After Elon Musk posts video on X, fact-checker calls it misleading
Many experts have criticized X (formerly Twitter) for letting misinformation spread on its platform in the past. But a new low for the platform came on Thursday, October 19, when a fact-checking website found that the owner of the platform, Elon Musk, was spreading misinformation through one of his posts on X. The post in question is a video that had a series of screenshots of news headlines where the efficacy of various COVID-19 vaccines was shown to decline in order of percentage. The fact-checker called it misleading and missing context. Interestingly, Musk has been vocal on the platform against the social and government-based pressure of getting the vaccine.
The AFP fact-checker posted a detailed breakdown of the video and said, “A video shared by Elon Musk stitches together screenshots of headlines that appeared to show declining estimates of protection from Covid-19 vaccines. The clip is missing context; the headlines are presented out of order, using incomparable data, and while the jabs do not completely protect against infection, physicians and epidemiologists say they are effective in reducing the risk of severe illness and death”.
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In its analysis, the report highlighted that the order in which the screenshots appear in the video does not follow the chronology of when each article was published and “uses incomparable data by looking at results for different vaccines and reactions to different variants of the disease”.
It also found that among the 111 screenshots shown in the video, one was taken from 2011 which had nothing to do with the pandemic.
The video starts with headlines calling COVID-19 vaccines 100 percent effective, and then with each passing screenshot, the
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