X's Community Notes Are Missing the Election Lies

X presents Community Notes as its defense against misinformation. Ahead of the November third midterms, NewsGuard tested whether that defense holds up. The media watchdog's Reality Check team identified twenty-seven false claims about the election that have gone viral this cycle, then examined one hundred eighty-nine X posts spreading them. Ninety-three point one percent of those posts had no Community Note attached.

The check ran on October nineteenth, using NewsGuard's False Claims Fingerprints database of provably false narratives. One hundred seventy-six of the one hundred eighty-nine posts carried no note. Those unflagged posts pushed twenty-three of the twenty-seven falsehoods NewsGuard tested. The team found Community Notes on just thirteen posts as of October twentieth, six point nine percent of the total, and those covered only four of the twenty-seven false claims.

The big posts that got no label

These were not fringe posts with a dozen views. Back in March, X user @SteveLovesAmmo claimed that longer voting hours for Democrats in Dallas County, Texas, were proof of widespread voter fraud. The post has pulled in more than two hundred seventy-two thousand views and eight thousand three hundred likes, NewsGuard reported, and seven months later it still had no Community Note. A county judge had extended the hours after a new rule kept Democrats and Republicans from voting at the same polling place, which sent plenty of voters to the wrong locations.

Conservative commentator Eric Daugherty posted on September twenty-seventh that New York and California made it illegal for officials to ask voters for identification. That post drew one hundred seventy-nine thousand views and five thousand seven hundred likes with no Community Note, and no such law exists in either state, according to NewsGuard. Sloppy claims cross party lines, too. In June, liberal user @LucasSa56947288 shared a doctored photo of a roadside billboard reading "Pedos ain't that bad. Keep Texas Red!" and presented it as a real Trump-Paxton billboard spotted in Texas. The post collected twenty-three thousand six hundred views and one thousand two hundred likes without a note, though the image originated in an anti-Trump Facebook group and its creator acknowledged it was fake.

Even the owner skips the check

X owner Elon Musk has spent years promoting Community Notes as the platform's answer to misinformation. The day before the 2024 general election, he told podcaster Joe Rogan that Community Notes were awesome and that everybody gets checked, including himself. NewsGuard's analysis suggests the checking skips some accounts. He advanced four of the false midterm claims himself, according to NewsGuard, despite having more than two hundred forty-one million followers on X, and none of those posts carried a Community Note.

Community Notes launched worldwide in December 2022 as a crowdsourced fact-check: users write notes on misleading posts and other users rate them, with the goal of adding context where it is missing. The concept has struggled before. NewsGuard's earlier analysis found that only thirty-two percent of posts spreading false narratives during the first week of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023 carried a Community Note. The new numbers are worse, and they land with the November third vote days away. X's press team did not respond to an emailed request for comment, NewsGuard said.

Why this matters for your feed

For younger voters, X is often where a claim breaks and where nobody checks it. Community Notes look like a backstop: a short correction, written by fellow users, sitting right under a sketchy post. NewsGuard's numbers say that backstop is mostly absent. Millions of interactions are stacking up on posts the platform's own system never touched, including claims that have been circulating for months.

Researchers keep finding the same pattern on the platform. According to our earlier reporting, bot networks have been amplifying election conspiracy theories on X through coordinated accounts. Fabricated media travels just as freely: a viral AI interview video recently fooled the internet with no correction attached.

Occasionally a false claim falls apart on its own, as one recent conspiracy rumor did when it collapsed in two days, according to our earlier reporting. But most of the posts in NewsGuard's sample just sat there, unflagged, collecting views. The full Reality Check analysis of Community Notes and the midterms puts the flag rate below one in fourteen, with voting already underway.