Community Notes, Epstein, and Maxwell
A brief look at recent X Community Notes regarding the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell case
In recent months, convicted sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein (deceased) and Ghislaine Maxwell (not deceased) have once again featured prominently in the news cycle, resulting in numerous dubious claims spreading on social media platforms such as X. Although some of these false claims have been labeled via X’s Community Notes fact-checking system, many of the more popular false posts have not, and even in cases where notes have been written, many have been insufficiently rated to be displayed. Although many of the noted posts are from random influencers, the account that has racked up the largest number of recent Community Notes regarding the Epstein case belongs to a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Mace.
X makes data regarding Community Notes and their associated ratings and metadata freely available for download, rendering analysis straightforward. (Sadly, Meta has not made the same decision in their own Community Notes implementation to date.)
In the two month period ranging from June 18th to August 18th, 2025, a total of 672 Community Notes containing “Epstein”, “Ghislaine”, or “Maxwell” were written. As of August 20th, 2025, 73 of these notes (10.8%) were rated helpful and shown on the relevant posts; the vast majority of the remaining 599 did not accumulate enough ratings from users with different perspectives to be ruled either helpful or unhelpful. The largest surge in activity was on July 15th, with 75 notes submitted.
The accounts whose posts regarding the Epstein/Maxwell case received the largest numbers of Community Notes submissions are a fairly even mix of left and right-wing accounts. The account with the largest number of visible notes, and second largest number of notes submitted, belongs to U.S. Representative Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina). Other accounts with visible notes include @bennyjohnson, @EastEndJoe, @MattWallace888, @grok, and @Timcast.
Not all of the accounts that received Epstein/Maxwell-related Community Notes are run by human beings. X’s AI chatbot Grok had notes written about four of its posts on the topic during the time period studied, one of which was rated helpful and is visible as of the time of this writing. (The visible note is attached to a Grok post falsely asserting that Elie Wiesel is not mentioned in Joe Haines’ 1988 book “Maxwell”). While Community Notes appears to have worked correctly in this case, many of Grok’s replies to individual users receive too little engagement for notes to garner sufficient ratings to be shown.
Some false claims regarding Epstein and Maxwell have proven more resistant to Community Notes than others. For instance, multiple attempts were made to attach notes to popular posts containing a false claim that Ghislaine Maxwell was being let out on work release, but thus far none of these notes have received sufficient ratings from a variety of users to be shown. Despite being debunked by Maxwell’s own attorney, this bogus claim has continued to spread on X and other platforms.
