I am not the most enormous fan of Elon Musk, and particularly not of his impact on social media, but there is one contribution he has made to social media which has worked far better than I had dared hope and has to be put down as a positive.
No fact-checking system is perfect, but the overwhelming majority of community notes I have seen on X, whether I generally agree with the position of the tweet to which the note was appended or not, have been accurate, and even where I generally agree with the point being made the community notes which qualified that position were generally balanced, fair and reasonable.
Which makes some research published this week on X by a Conservative poster who uses the handle "Vodka & Selena" all the more interesting. (Hereafter I shall refer to him as "V&S")
HIs thread starts HERE.
Now I've told you up front his admitted bias, and there will be some people who don't like what he says who will see that as enough reason to discount it. But he's included the receipts - he gives a link to his dataset - and I think what he writes makes sense.
V&S has made a study of 32,032 X posts from the four main UK-wide major political parties since between Jan 1st and 18th August 2026, from 107 senior political figures and official accounts. E.g. from the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, and Reform UK, (Pity he didn't include the Greens but never mind.)
Of these 32k posts, 113 had attracted a community note - obviously that's about one in three hundred which strongly suggests that people are not successfully getting community notes slapped on everything they disagree with, you have to have a significant number of people who think you are getting your facts seriously wrong or being very misleading to attract such a note.
Now here is where it starts to get interesting. Reform UK's official accounts or senior members of Reform had posted 28% of the X posts but attracted 68% (77) of the Community notes.
Here are some more of V&S's comments.
"Reminder: Community Notes are X's fact-checking system. Users write them, but a note appears only when raters who have disagreed before agree that readers need the correction or context.
A note is not automatic proof of a lie. The pattern across dozens of notes is the story."
"Across Reform, Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, 113 posts carried displayed Community Notes.
Adjust for output and Reform still comes first: 8.60 notes per 1,000 posts, against Labour's 4.94, the Liberal Democrats' 0.21 and the Conservatives' 0.17."
"Inside Reform, the problem is concentrated at the top. Zia Yusuf attracted 19 notes, the largest raw total of any account examined. Reform's official account had 14. Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman had 12 each. Robert Jenrick had 10.
Together: 67 of Reform's 77 notes."
What Reform's community notes corrected:
"The notes weren't obscure technical quibbles.
They corrected 26 factual errors, 17 cases of missing context, 12 cases of hypocrisy or inconsistency, nine misquotations, seven chronological distortions, four misleading uses of numbers and two cases of misrepresented media."
V&S then proceeds to explain some detailed examples of why particular tweets by Zia Yusuf were community noted. I myself also commented on one or two of these at the time: and I previously published extracts from an article by Stephen Pollard responding to disgraceful smears which Zia (and Robert Jenrick) had tweeted and which you can read at:
V&S concludes:
"Reform does not merely campaign hard. It lies, misquotes and strips facts of context, then calls correction an establishment attack. The 77 notes in this dataset show a method, not a run of bad luck.
Reform has decided that destroying the
@Conservatives
is so important that any tactic is justified. That is why truth is optional. A claim only has to hurt the right opponent. Whether it is true comes second.
This is not about Reform being “far-right” (it is not). It is about a party built around Farage, grievance and personal loyalty. Policy follows the leader. Standards bind opponents, not allies. “Free speech” means freedom to attack, never an obligation to tolerate criticism.
That is how Reform will govern. Promises will last only while they serve Farage. Critics will be treated as enemies. Institutions will be expected to obey. Every failure will be blamed on the establishment, the media or an internal traitor.
Getting power will not make this party more honest. It will give its dishonesty more force.
Reform is not a conservative government in waiting. It is Farage’s personal vehicle, and it wants control of the state."
Finally V&S publishes his dataset so anyone who wishes to can check his work: you can find this at
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