decade,” The Financial Times reported.

According to Musk, X was refusing to censor UK users. Attacking the OSA, Musk falsely claimed Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government was “releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts,” FT reported. Such a post, if seen as spreading misinformation potentially inciting violence, could be banned under the OSA, the FT suggested.

Trump’s UK deal may disappoint Musk

Musk hopes that Trump will strike a deal with the UK government to potentially water down the OSA.

UK online safety law Musk hates kicks in today, and so far, Trump can’t stop it Read More »

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Meta plans to test and tinker with X’s community notes algorithm

Meta also confirmed that it won’t be reducing visibility of misleading posts with community notes. That’s a change from the prior system, Meta noted, which had penalties associated with fact-checking.

According to Meta, X’s algorithm cannot be gamed, supposedly safeguarding “against organized campaigns” striving to manipulate notes and “influence what notes get published or what they say.” Meta claims it will rely on external research on community notes to avoid that pitfall, but as recently as last October, outside researchers had suggested that X’s Community Notes were easily sabotaged by toxic X users.

“We don’t expect this process to be perfect, but we’ll continue to improve as we learn,” Meta said.

Meta confirmed that the company plans to tweak X’s algorithm over time to develop its own version of community notes, which “may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated.”

In a post, X’s Support account said that X was “excited” that Meta was using its “well-established, academically studied program as a foundation” for its community notes.

Meta plans to test and tinker with X’s community notes algorithm Read More »

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X’s globe-trotting defense of ads on Nazi posts violates TOS, Media Matters says

“X conceded that depending on what content a user follows and how long they’ve had their account, they might see advertisements placed next to extremist content,” MMFA alleged.

As MMFA sees it, Musk is trying to blame the organization for ad losses spurred by his own decisions after taking over the platform—like cutting content moderation teams, de-amplifying hateful content instead of removing it, and bringing back banned users. Through the lawsuits, Musk allegedly wants to make MMFA pay “hundreds of millions of dollars in lost advertising revenue” simply because its report didn’t outline “what accounts Media Matters followed or how frequently it refreshed its screen,” MMFA argued, previously likening this to suing MMFA for scrolling on X.

MMFA has already spent millions to defend against X’s multiple lawsuits, their filing said, while consistently contesting X’s chosen venues. If X loses the fight in California, the platform would potentially owe damages from improperly filing litigation outside the venue agreed upon in its TOS.

“This proliferation of claims over a single course of conduct, in multiple jurisdictions, is abusive,” MMFA’s complaint said, noting that the organization has a hearing in Singapore next month and another in Dublin in May. And it “does more than simply drive up costs: It means that Media Matters cannot focus its time and resources to mounting the best possible defense in one forum and must instead fight back piecemeal,” which allegedly prejudices MMFA’s “ability to most effectively defend itself.”

“Media Matters should not have to defend against attempts by X to hale Media Matters into court in foreign jurisdictions when the parties already agreed on the appropriate forum for any dispute related to X’s services,” MMFA’s complaint said. “That is—this Court.”

X still recovering from ad boycott

Although X CEO Linda Yaccarino started 2025 by signaling the X ad boycott was over, Ars found that external data did not support that conclusion. More recently, Business Insider cited independent data sources last month who similarly concluded that while X’s advertiser pool seemed to be increasing, its ad revenue was still “far” from where Twitter was prior to Musk’s takeover.

X’s globe-trotting defense of ads on Nazi posts violates TOS, Media Matters says Read More »

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Elon Musk blames X outages on “massive cyberattack”

After DownDetector reported that tens of thousands of users globally experienced repeated X (formerly Twitter) outages, Elon Musk confirmed the issues are due to an ongoing cyberattack on the platform.

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk wrote on X. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved.”

Details remain vague beyond Musk’s post, but rumors were circulating that X was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack.

X’s official support channel, which has been dormant since August, has so far remained silent on the outage, but one user asked Grok—X’s chatbot that provides AI summaries of news—what was going on, and the chatbot echoed suspicions about the DDOS attack while raising other theories.

