Elon Musk’s X says China tried to use X to turn Americans against AI data centers. Did it work?

Some tech types believe that China has made Americans hate AI data centers.

Now those voices think they have proof: a report from Elon Musk Xposted Thursday evening reported that 200 accounts had been found “posting in a way that could manipulate legitimate debate about U.S. AI and energy policy.”

The messages marked with X look a lot like messages OpenAI found earlier this summer, said to be created by ChatGPT accounts “likely originating in China.”

As I’ve noted before, it’s certainly plausible that China has tried to use social media to convince Americans to hate data centers. China, Iran and Russia have all used social media platforms in the past for US persuasion campaigns.

But “China tried to exploit opposition to data centers” is different from “China created that opposition” – or even “China meaningfully amplified it.”

The bigger picture is that it seems unlikely that a report like this will turn people who don’t like data centers into people who like data centers. More likely, it will ultimately end with preaching to the choir.

Calling people victims of a ‘psyop“Maybe it will make you feel better. I’m not sure if it does anything else.

And when it comes to Thursday’s report from X, there are several warning signs to consider before accepting it at face value.

For example:

• X says it found 200 accounts spreading anti-data center posts. But it doesn’t provide other details, such as what time period those accounts posted those kinds of things, or, crucially, what kind of reach those posts got. Have millions of X users seen them? Or dozens? And what type X users have seen them: people living near proposed data center projects? Americans? Randos?
• The screenshots of the posts that Maybe the posts marked by But in at least some of the examples of anti-data center posts that OpenAI has previously highlighted, the audience data we can see seems like that one messages that reach somewhere between small and virtually zero reach.

Or you can zoom out and note that OpenAI has flagged the existence of anti-AI posts likely made by Chinese users June 10. Did it take X almost three months to track down evidence of questionable accounts on its own platform? Or is this something the company has only recently started looking at – perhaps as calls to fight back against anti-data center voices have grown louder?

You might also wonder why Meta and Google’s YouTube haven’t yet flagged any evidence of this behavior on their platforms. (I asked both companies about this last week and asked again on Friday.)

Or you can go ahead and note that X owner Elon Musk – someone who has a very vested interests in data centers — hasn’t always been a reliable source of information when it comes to his site or the way he runs it. That’s a trait that goes all the way back to 2022, back then Musk said he was going to buy what was then Twitter to get rid of bots – and then tried to back out of the deal by saying he didn’t know Twitter had so many bots.

That doesn’t mean the things Musk says about his platform are necessarily untrue — and in this case, it’s worth noting that Musk hasn’t even acknowledged the report from his Global Government Affairs account as of Friday morning. Perhaps he is completely unaware that one of his companies is saying it has been used against data centers his other companies need.

Back to the main point: It’s possible that China is trying to make Americans more wary of data centers. It’s also possible that Americans have plenty of reasons to be suspicious of data centers on their own. Telling them – or yourself – that their concerns are made up by shadowy foreigners is unlikely to change anything.