Did Elon Musk just unintentionally prove he’s a disinformation spreader while trying to do the exact opposite?

Elon Musk has been celebrating his reign of X by calling himself Irony Man as he disproves others by showing the irony of their statement, but now the twist of irony is appropriately on Irony Man himself.

Musk is proud to call X a free speech domain and, despite his critics, he sticks by this even as other social media outlets don’t follow in Musk’s footsteps, such as Bluesky, which has made recent headlines for banning conservative voices.

I will use the power of irony to defeat villains!

“Oh you call yourself “The Joker”, then why can’t you tell a joke! How ironic …” pic.twitter.com/6HZ1sLkBAj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2024

Mr. X is also proud of the fact that the community notes feature on his platform is proving to be extremely efficient.

For those unaware, community notes is a fact-checking aspect of X that is also used for adding context to a post that might help readers further understand it. The method used to determine if the post is factual or in need of more information relies on many users with knowledge of the topic and is only published if those many users agree, hence the “community” aspect of it.

Despite creating Bluesky, Jack Dorsey quietly resigned from the board earlier this year.

He saw them turning into Twitter 1.0 even though he funded the thing to be decentralized.

It's not. They can ban you easily, and we've seen whose getting the boot.https://t.co/8GA86GMtJA

— GIGABEAR (@GigabearPanda) November 23, 2024

In a desire to show he’s fair, and somewhat in response to a few users suggesting that he’s never community noted, Musk himself posted that very lie and, as intended, it succeeded in being community noted.

Yet, Irony Man must have fallen out of his tights when community notes added information to the post by showing that Musk has been corrected not once or twice but….89 times. In other words, community notes was forced to correct disinformation that Musk had shared or stated himself on 89 different occasions.

🚨ELON MUSK ON COMMUNITY NOTES:

"Community Notes is awesome. Everybody gets checked. Including me. All the community notes software is open source, and all the data. So you can recreate any given note independently. It's total absolute transparency in every way. The counter to… pic.twitter.com/EIIh5ZPJTC

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) November 4, 2024

Even worse, when Musk jokingly replied to himself, community notes added an entire log of Musk’s corrected posts.

Although some are just adding context, most are correcting disinformation. Perhaps Musk sharing such disinformation is partly motivated by trusting community notes, thus making him feel free to not fact-check his own info before posting.

I may have been Community Noted 70 times, but I have post 70 million times, so that’s only 1 in a million!

(My Community Note counter about to increment to 71 😂)

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 21, 2024

For instance, he has been corrected multiple times about his claim that there is no oversight for the financial aid sent to Ukraine by the United States. Notice I wrote, “multiple,” meaning that despite being corrected previously, he continues to push the narrative — and continues to be corrected.

Perhaps the funniest of all community notes in the log is when Musk replied to someone about farmers in Germany protesting over new agriculture policies. Musk claimed, “The news has been told not to cover it.” Community notes responded with 22 different articles showing that the news has indeed covered it, including the news in Germany.

Apple using the words “protect your privacy” while handing your data over to a third-party AI that they don’t understand and can’t themselves create is *not* protecting privacy at all!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 10, 2024

Such smacks of truth can prove embarrassing, especially for Musk, but he clearly hasn’t learned from posting reactionary messages. To be fair to him, it does also prove that community notes doesn’t discriminate, and many users — including those who have grown to express dislike over the platform — have praised community notes for being the best thing about it.

That being stated, if the best thing about your platform is the very active fact police on it, then perhaps the platform has bigger issues that will take more than fact checkers to fix. And you can community note that.