Musk vows to ‘fix’ X after polls show high support for Ukraine’s Zelenskyy

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.

Rowing in behind Trump’s attacks on Zelenskyy on Thursday, Musk claimed that his social media platform’s “community notes” feature was being “gamed” by governments and traditional media.

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 canceled 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.”

Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches misinformation and disinformation, described Musk’s comments as “extremely concerning”.

“As is often the case with this kind of rhetoric, the accusations are a guide to what we have to look out for from the accuser – a world where private platforms like X can be systematically gamed to favour the political interests and alliances of their owners,” Graves told Al Jazeera.“A well-designed community notes system can be a useful check on misinformation. But that requires transparent rules that make it easy for users to surface reliable information, and that can’t be tweaked at the whim of one person.”