Kamala Harris campaign manipulates X Community Notes feature to suppress comments they 'don't like': report

The Kamala Harris campaign has reportedly been manipulating Community Notes on X posts in order to make Donald Trump look worse and make Harris look better on different X posts. This comes less than a week out from the election as the GOP and Democratic nominees are making their last efforts to get out the vote in vital swing states.

According to a report from the Federalist, the Harris campaign has been instructing volunteers to block Community Notes that they "don't like” and manipulating the crowdsourced fact-checking program on X. Prior to Elon Musk purchasing then-Twitter, administrative staff on the site would censor content at times, however, as Musk has made the platform to reflect the principles of free speech, Community Notes was created as a system to fact-check out-of-context or bad information to curtail false claims.



The report said that one user on a Harris campaign Discord server said that one goal is to get volunteers for the campaign to swarm posts on X and "block [Community Notes] we don’t like."

One can become a contributor on Community Notes after signing up and going through a rating process. After one reaches a certain rating score, you can then start writing Community Notes that will appear to Community Note contributors and if a Community Note gets enough ratings from those of opposing viewpoints as accurate, it will show up publicly to all X users.

@KamalaHQ, a Harris campaign account, will often be marked with "Rate proposed Community Note" box, only visible to those who are contributors in the program. The account will often take comments from Trump out of context, leading to the proposed Community Notes, per a CNN report. In one such instance reported on by the outlet, the account had posted a clip out of context claiming: "Trump on Americans who don't support him: 'We can't play games with these people. These are people that are dangerous people ... I've never seen anything like it."

In the clip itself, Trump had only mentioned two people, Hillary Clinton as well as Joe Biden, and referred to the American who leaked Israel's war plans to attack Iran earlier in October. The report from the Federalist showed that on a Discord channel, an alleged paid Democrat staffer asked volunteers: "Can folks rate notes as this as ‘not helpful’?” in response to a Community Note on the post.

 

The proposed Community Note has not been published on the post despite the caption being taken out of context of what Trump said at the time during a Latino Roundtable event in Miami, Florida on Oct. 22.

There is also a "twitter-community-notes" channel on the campaign Discord, where the Federalist reported, "paid Democrat staffers are ... writing dubious Community Notes on X to undermine GOP and Trump messaging. They then encourage volunteers to rate them positively."

The outlet reported that volunteers for the campaign can go through a "Twitter (X) Community Notes Training" module that instructs volunteers on how to rate Community Notes and get to a high enough rating status in order to write their own notes on the platform.