Meta · Elon Musk · TikTok · U.S. · The Atlantic Technology
Last weekend, Chaya Raichik, the popular right-wing influencer who goes by Libs of TikTok
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“In Minnesota, the USPS offices are inside mosques,” she wrote.
Key facts
- In 2020, the last national election when Trump was in the White House, the president’s claims that the election had been stolen gained traction on social media and helped fuel the Capitol
- NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation, found that 93 percent of false claims about the midterms on X failed to receive a Community Note
- President Trump has endorsed this crusade—he recently announced a $1 million bounty for voter-fraud tips that lead to a conviction
- Of the 37 viral false claims about the midterms identified by NewsGuard’s ongoing tracker, 22 started as X posts, and many of them spread to larger platforms from there
Summary
Last weekend, Chaya Raichik, the popular right-wing influencer who goes by Libs of TikTok, made an ominous claim to her nearly 5 million followers on X. What are they doing America.” She reshared a 28-minute-long video of a man circling a brick building in Plymouth, Minnesota, and accosting postal workers inside. Almost everything about Raichik’s post is misleading. In situations like this, X’s crowdsourced fact-checking feature, called “Community Notes,” is supposed to help correct the record. As of yesterday, the video had more than 1.7 million views. (Raichik did not respond to a request for comment.) Since Elon Musk bought X four years ago, the platform has been a petri dish for rumors and propaganda. Community Notes, which even some of Musk’s critics have praised as a worthwhile program, would seem to offer a bulwark against bogus claims of vote-rigging. If Tuesday and the days afterward bring widespread claims of rigged results, expect many of them to originate on X.
Since Musk embraced Community Notes on X, crowdsourced fact-checks have gone from a niche experiment to the default on social media.