Random rebuttal

Elon Musk is wrecking political Twitter, but not in the way you think

Rishi Sunak is interested in Twitter’s community notes feature. He asked Elon Musk about the reasoning behind it when he interviewed him at the end of the AI summit last year. As Musk explained, “The idea behind community notes is… consensus driven approach to truth. How do we make things the least amount untrue? You can say you can’t perhaps get to pure truth, but you can aspire to be more truthful. The thing about community notes is it doesn’t actually delete anything. It simply adds context.”

You can watch the exchange here:

If you can’t be bothered to watch the whole exchange, it can be summed up in this short transcript of part of the conversation:

Elon Musk: People don’t always like the truth.

Rishi Sunak: No.

Elon Musk: Not always.

Rishi Sunak: Yeah.

In November, Rishi Sunak didn’t know much about community notes. Well, he knows all about them now.¹ At the time of writing, Sunak has tweeted 19 times (excluding retweets) since the start of 2024, and of those 19 tweets, five - more than a quarter - now have community notes attached to them. Sunak’s own tweets now carry additional information questioning his claim to have cleared the asylum backlog, pointing out that halving inflation is the responsibility of the Bank of England not the Government, arguing that taxes have not in fact been cut, arguing again that taxes have not in fact been cut, and flagging that a website promoted by Sunak which offers to “calculate your savings from our tax cut” is in fact “merely a form designed to harvest email addresses for a spam campaign once the General Election is called”.

How it started:

How it’s going:

It isn’t just Sunak. A tweet from HM Treasury about the National Insurance cut was community noted to point out that the tax burden is at a post-war high, and the same thing happened to a tweet about the tax cut from the Conservative Party’s own Twitter account.

On one level, this is quite funny. The Tories, you might think, are bang to rights: they have tweeted misleading content, and they are being held to account. Tough.

On the other hand, it’s bad. Not just because community notes are almost invariably annoying even when they’re right and applied to people you don’t like. But because it’s bad news for anyone who uses social media for political communication - which is to say, for every politician and every political party, as well as for a range of other campaigners and campaigning organisations. Everyone who works on producing party political content on Twitter now needs to worry about the risk of getting community noted - something which it may well be impossible to avoid entirely.

For a politician or party, getting a community note attached to a tweet is very bad news indeed. The point of tweeting anything in the first place is to get your message across, and give your supporters something to share so that they can help you get your message across. People can take issue with it, of course, and they often do. But the message stands. Unless you get a community note. Then, it’s worse than not having tweeted in the first place.

That’s because even though community notes are presented as “Readers added context they thought people might want to know”, they are widely received as authoritative, definitive factchecks or rulings on a tweet’s reliability. You can tell they are seen as authoritative from the way community noted tweets get widely shared by people who want to gloat at the community notes.

It’s all very well when this happens to tweets that are unequivocal lies - I wrote last month about one Conservative tweet that had a community note attached to it because it was straightforwardly untrue. But some of this “added context” is to tweets which don’t seem to me to cross a line, and which fall comfortably inside what political parties expect to be allowed to say.

Take, for example, Sunak’s tweet in the screenshot above saying that the Government has cut taxes and put £450 into the pocket of the average worker. Under the Conservatives, the tax burden really has gone up in recent years - an argument which their opponents, and anyone else, have every right to make. But the cut in NICs really is a tax cut, it really does make its recipients better off than they would have been without it, and it really is fair enough for the Conservatives to want to talk about it. Their tax cut claim is, for me, a legitimate political claim that falls within the normal range of legitimate political claims that can be made and can be argued against. One of my jobs when I worked for the Labour Party policy team was to sign off posts from the social media team to make sure they were accurate and defensible. If I’d been doing the equivalent job for the Tories, I’m sure I would have signed this one off.

The argument that the Tory claim is misleading is one I’d expect Labour to be making - and they are, with graphics like these (I’d have signed these off too):

I like these Labour messages. But they are less effective than a community note, because a community note has the credibility that comes from looking non-partisan and authoritative. And that worries me, because community notes are flawed.² If the bar for what gets called out and what context is added is too low - and it is - then the risk is that community notes become a place for partisan point-scoring. I like partisan point-scoring, but there’s plenty of places to do it on Twitter already without importing it to what’s dressed up as a tool for tackling misinformation.

