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Elon Musk has pledged to “fix” X’s fact-checking tool following the release of polling contradicting United States President Donald Trump’s claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is deeply unpopular in his country. Musk made the claim while amplifying an anonymous right-wing X account that questioned the credibility of a widely cited Ukrainian polling outfit because of its work with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being effectively dismantled under the billionaire’s cost-cutting drive.
“If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election. He knows he would lose in a landslide, despite having seized control of ALL Ukrainian media, so he cancelled the election,” Musk said on X, while sharing the unsubstantiated claim that US intelligence agencies estimate Zelenskyy’s approval to be just 4 percent. “In reality, he is despised by the people of Ukraine, which is why he has refused to hold an election,” Musk said, referring to Zelenskyy’s decision to suspend elections after declaring martial law in the wake of Moscow’s 2022 invasion.
“I challenge Zelensky to hold an election and refute this. He will not.”
Musk, one of Trump’s most powerful allies as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), did not provide evidence of manipulation of X’s community notes system, which attaches explanatory notes to contentious posts based on the consensus of users. The Tesla CEO, who later on Thursday appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference waving a chainsaw in homage to Argentina’s cost-cutting president Javier Milei, also did not substantiate a claim that widely reported polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology was “Zelensky-controlled” and “not credible.”
“I think there’s a strong chance that X/Twitter becomes a propaganda arm for Musk/Trump – and, in fact, it’s already happening,” Gordon Pennycook, a professor of psychology at Cornell University who studies misinformation, told Al Jazeera. “I think Musk wants to reform community notes because he doesn’t like being corrected, as is typical for authoritarian oligarchs.”
Twitter and TikTok need to be banned in Europe.
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