A new report from the British non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) found X owner Elon Musk spread misinformation about the US election and the Democrats’ presidential campaign in 50 posts this year alone. His assertions continue to go unchecked on the platform, not even through its own “Community Notes” feature. CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed says the absence of these grassroots fact-checks show “that his business is failing woefully to contain the kind of algorithmically-boosted incitement that we all know can lead to real-world violence, as we experienced on Jan. 6, 2021.”
The report cites 50 posts made on Musk’s X account from January 1 to July 31 that made claims about the election which have been proven false by independent fact-checkers. The posts overwhelmingly involve allegations of the Democratic party importing voters to gain an electoral advantage. He pushed conspiracy theories that “The Dem Party goal is to import voters” on March 28 and “Dems won’t deport, because every illegal is a highly likely vote at some point” on February 26. The fact checking website Politifact rated the latter claim as “False” citing the 3.6 million immigrants removed from the US under President Biden’s administration between February 2021 to September 2023.
Around half a dozen of Musk’s posts also falsely insist the US election system is meaningfully vulnerable to fraud. He called for the elimination of electronic voting machines because of their “risk of being hacked by humans or AI” in a X post he made on June 15. He also asserted that “Mail-in and drop box ballots should not be allowed,” accompanied by a video of Fox News’ Jesse Waters and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson making claims about the ease of which non-citizens can vote in American elections. Neither post has been corrected. (The Brennan Center for Justice has called instances of voter fraud “extremely rare” and notes that states have “multiple layers of security to protect against malfeasance.”)
One of Musk’s posts even featured an AI-generated deepfake of Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris. The faked fooage features the voice of someone claiming to be Harris talking about how she’s the “ultimate diversity hire” and how she tries to “sound black” and “pretends to celebrate Kwanzaa.” Once again, the post has no community note or correction, even though sharing “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media” is in direct contravention of X’s policies.
The CCDH report says the combined 50 tweets have been viewed approximately 1.2 billion times on X.
Based on these and other posts written by Musk, Ahmed called for the amendment of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1986 to include social media companies “to be held liable in the same way as any newspaper, broadcaster or business across America.”
The CCDH is currently involved in a legal battle with Musk and X Corp. The parent company of X filed a federal lawsuit in San Francisco against the non-profit group claiming it illegally scraped its servers and purposely picked hateful posts as part of “a scare campaign to drive away advertisers,” according to court documents.
We attempted to reach X for a chance to comment but are unlikely to receive a fulsome response — the site effectively dissolved its public relations team under Musk’s stewardship.
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