New York.- Hours after an alleged assassination attempt on Donald Trump over the weekend, Elon Musk took to his social media platform X to post a pensive emoji and a comment saying that “no one is even trying to assassinate” the Democratic president and vice president.
Amid anti-Muslim riots in the UK – fueled by a false rumour – Musk declared that “civil war is inevitable” in that country.
And when an anonymous X user misrepresented data to claim a surge in dubious voter registrations in three US states, Musk highlighted the fake post as “extremely concerning.”
These three posts prompted a swift reaction from officials, who called Musk’s words irresponsible and misleading. While his words have been viewed millions and shared thousands of times, they also illustrate the ability of one of the world’s most influential people to spread fear, hate and misinformation during sensitive political moments globally. And this is particularly true given that Musk owns the social platform that was formerly Twitter, giving him the authority to determine how his content reaches users.
Musk’s inaccurate posts to his 200 million followers, along with his website’s lack of security controls, are raising concerns about how he could manipulate public trust as US Election Day approaches. 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 during an event on X on Monday night, basking in the tech billionaire’s support and referring to him as his “friend.” Musk did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Election experts and officials are concerned, at the very least, that Musk could cause people to question the legitimacy of the vote. But they are also concerned that his words could motivate threats and violence against election workers or candidates.
“X and Musk are dangerously and irresponsibly raising the political bar at a critical moment,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “It’s a disgrace.”
The 53-year-old billionaire, who bought and transformed 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. He has often touted X as a superior news source to mainstream media, where users can post without fear and discern the “truth.”
However, the changes Musk has introduced to the company over two years have also allowed misinformation to spread largely unchecked.
He has dismantled the company’s Trust and Safety Board and stopped enforcing the content moderation and hate speech rules the site followed before his acquisition. He has restored the accounts of conspiracy theorists, incentivized participation on the platform with payments and content production partnerships, and instituted a Community Notes feature that sometimes leads to misleading comments on posts.
Baseless claims from both sides of the political spectrum are being shared thousands of times on Musk’s X platform. After a gunman shot Trump in the ear in an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, far-left users shared false conspiracy theories that the former president had organized it. And after the debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, far-right users spread the false claim that Harris was wearing an earpiece.
Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Musk has degraded the site to a shadow of its former self in 2020, when it was considered a fairly reliable clearinghouse for information.
“Twitter, or X, has a very different public reputation now. There’s a reason millions of people have left the platform and advertisers have left,” Hasen said. “It’s spreading terrible messages. The question is whether the marketplace of ideas will work well enough” for people to recognize those messages as unreliable, Hasen added.
Musk and many Republicans disagree with that view. They say the site, under its previous owner, unfairly censored accurate information about the origins of COVID-19 and about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, when the facts were not yet available.
Musk uses his 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 airtime to unsubstantiated claims by politicians, such as that Democrats are “importing” migrants into the country to vote and that Haitian migrants in Ohio are killing and eating pets.
Michigan Democrat Jocelyn Benson, secretary of state, said in an interview earlier this month that Musk’s election posts have created a “maelstrom of misinformation” that makes it difficult for those managing elections to inform voters about the facts.
“I know that the vast majority of election administrators are trying to be discreet and do their job,” he said. “The challenge is how do we get information about our work out to the citizens, who in many cases follow Musk or are members of X, or are on the platform.”
Some election officials have tried to engage Musk directly to explain things to him and his supporters. In July, the Republican registrar in charge of elections in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, invited Musk on a 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 secretaries of state this summer when Musk’s artificial intelligence platform, Grok, published incorrect information about election rules. He said Musk was to blame for belatedly correcting the misinformation.
Simon said that before Musk bought Twitter, the platform helped correct election misinformation and that he hopes Musk can do the same, whatever his personal beliefs.
“It’s one thing to not like this or that Minnesota election system,” Simon said, but misinformation about voting needs to be addressed.
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 did in fact use paper ballots, allowing votes to be counted, recounted, and audited to ensure accuracy.”
X’s owner has sometimes backtracked when he acknowledged his posts were inaccurate. 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 later deleted it.
Musk also deleted a Sunday post in which he questioned why Biden and Harris had not been targeted in assassination attempts. White House spokesman Andrew Bates responded to call the post “irresponsible” and say violence “should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, noted that most celebrities are careful with their words, acknowledging that not everyone will understand their jokes or respond in a measured way. Musk, he said, has never had that kind of filter.
Still, Vaidhyanathan noted that Musk’s influence may be overstated 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 one more voice in that cacophony,” he said.
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