“Over 40,000 users reported issues, with the platform struggling to load globally,” Grok said. “No clear motive yet, but some speculate it’s political since X is the only target. Outages hit hard in the US, Switzerland, and beyond.”

As X goes down, users cry for Twitter

It has been almost two years since Elon Musk declared that Twitter “no longer exists,” haphazardly rushing to rebrand his social media company as X despite critics warning that users wouldn’t easily abandon the Twitter brand.

Fast-forward to today, and Musk got a reminder that his efforts to kill off the Twitter brand never really caught on with a large chunk of his platform.

Elon Musk blames X outages on “massive cyberattack” Read More »

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Elon Musk to “fix” Community Notes after they contradict Trump

Elon Musk apparently no longer believes that crowdsourcing fact-checking through Community Notes can never be manipulated and is, thus, the best way to correct bad posts on his social media platform X.

Community Notes are supposed to be added to posts to limit misinformation spread after a broad consensus is reached among X users with diverse viewpoints on what corrections are needed. But Musk now claims a “fix” is needed to prevent supposedly outside influencers from allegedly gaming the system.

“Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media,” Musk wrote on X. “Working to fix this.”

Musk’s announcement came after Community Notes were added to X posts discussing a poll generating favorable ratings for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That poll was conducted by a private Ukrainian company in partnership with a state university whose supervisory board was appointed by the Ukrainian government, creating what Musk seems to view as a conflict of interest.

Although other independent polling recently documented a similar increase in Zelenskyy’s approval rating, NBC News reported, the specific poll cited in X notes contradicted Donald Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy is unpopular, and Musk seemed to expect X notes should instead be providing context to defend Trump’s viewpoint. Musk even suggested that by pointing to the supposedly government-linked poll in Community Notes, X users were spreading misinformation.

“It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky[y]-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!” Musk wrote on X.

Musk’s attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren’t “perfect,” he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X “by far the best source of truth on Earth.” At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are “good for the world.”

Yaccarino invited audience members to “think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time,” but just one month later, Musk is suddenly casting doubts on that characterization while the European Union continues to probe X.

Perhaps most significantly, Musk previously insisted as recently as last year that Community Notes could not be manipulated, even by Musk. He strongly disputed a 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that claimed that toxic X users were downranking accurate notes that they personally disagreed with, claiming any attempt at gaming Community Notes would stick out like a “neon sore thumb.”

Elon Musk to “fix” Community Notes after they contradict Trump Read More »

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X is reportedly blocking links to secure Signal contact pages

X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, is seemingly blocking links to Signal, the encrypted messaging platform, according to journalist Matt Binder and other firsthand accounts.

Binder wrote in his Disruptionist newsletter Sunday that links to Signal.me, a domain that offers a way to connect directly to Signal users, are blocked on public posts, direct messages, and profile pages. Error messages—including “Message not sent,” “Something went wrong,” and profiles tagged as “considered malware” or “potentially harmful”—give no direct suggestion of a block. But posts on X, reporting at The Verge, and other sources suggest that Signal.me links are broadly banned.

Signal.me links that were already posted on X prior to the recent change now show a “Warning: this link may be unsafe” interstitial page rather than opening the link directly. Links to Signal handles and the Signal homepage are still functioning on X.

Binder, a former Mashable reporter who was once blocked by X (then Twitter) for reporting on owner Elon Musk and accounts related to his private jet travel, credited the first reports to an X post by security research firm Mysk.

X is reportedly blocking links to secure Signal contact pages Read More »

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European Union orders X to hand over algorithm documents

Earlier in the week, Germany’s defence ministry and foreign ministry said they were suspending their activity on X, with the defence ministry saying it had become increasingly “unhappy” with the platform.

When asked if the expanded probe was a response to a discussion Musk conducted last week with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, in which she was given free rein to promote her party’s platform and make false claims about Adolf Hitler, a Commission spokesperson said the new request helped “us monitor systems around all these events taking place.”

However, he said it was “completely independent of any political considerations or any specific events.”

“We are committed to ensuring that every platform operating in the EU respects our legislation, which aims to make the online environment fair, safe, and democratic for all European citizens,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s digital chief.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Commission had been under recent political pressure to be tough on Musk’s X ahead of the Weidel interview.

