Elon Musk has often inflamed politically tense moments, raising worries for the US election
NEW YORK — Hours after a apparent attempt about Donald Trump’s life last weekend, Elon Musk took to his social platform X to post a thinking emoji and comment that “no one is even trying to kill the Democratic President and Vice President.”
Amid anti-Muslim riots in the UK – sparked by a false rumour – Musk stated that “civil war is inevitable” in the countryside.
And when an anonymous X user twisted data to claim there was a surge in dubious voter registrations in three US states, Musk said reinforced the false post and called it “extremely concerning.”
All three posts were quickly met with backlash from government officials, who called Musk’s comments irresponsible and misleading. While his words have been viewed millions of times 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 tense political moments around the world. That’s especially true because he owns the social platform that used to be Twitter, giving Musk the authority to shape how his content reaches users.
Musk’s inaccurate messages to his 200 million followers, coupled with the lack of safeguards on his site, raise concerns about how he could manipulate public trust as Election Day approaches in the U.S. He recently endorsed Trump’s presidential bid and has become more personally involved in politics — even agreeing to take a government efficiency commission if Trump is re-elected.
Trump gave Musk a shoutout at an event on X Monday night, hailing the tech billionaire’s support and calling him his “friend.” Musk did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
At the very least, experts and election officials worry that Musk could influence people to question the legitimacy of the vote. But they also worry that his words could motivate threats and violence against election workers or candidates.
“X and Musk are dangerously and irresponsibly raising the temperature of politics at a critical time,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “It’s outrageous.”
The 53-year-old billionaire who Twitter bought and transformed In 2022, he modeled his social media site as a marketplace of ideas where people can speak freely without censorship, a move that many conservatives have applauded. He has often touted X as a superior news source to the mainstream media, one where users can post without fear and discern the “truth.”
But the changes Musk has made at the company over the past two years have also allowed misinformation to spread largely unchecked.
He dismantled the company Advisory Group Trust and Safety and stopped enforcing content moderation And hate speech rules that the site followed before his takeover. He has the accounts restored of conspiracy theorists, encouraged engagement on the platform with payouts and content partnerships, and instituted a Community Notes feature that sometimes results in Misleading comments posted on posts.
Unsubstantiated claims from both sides of the political spectrum are generating thousands of shares in Musk’s X. After a gunman shot Trump in the ear in a attempted murder in Pennsylvania, Far-left users shared false conspiracy theories that the former president set it up. And then the debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, far-right users spread the false claim that Harris was wearing an earpiece.
According to Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Musk has degraded the site to a level where it is a shadow of what it was in 2020, when it was considered a reasonably trustworthy place 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 untrustworthy, Hasen added.
Musk and many Republicans disagree. They say the site under its previous ownership unfairly censored accurate information about the origins of COVID-19 and President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, when the facts weren’t readily available.
Musk uses his platform to post about his companies Tesla and SpaceX, to share his personal views that more people should have children, and to make jokes in response to memes and other content he finds entertaining. He has also increasingly used the site to amplify unsubstantiated claims made by politicians, including that Democrats “importing” migrants into the country to vote and that Haitian migrants in Ohio kill and eat pets.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview earlier this month that Musk’s campaign messaging has created a “maelstrom of disinformation” that has made it harder for those who administer elections to provide voters with facts.
“I know the vast majority of election administrators are just trying to keep their heads down and do their job,” she said. “The challenge is how do we get information about our work out to the public, many of whom follow Musk or are members of X, or are on the platform?”
Some election officials have tried to reach out to Musk directly to educate him and his followers. In July, the Republican clerk in charge of elections in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, invited Musk via X-mail for an all-access tour of the county’s election facility.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, and four other secretaries of state co-authored a letter to Musk this summer after Musk’s AI platform Grok posted false information about election rules. He said Musk deserved credit for belatedly correcting the misinformation.
Simon said that before Musk bought it, Twitter was useful in correcting election misinformation and that he hopes Musk can do the same, regardless of his personal beliefs.
“It’s one thing if you don’t like this election system or that election system in Minnesota,” Simon said, but factually incorrect information about voting needs to be corrected.
Jen Easterly, director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, also commented on one of Musk’s posts last month to correct a misconception that most U.S. elections don’t use paper ballots. She wrote that during the last presidential election in 2020, “all states with a close count of the presidential vote actually used paper ballots, allowing votes to be counted, recounted, & checked to ensure accuracy.”
The owner of X has sometimes gone back on his words when he acknowledges that his posts have been unwise. 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 subsequently removed it.
Musk too deleted post from sunday musing about how Biden and Harris were not the targets of assassination attempts. White House spokesman Andrew Bates nevertheless responded by calling the post “irresponsible” and saying that violence “should only be condemned, never encouraged or ridiculed.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, said most celebrities are careful with their words because they realize that not everyone will understand their jokes or respond in a measured way. Musk, he said, never had that kind of filter.
Still, Vaidhyanathan said Musk’s influence may be overblown when it comes to political disinformation. His platform has lost money and advertisers, and he’s just one of many figures who have long made false claims about elections.
“Musk is just one voice in that cacophony,” he said.
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Associated Press journalists Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta, Chris Megerian in Washington and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.
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