New York.- Hours after the alleged attack on Donald Trump over the weekend, Elon Musk took to his social platforms
Amid anti-Muslim riots in the UK – fuelled by false rumours – Musk declared that “civil war is inevitable” in the country.
And when anonymous
The three posts prompted swift backlash from officials who called Musk’s comments irresponsible and misleading. While his comments have been viewed millions of times and shared thousands of times, they also illustrate the ability of one of the world’s most influential people to spread fear, hatred and misinformation at a difficult political moment globally. This is especially true given that Musk owns the social platform formerly known as Twitter, giving him the power to determine how his content reaches users.
Musk’s inaccurate posts to his 200 million followers, as well as his lack of security controls on his site, have raised concerns about how he could manipulate public trust ahead of the U.S. Election Day. He recently endorsed Trump’s presidential bid and has become more personally involved in politics, even agreeing to lead a government efficiency commission if Trump wins re-election.
Trump praised Musk at an X event Monday night, drawing support from the tech billionaire and calling him a “friend.” Musk did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Experts and election officials are at least concerned that Musk could cause people to question the legitimacy of the vote. But they are also concerned that his words could lead to threats and violence against poll workers or candidates.
“X and Musk are dangerously and irresponsibly raising the political thermometer at a critical time,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “It’s a shame.”
The 53-year-old billionaire, who bought and revamped Twitter in 2022, has modeled his social network as a marketplace of ideas where people can speak freely without censorship, a move that has been applauded by many conservatives. They often cite X as a superior news source to the mainstream media, where users can post without fear and see “the truth.”
However, the changes Musk made at the company over the past two years have also allowed false information to spread unchecked.
They have disbanded the company’s Trust and Safety Board and stopped enforcing the content moderation and hate speech rules the site followed before it was acquired. They have restored the accounts of conspiracy theorists, incentivized participation on the platform with payments and content production partnerships, and implemented a Community Notes feature that sometimes resulted in misleading comments on posts.
Unsubstantiated claims from both sides of the political spectrum have been shared thousands of times on Musk’s X platform. After a gunman shot Trump in the ear in an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, left-wing users shared a false conspiracy theory that the former president was organizing the campaign. And after the debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, right-wing users spread a false claim that Harris was wearing an earpiece.
Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Musk has denigrated the site as it was in 2020, when it was considered a fairly reliable hub of information.
“Twitter, or X, now has a very different public reputation. “There’s a reason why millions of people are leaving the platform and advertisers are leaving,” Hasen said. “It’s spreading bad messages. The question is whether the marketplace of ideas will work well enough” for people to realize that those messages are unreliable, Hasen added.
Musk and many Republicans disagree with that view. They say the site, under its previous owners, unfairly censored accurate information about the origins of COVID-19 and about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, when the facts weren’t yet available.
Musk has used the platform to post information about his companies Tesla and SpaceX, share his personal opinion that more people should have children, and make jokes in response to memes and other content he finds funny. He has also increasingly used the site to give more space to baseless claims from politicians, such as that Democrats are “importing” migrants into the country to vote and that Haitian migrants in Ohio are killing and eating pets.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan's secretary of state, said in an interview earlier this month that Musk's election posts had created a “maelstrom of misinformation” that made it difficult for election officials to inform voters about the facts of the election results.
“I know that most election officials are trying to be careful and do their job,” he said. “The challenge is how do we communicate our work to the public, who in many cases follow Musk or are a member of X, or are on those platforms.”
Several election officials have attempted to speak directly with Musk to explain things to him and his followers. In July, the Republican clerk in charge of elections in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, invited Musk on a guided tour of the county’s election facilities via a post on X.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, sent a letter to Musk along with four other state secretaries this summer, when Musk’s artificial intelligence platform Grok published misinformation about election rules. He claimed that Musk deserved credit for being late in correcting the misinformation.
Simon noted that before Musk bought Twitter, the platform helped correct election misinformation and he hopes Musk can do the same, regardless of his personal beliefs.
“It’s one thing to not like this or that election system in Minnesota,” Simon said, but misinformation about the election needs to be corrected.
Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, also commented on one of Musk’s posts last month to correct the misconception that most U.S. elections do not use paper ballots. Easterly wrote that during the last presidential election in 2020, “all states with very close presidential vote counts actually used paper ballots, so that votes could be counted, recounted, and audited for accuracy.”
Owner Earlier this month, he sparked outrage when one of his posts promoted an interview between right-wing podcast host Tucker Carlson and a Holocaust revisionist. He then deleted it.
Musk also deleted a post on Sunday that questioned why Biden and Harris were not targets of assassination attempts. White House spokesman Andrew Bates responded by calling the post “irresponsible” and saying that violence “should only be condemned, not encouraged or joked about.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, points out that most celebrities are careful with their words, realizing that not everyone will get their jokes or respond in a measured way. Musk, he says, has never had that filter.
But Vaidhyanathan noted that Musk’s influence may be overblown when it comes to political misinformation. His platform has lost money and advertisers, and he is just one of many celebrities who have long made false claims about the election.
“Musk is just another voice in the din,” he said.