The world’s richest man buys out one of the most popular social media platforms and uses it as a propaganda and disinformation machine in support of a presidential candidate. What could go wrong?
An analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks misinformation, found that Elon Musk posted at least 87 claims this year about the U.S. election on X that fact-checkers have rated as false or misleading.
Those false and misleading posts have generated more than 2 billion views, and not just because Musk is an influential person. He has also been found to tweak X’s algorithms so his own posts reach everyone on the platform because apparently, having 203 million followers just isn’t enough.
CNN first reported on the CCDH’s data, noting that Musk has given more than $118 million to a super PAC that is supporting former president Donald Trump for reelection, making Musk the biggest donor to Trump’s campaign. That PAC has been leading an advertising campaign that impersonates Democrats and targets registered Republicans with unpopular policies that are not supported by VP Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. The ads are cartoonishly “woke,” saying things like “Help make our schools as trans-friendly as possible,” and “A national, mandatory buy-back program means fewer guns & fewer tragedies. Kamala Harris gets it!”
A 404 Media report found in the last couple of weeks, the PAC increased its Facebook ad spend by 1,000%. Meta waited until the end of last week to ban ads about social issues, elections, or politics.
On X, political ads are still pumping alongside Musk’s megaphone.
Anyone with an X account has witnessed the barrage of political messaging from Musk, much of which is in favor of Trump and far-right political narratives. The CCDH found Musk’s political posts have garnered more than 17.1 billion views since the billionaire executive formally endorsed Trump in July. That’s twice as many views as all political ads on the platform combined during the period, which is roughly the same as spending $24 million in campaign ads, per the CCDH.
Researchers identified a total of 746 posts Musk made between July 13 and October 25 that mention terms associated with the U.S. election, like Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, voting, and ballots. The analysis comes from publicly available data from X about Musk’s posts and political campaign spending to promote ads on the platform.
Among the examples of false or misleading claims that Musk made on X is one that claims, “Triple-digit increases of illegals in swing states over the past 4 years. Voter importation at an unprecedented scale!” The post saw 21 million views.
Another claimed, “If the Democratic Party big government machine wins this election, they will ban voter ID nationwide, not just in California.” It saw 11.9 million views.
The research found that Musk’s claims that Democrats support “importing voters” were viewed nearly 1.3 billion times.
Musk has also pushed narratives about unreliable voting systems that have been viewed 532 million times, per the analysis.
For the record, there is little to no evidence to support the claim that illegal voters are “imported” to support particular political parties. Voter fraud is rare in the U.S. due to strict verification measures at the state and federal levels. Experts say mail ballots are verified when being requested by a voter and verified again when returning a ballot.
Like any organization that criticizes Musk, CCDH has become a target for the billionaire, who recently called the group a “criminal organization.” Musk, a self-described free speech advocate, tried to sue the CCDH last year, but the case was tossed by a federal judge who said the litigation was aimed at “punishing” the organization for criticizing X.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of CCDH, said in a statement that X has “devolved into a hellscape of hate and disinformation” after Musk removed many of the site’s guardrails that protected against false information. Musk has claimed that X’s Community Notes feature allows community members to fact-check posts, but Ahmed says the feature is “little more than a bandaid.”
“Elon Musk has shown through his personal conduct his contempt for truth — is it any wonder that his solution to the disinformation crisis on X was so lackluster?” said Ahmed.
Ahmed was also onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week where he warned of the use of generative AI to reduce the marginal cost to produce and distribute a piece of disinformation to zero.
“So what you have, theoretically, is a perfect loop system in which generative AI is producing, it’s distributing, and then it’s assessing the performance — A/B testing and improving,” he said. “You’ve got a perpetual bulls— machine. That’s quite worrying.”
TechCrunch has reached out to X for comment.