Last week Damian Boeselager, member of the European parliament, wrote to Virkkunnen to demand a probe into whether the social media platform’s use of algorithms met the EU’s transparency requirements.

“There are allegations that Musk is boosting his own tweets,” Boeselager told the Financial Times last week. “The guy can be crazy but it is unfair if he’s amplifying who must listen to him.”

This story was updated shortly after publication with additional details.

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

European Union orders X to hand over algorithm documents Read More »

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X CEO signals ad boycott is over. External data paints a different picture.

When X CEO Linda Yaccarino took the stage as a keynote speaker at CES 2025, she revealed that “90 percent of the advertisers” who boycotted X over brand safety concerns since Elon Musk’s 2022 Twitter acquisition “are back on X.”

Yaccarino did not go into any further detail to back up the data point, and X did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.

But Yaccarino’s statistic seemed to bolster claims that X had made since Donald Trump’s re-election that advertisers were flocking back to the platform, with some outlets reporting that brands hoped to win Musk’s favor in light of his perceived influence over Trump by increasing spending on X.

However, it remains hard to gauge how impactful this seemingly significant number of advertisers returning will be in terms of spiking X’s value, which fell by as much as 72 percent after Musk’s Twitter takeover. And X’s internal data doesn’t seem to completely sync up with data from marketing intelligence firm Sensor Tower, suggesting that more context may be needed to understand if X’s financial woes may potentially be easing up in 2025.

Before the presidential election, Sensor Tower previously told Ars that “72 out of the top 100 spending US advertisers” on Twitter/X from October 2022 had “ceased spending on the platform as of September 2024.” This was up from 50 advertisers who had stopped spending on Twitter/X in October 2023, about a year after Musk’s acquisition, suggesting that the boycott had seemingly only gotten worse.

Shortly after the election, AdWeek reported that big brands, including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment, had resumed advertising on X. But by the end of 2024, Sensor Tower told Ars that X still had seemingly not succeeded in wooing back many of pre-acquisition Twitter’s top spenders, making Yaccarino’s claim that “90 percent of advertisers are back on X” somewhat harder to understand.

X CEO signals ad boycott is over. External data paints a different picture. Read More »

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Crypto scammers posing as real brands on X are easily hacking YouTubers

“I’m fighting with Google now,” Townsend told Ars. “I don’t expect any real answers from them.”

How YouTubers can avoid being targeted

As YouTube appears evasive, Townsend has been grateful for long-time subscribers commenting to show support, which may help get his videos amplified more by the algorithm. On YouTube, he also said that because “the outpouring of support was beyond anything” he could’ve expected, it kept him “sane” through sometimes 24-hour periods of silence without any updates on when his account would be restored.

Townsend told Ars that he rarely does sponsorships, but like many in the fighting game community, his inbox gets spammed with offers constantly, much of which he assumes are scams.

“If you are a YouTuber of any size,” Townsend explained in his YouTube video, “you are inundated with this stuff constantly,” so “my BS detector is like, okay, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. But this one just, it looked real enough, like they had their own social media presence, lots of followers. Everything looked real.”

Brian_F echoed that in his video, which breaks down how the latest scam evolved from more obvious scams, tricking even skeptical YouTubers who have years of experience dodging phishing scams in their inboxes.

“The game has changed,” Brian_F said.

Townsend told Ars that sponsorships are rare in the fighting game community. YouTubers are used to carefully scanning supposed offers to weed out the real ones from the fakes. But Brian_F’s video pointed out that scammers copy/paste legitimate offer letters, so it’s already hard to distinguish between potential sources of income and cleverly masked phishing attacks using sponsorships as lures.

Part of the vetting process includes verifying links without clicking through and verifying identities of people submitting supposed offers. But if YouTubers are provided with legitimate links early on, receiving offers from brands they really like, and see that contacts match detailed LinkedIn profiles of authentic employees who market the brand, it’s much harder to detect a fake sponsorship offer without as many obvious red flags.

Crypto scammers posing as real brands on X are easily hacking YouTubers Read More »

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Toxic X users sabotage Community Notes that could derail disinfo, report says


It’s easy for biased users to bury accurate Community Notes, report says.

