Mother Jones; Marc Piasecki/Getty
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.
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 January 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.
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.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the CCDH, said in a statement accompanying the report that 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.”
X responded to a request for comment from Mother Jones with an automated message saying, “busy now, please check back later.” (The company may have retired its automated poop emoji.) Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president last month, after Trump nearly was assassinated.
As I reported recently, in addition to being false or misleading, at least some of this content appears to violate X’s own terms of service. On July 26, Musk shared a deepfake that falsely appeared to show Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire” and degrading President Biden. “This is amazing,” Musk wrote in his post sharing the video, accompanied by a laughing emoji. Musk’s post has received more than 135 million views, and it remains online—despite the fact that, as the CCDH report notes, X’s policy prohibits the sharing of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”
X says it only deletes such posts in cases of “high-severity violations of the policy, including misleading media that have a serious risk of harm to individuals or communities”—though it does not define how it measures “high-severity violations” or “serious risk of harm.”
And while Musk personally has massive reach, with more than 193 million followers on X, the problems are systemic, allowing other users who have significant reach also to spread political disinformation. One example: As I reported on Sunday, an account that reposts Donald Trump’s feed from Truth Social on X shared an obviously manipulated video of Harris that appeared to show her struggling to complete a sentence. Trump first posted the video to his Truth Social platform on Saturday, though it’s unclear who originally altered the video. When Mother Jones exposed its spread on X on Sunday, it had drawn more than 620,000 views, and bore no indication that it clearly was doctored footage.
When I inquired with the Trump campaign about the video, spokesperson Steven Cheung just asserted (profanely) that it was authentic. But by Monday, following my inquiry to X about the video, the post on X had been updated with a label calling it “manipulated media”—though the video remains up. (Cheung did not respond to a further request for comment.)
The CCDH report comes as the latest example of the growing scrutiny of X and its platforming of disinformation targeting Harris ahead of the November election. On Monday, five secretaries of state sent Musk a letter demanding he “immediately implement changes” to Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, after it falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states.
The scrutiny does not appear to concern Musk. This week, the X owner has continued attacking Harris on the platform he purchased in 2022, baselessly claiming Harris is “quite literally a Communist.” Expect more to come, especially given that Musk, according to Trump, is reportedly set to “interview” Trump on Monday. If that conversation occurs, it isn’t likely to focus on or stick to facts; as my colleague Mark Follman points out, Musk clearly is not a journalist.
