Harris-Walz Campaign Pushes Volunteers to Manipulate X’s Community Notes
The staffers want them to “block[community notes] we don’t like.”
The Federalist has investigated how VP Kamala Harris’s campaign pushes its volunteers to manipulate social media, making it appear that she is more popular and correct than she is.
The campaign uses a Discord server to tell its volunteers what to do and execute the plan.
The volunteers’ latest target is Elon Musk’s X platform to “block[community notes] we don’t like.”
Select users who signed up for the program could propose notes to be added to tweets showing that the information was wrong, misleading, or required important context. Other users can then read the proposed notes and vote on whether they are accurate or needed, and if the proposed notes get enough favorable votes, they get appended to the post permanently.
However, throughout this campaign Harris-Walz official accounts have been remarkable conduits for disinformation and have regularly provided dishonest presentations of the Trump-Vance campaign. The Harris campaign’s X accounts have been so bad that even CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, who has been very harsh on Trump for several years, wrote an entire column highlighting the errors and dishonesty.
Despite this, virtually none of the false and misleading tweets from Kamala Harris’ campaign have Community Notes appended to them. One likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the Harris campaign is directing volunteers on its Discord server to vote down Community Notes even when those notes accurately say the campaign is being deceptive.
The Federalist used a @KamalaHQ post claiming Trump called those who don’t support him “dangerous people.”
Democratic National Committee employee Timothy Durigan latched onto the community notes on the tweet, telling readers the account took the comments out of context.
The staffers also tell volunteers to propose false community notes for accounts connected to Republicans and Trump.
Is anyone shocked? Every post by @KamalaHQ infuriates me because it’s always wrong.
Musk said X started an investigation.
We are investigating this https://t.co/JR7gikRDxY
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 30, 2024
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Comments
You mean they are cheating? Impossible!
It’s good this has got Musks attention. It’s quite clear that pretty much EVERY post from Harris should have a community note attached to it highlighting “misinformation” 😂
You forgot the apostrophe on Musk. Just want to make sure I fully understand what you wrote. 😉
Apparently, the one thing the communists can’t do is to be honest.
Do you know what Kamala means in Hindi?
Hillary.
Fouad: “Is funnier in Finnish… because it’s true!”
In the social media industry, there are two schools of thought on social media platform moderation. In one school of thought, there’s a cabal – either internal or external – that is empowered by the social media company to police end-user posts. This is essentially what the former Executive Team of Twitter elected to adopt. There’s another school of thought – one that Musk seems to lean into – that the best moderation mechanism is the kind that is essentially crowd sourced from the entire user base. The ‘democratic’ process will largely find equilibrium and only censor posts that are truly obscene or threatening in a legally actionable way or laughably deceptive and/or fraudulent.
Honestly, both methods have upsides and downsides. But, the downside of the method Musk is developing seems far less oppressive and less exploitable by government. BUT, it’s also a bit more susceptible to being gamed by other bad actors…like the Harris Campaign is doing here. While Musk is in a tough spot, at least he seems to really be trying to get it right.
“another school of thought [is[ that the best moderation mechanism is the kind that is essentially crowd sourced from the entire user base.”
This is essentially what the former Executive of Wikipedia elected to adopt.
As you can see, they both come with their own catastrophic but inevitable failure modes.
she’s popular as ever with the low iq crowd