What’s the point of recruiting hundreds of thousands of X users to fact-check misleading posts before they go viral if those users’ accurate Community Notes are never displayed?

That’s the question the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is asking after digging through a million notes in a public X dataset to find out how many misleading claims spreading widely on X about the US election weren’t quickly fact-checked.

In a report, the CCDH flagged 283 misleading X posts fueling election disinformation spread this year that never displayed a Community Note. Of these, 74 percent were found to have accurate notes proposed but ultimately never displayed—apparently due to toxic X users gaming Community Notes to hide information they politically disagree with.

On X, Community Notes are only displayed if a broad spectrum of X users with diverse viewpoints agree that the post is “helpful.” But the CCDH found that it’s seemingly easy to hide an accurate note that challenges a user’s bias by simply refusing to rate it or downranking it into oblivion.

“The problem is that for a Community Note to be shown, it requires consensus, and on polarizing issues, that consensus is rarely reached,” the CCDH’s report said. “As a result, Community Notes fail precisely where they are needed most.”

Among the most-viewed misleading claims where X failed to add accurate notes were posts spreading lies that “welfare offices in 49 states are handing out voter registration applications to illegal aliens,” the Democratic party is importing voters, most states don’t require ID to vote, and both electronic and mail-in voting are “too risky.”

These unchecked claims were viewed by tens of millions of users, the CCDH found.

One false narrative—that Dems import voters—was amplified in a post from Elon Musk that got 51 million views. In the background, proposed notes sought to correct the disinformation by noting that “lawful permanent residents (green card holders)” cannot vote in US elections until they’re granted citizenship after living in the US for five years. But even these seemingly straightforward citations to government resources did not pass muster for users politically motivated to hide the note.

This appears to be a common pattern on X, the CCDH suggested, and Musk is seemingly a multiplier. In July, the CCDH reported that Musk’s misleading posts about the 2024 election in particular were viewed more than a billion times without any notes ever added.

The majority of the misleading claims in the CCDH’s report seemed to come from conservative users. But X also failed to check a claim that Donald Trump “is no longer eligible to run for president and must drop out of the race immediately.” Posts spreading that false claim got 1.4 million views, the CCDH reported, and that content moderation misstep could potentially have risked negatively impacting Trump’s voter turnout at a time when Musk is campaigning for Trump.

Musk has claimed that while Community Notes will probably never be “perfect,” the fact-checking effort aspires to “be by far the best source of truth on Earth.” The CCDH has alleged that, actually, “most Community Notes are never seen by users, allowing misinformation to spread unchecked.”

Even X’s own numbers on notes seem low

On the Community Notes X account, X acknowledges that “speed is key to notes’ effectiveness—the faster they appear, the more people see them, and the greater effect they have.”

On the day before the CCDH report dropped, X announced that “lightning notes” have been introduced to deliver fact-checks in as little as 15 minutes after a misleading post is written.

“Ludicrously fast? Now reality!” X proclaimed.

Currently, more than 800,000 X users contribute to Community Notes, and with the lightning notes update, X can calculate their scores more quickly. That efficiency, X said, will either spike the amount of content removals or reduce sharing of false or misleading posts.

But while X insists Community Notes are working faster than ever to reduce harmful content spreading, the number of rapidly noted posts that X reports seems low. On a platform with an estimated 429 million daily active users worldwide, only about 400 notes were displayed within the past two weeks in less than an hour of a post going live. For notes that took longer—which the CCDH suggested is the majority if the fact-check is on a controversial topic—only about 60 more notes were displayed in more than an hour.

In July, an international NGO that monitors human rights abuses and corruption, Global Witness, found 45 “bot-like accounts that collectively produced around 610,000 posts” in a two-month period this summer on X, “amplifying racist and sexualized abuse, conspiracy theories, and climate disinformation” ahead of the UK general election.

Those accounts “posted prolifically during the UK general election,” then moved “to rapidly respond to emerging new topics amplifying divisive content,” including the US presidential race.

The CCDH reported that even when misleading posts get fact-checked, the original posts on average are viewed 13 times more than the note is seen, suggesting the majority of damage is done in the time before the note is posted.

