Elon Musk is not just the Trump-supporting owner of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. It turns out he is also one of the platform’s biggest peddlers of election-related disinformation, according to a new report published Thursday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Zany: Quick request: Congress, can you please pass legislation that owners of social media platforms can’t donate to a presidential candidate then actively spread disinformation and lies on their platform about the other candidate? It just “seems illegal” to me.
The report from CCDH, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting civil liberties and holding social media companies accountable, found that 50 false or misleading posts shared by Musk on X between Jan. 1 and July 31 of this year racked up a staggering 1.2 billion views. The group categorized the posts under three main themes: false claims that Democrats are “importing voters” through illegal immigration (the bulk of the content that researchers examined); false claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud; and a manipulated video, also known as a deepfake, of Vice President Kamala Harris. Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president last month, after Trump nearly was assassinated.
According to the report, while independent fact-checkers found the content in all of those 50 posts shared by Musk to be false or misleading, none of the posts in question contained a “community note,” X’s user-generated fact-checking system that the company promise’s can contextualize “potentially misleading posts.” Just this week, Musk claimed in a post on X that community notes offer “a clear and immediate way to refute anything false in the replies,” adding, “the same is not true for legacy media who lie relentlessly, but there is no way to counter their propaganda.”
A deepfake on X exposed by Mother Jones on Sunday had quickly drawn more than 620,000 views and bore no indication that it was doctored footage.
