Venezuela: a stress test for the X fact-checking system

By: Alejandro Moreno

This text originally appeared in the Network of Experts on Democracy and Technology in alliance with La Silla Vacía.

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"Fostering hatred and facism" were the two reasons why last week Nicolás Maduro decided to suspend X's activity in his country for a period of ten days. Since July 29, the day of the presidential elections, the platform has been a scene of political dispute and direct confrontations between Maduro and Elon Musk.

The doubts about the electoral process, as well as the protests to which it has given rise, have also been the main test of effort in the region of the new collaborative system for dealing with disinformation in X: the Community Notes.

Last August 5, in the midst of his eagerness to show legitimacy, Maduro expressed in his X account his gratitude to the government of Mozambique for recognizing his "overwhelming electoral and popular victory". A note from the community, added at the bottom of Maduro's publication, lowered the volume of the president's affirmation and raised questions about the transparency of the process: "At the moment, the Venezuelan CNE has not published the signed voting records and therefore there are no verifiable results, nor has there been a due scrutiny process. In fact, the official CNE website remains inaccessible to the public".

This week, to the news that the Venezuelan Minister of Communications, Freddy Náñez, had assured that the voting records published by the opposition did not have metadata and therefore were edited, a note was added denying his statements. This, under the assertion that "metadata cleaning is a common practice in governments around the world as a cybersecurity strategy".

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The notes were not written by a fact-checking agency or X moderators, but by users of the platform who volunteer to check information from misleading or inaccurate posts.

This collaborative program was devised by Jack Dorsey - founder and CEO of the late Twitter - as a means of giving users the ability to add information that could clarify the context of a post. Under Musk's reign, the project took on its current name and, while still in the testing phase in many markets, it aims to be a global method of combating misinformation.

For a note to be visible, it is necessary that the contributors to this program rate it as useful. Those who participate in the voting must have different points of view, which in theory guarantees the impartiality of the note.

The model aims to address some of the limitations of the traditional fact-checking system, such as problems of scale, as naturally not all misleading posts on networks can rely on a fact-checking process. Moreover, at a time when trust in the media has declined and fact-checking agencies have come under attack for doing their job, it is possible that contextual notes aggregated by other users may come to have a better perception in the eyes of the audience.

However, in some cases the wording of the notes makes clear the biases or political opinions of those who produce them. A few months ago, we saw how a discussion about a law to regulate the Internet in the United States -which may indeed be problematic- was pointed out in a community note as a "Trojan horse for Internet censorship".

At times, the community notes do not really add context about the posts, or do so with little or convoluted rationale, as if the space became a way of tweeting with a certain level of authority. While some of the program's requirements seek to keep the notes objective and relevant, it should not be overlooked that, in the hands of its owner and main influencer, X has taken an overt ideological turn and has become, in Casey Newton's words, a political project.

In critical situations, such as the one Venezuela is going through, where the government has besieged the media and fact-checking agencies, social networks can be a window to access information vaccinated against official propaganda and disinformation. A few days ago, Musk himself, in his role as an opponent, proclaimed X as the main news application in Venezuela. It is precisely these tense situations that can demonstrate whether a model such as community notes fulfills its democratic and innovative potential, or whether it turns out to be the continuation of information contamination by other media.

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