Of course, content moderators are often called out for moving too slowly to remove harmful content, a Bloomberg opinion piece praising Community Notes earlier this year noted. That piece pointed to studies showing that “crowdsourcing worked just as well” as professional fact checkers “when assessing the accuracy of news stories,” concluding that “it may be impossible for any social media company to keep up, which is why it’s important to explore other approaches.”

X has said that it’s “common to see Community Notes appearing days faster than traditional fact checks,” while promising that more changes are coming to get notes ranked as “helpful” more quickly.

X risks becoming an echo chamber, data shows

Data that the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower recently shared with Ars offers a potential clue as to why the CCDH is seeing so many accurate notes that are never voted as “helpful.”

According to Sensor Tower’s estimates, global daily active users on X are down by 28 percent in September 2024, compared to October 2022 when Elon Musk took over Twitter. While many users have fled the platform, those who remained are seemingly more engaged than ever—with global engagement up by 8 percent in the same time period. (Rivals like TikTok and Facebook saw much lower growth, up by 3 and 1 percent, respectively.)

This paints a picture of X risking becoming an echo chamber, as loyal users engage more with the platform where misleading posts can seemingly easily go unchecked and buried notes potentially warp discussion in Musk’s “digital town square.”

When Musk initially bought Twitter, one of his earliest moves was to make drastic cuts to the trust and safety teams chiefly responsible for content-moderation decisions. He then expanded the role of Twitter’s Community Notes to substitute for trust and safety team efforts, where before Community Notes was viewed as merely complementary to broader monitoring.

The CCDH says that was a mistake and that the best way to ensure that X is safe for users is to build back X’s trust and safety teams.

“Our social media feeds have no neutral ‘town square’ for rational debate,” the CCDH report said. “In reality, it is messy, complicated, and opaque rules and systems make it impossible for all voices to be heard. Without checks and balances, proper oversight, and well-resourced trust and safety teams in place, X cannot rely on Community Notes to keep X safe.”

More transparency is needed on Community Notes

X and the CCDH have long clashed, with X unsuccessfully suing to seemingly silence the CCDH’s reporting on hate speech on X, which X claimed caused tens of millions in advertising losses. During that legal battle, the CCDH called Musk a “thin-skinned tyrant” who could not tolerate independent research on his platform. And a federal judge agreed that X was clearly suing to “punish” and censor the CCDH, dismissing X’s lawsuit last March.

Since then, the CCDH has resumed its reporting on X. In the most recent report, the CCDH urged that X needed to be more transparent about Community Notes, arguing that “researchers must be able to freely, without intimidation, study how disinformation and unchecked claims spread across platforms.”

The research group also recommended remedies, including continuing to advise that advertisers “evaluate whether their budgets are funding the misleading election claims identified in this report.”

That could lead brands to continue withholding spending on X, which is seemingly already happening. Sensor Tower estimated that “72 out of the top 100 spending US advertisers on X from October 2022 have ceased spending on the platform as of September 2024.” And compared to the first half of 2022, X’s ad revenue from the top 100 advertisers during the first half of 2024 was down 68 percent.

Most drastically, the CCDH recommended that US lawmakers reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act “to provide an avenue for accountability” by mandating risk assessments of social media platforms. That would “expose the risk posed by disinformation” and enable lawmakers to “prescribe possible mitigation measures including a comprehensive moderation strategy.”

Globally, the CCDH noted, some regulators have the power to investigate the claims in the CCDH’s report, including the European Commission under the Digital Services Act and the UK’s Ofcom under the Online Safety Act.

“X and social media companies as an industry have been able to avoid taking responsibility,” the CCDH’s report said, offering only “unreliable self-regulation.” Apps like X “thus invent inadequate systems like Community Notes because there is no legal mechanism to hold them accountable for their harms,” the CCDH’s report warned.

Perhaps Musk will be open to the CCDH’s suggestions. In the past, Musk has said that “suggestions for improving Community Notes are… always… much appreciated.”

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Toxic X users sabotage Community Notes that could derail disinfo, report says Read More »