I don’t think any political party is in a position to reasonably predict what will and what won’t be community noted, which means that we can expect to see plenty more tweets that end up backfiring as badly as five of Rishi Sunak’s have already in this election year. It may well be, as Guido Fawkes claims, that community notes on party political tweets overwhelmingly attack the Tories while letting Labour off the hook. But there’s no reason to assume that will always be the case. There is no reason at all why any legitimate or defensible claim Labour wants to make about its own policy couldn’t be undermined by a community note that points out “context” - because there is always context. And in any case, we can’t defend a bad system on the basis that, so far, it’s mostly the other side who are being hurt by it.

Context is for other tweets, and other parties, and other people, to provide. If it isn’t an outright lie, community notes should leave it alone.

Accidental dog-whistles

Rob Hutton, sketchwriter of The Critic and friend of this Substack, posted on Twitter this week that he expected me to use Dividing Lines to explain a minor and tedious controversy about whether Keir Starmer’s attack on Rishi Sunak at PMQs as “a Prime Minister who just doesn’t get Britain” was a dog-whistle racist attack. As Rob put it, “attacks work best when they have a basic plausibility. ‘Rishi Sunak doesn’t know the price of a pint of milk’, for instance, feels plausible. ‘Keir Starmer used PMQs to deliver racist taunts’, not so much.” 

Rob is right, and now that he has explained it I don’t have to write a post about it. I will add one thing, though. I don’t believe for a second that it was intended as a racist attack, for obvious reasons. But I winced when I heard it, because it was immediately obvious that it opened up the “Keir Starmer made a racist attack” box. “[Person of minority ethnic background] just doesn’t get Britain” is the kind of thing some racists would say, even if there are people of minority ethnic background who for various reasons unrelated to race can reasonably be criticised for being out of touch. Given that Labour did not want to be spending even a second defending Starmer from charges of racism, and given that they should have been able to predict that this - obviously scripted - form of words would force them to do so (as I say, I winced), he shouldn’t have said it. Part of politics is about pre-empting and avoiding avoidable rows you don’t want to have, and this was a failure of bombproofing.

One of the biggest insights you can get from being on Twitter is a proper awareness of your own insignificance in the grand scheme of things, and also of an important asymmetry: if you tweet things, people sometimes notice you’re there, but if you don’t tweet things, nobody notices you’re not - nobody is waiting for you to post anything. I’m assuming the same is true of Substack, which is a long-winded way of saying that this is my first post in over a week, the longest break between posts since I started, largely because I’ve been busy at work but also because I’ve had about three different ideas for posts and so it took me a long time to settle on one. But as I say: I don’t think you noticed.

This doesn’t matter because this Substack is free. I emphasise this because one Substack feature I wasn’t aware of when I signed up is that people can pledge to give you money even if you haven’t turned on paid subscriptions. To my surprise, some people have done this. I haven’t turned on paid subscriptions because I don’t want to, and so nobody who has pledged to give me money has actually given me any money, which is fine by me. But I want to emphasise that I have no intention of charging for this Substack, and there will be no additional content for paid subscribers. This is not my livelihood. For some people on Substack, it is, and if you like their writing you should send your paid subscriptions their way not my way. (The caveat to this is that if I lose my job, for example for posting too much, I reserve the right to turn on paid subscriptions.) Anyway, do subscribe. Pledge me money if you like. But don’t expect anything you couldn’t get for free.

1. He probably doesn’t really - I doubt very much that Rishi Sunak is responsible for his own Twitter account or looks at it very often.

2. The community note in the screenshot above, with its claim that tax overall has been raised by 10p and cut by 2p, links for evidence to the OBR report from November, here. That’s a 170-page document, with no further page reference - a level of shoddiness that makes me think that whoever wrote the community note wasn’t actually referring to the OBR document at all.