Elon Musk’s false US election tweets ‘seen 1bn times’
Campaigners calculate reach of the billionaire’s 50 most recent misleading posts on the platform he owns.
Posts by Elon Musk containing false and misleading claims about American elections have been viewed nearly 1.2 billion times on his social media platform Twitter/X, new analysis shows.
In the year to July 31 the Tesla and SpaceX founder, 53, shared 50 posts containing information about the presidential elections that has been debunked by independent fact-checkers, according to an analysis by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, a British non-profit organisation.
In recent days the world’s richest man has also been accused of fanning the social unrest in Britain by sharing false claims and provocations.
In the United States he has shared deepfake video of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, with unverified claims that Democrats are “importing” illegal immigrants to sway elections, the organisation said. The South African-born Musk has 193 million followers on Twitter/X.
None of the misleading posts displayed a community note, the platform’s term for user-generated fact-checks.
“Elon Musk is abusing his privileged position as owner of a small, but politically influential, social media platform to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust,” Imran Ahmed, the head of Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said.
“The lack of community notes on these posts shows 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 January 6, 2021.” On this date a group of Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the US Capitol in Washington in an attempt to overthrow President Biden’s election victory.
Ahmed called for US politicians to amend section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives social media companies blanket protection for content posted on their sites.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment. He has an estimated fortune of $US218 bn ($330bn) and bought the social media platform for $US44 billion in 2022.
Musk claimed at the time that the previous owners had stifled free speech and engineered its algorithm to suppress conservative voices.
Since then, he has rebranded the platform as X, fired 80 per cent of the staff, including most of the content moderators, and reinstated suspended accounts of far-right activists including the British provocateurs Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who uses the name Tommy Robinson, and Katie Hopkins.
The rise in hate content published on the site led to an exodus of advertisers and meant that revenue plunged by 40 per cent in the first six months of 2023 compared with the previous year, according to Bloomberg.
This week Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, said the company was suing a group of advertisers for orchestrating a “massive advertiser boycott” deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated US antitrust laws.
Musk has injected himself into election discourse in the US, UK, Germany, Brazil and other countries this year. Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, has accused the tycoon of stoking hatred that inflamed riots following the stabbing of three children in Southport on July 30.
Musk posted that a UK “civil war was inevitable” in response to a post blaming the violent protests on “mass migration and open borders”.
In the first six months of this year, Musk posted false or misleading claims about the Democrats “importing voters” to influence the outcome of US elections on 42 occasions, receiving 747 million views, according to the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
Studies by independent fact-checking sites such as PolitiFact have determined that Musk’s claims are false.
He has also posted false or misleading claims about the integrity of voting machines and mail-in ballots during the 2020 US presidential elections; these posts were viewed 288 million times.
An assessment by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised” in 2020.
Last month Musk shared a fake Harris campaign ad using a manipulated version of her voice without stating it was a parody.
Musk, who says he once voted for the Democrats, publicly endorsed Donald Trump after the former president survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13. He established the pro-Trump political fundraising group America Pac this year to support Trump and other Republican candidates in November.
The super pac, a fund raising body that acts independently of a candidate’s campaign, spent more than dollars 800,000 on ads designed to collect voter data by encouraging people in battleground states to visit America Pac’s website to register to vote. The super pac is under investigation by the Michigan secretary of state.
The Times
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