Last updated on August 29th, 2024 at 05:37 pm
A report just published determined that the number of false or misleading election claims posted by Elon Musk on X, formerly Twitter, has gotten nearly 1.2 billion views thus far in San Francisco this year. The finding places in great relief the tremendous influence the billionaire maintains within an extremely polarized US presidential race.
Researchers have raised alarms that X will be a hotspot for political misinformation in the lead-up to the November election. The Center for Countering Digital Hate identified 50 posts by Musk-who has more than 193 million followers on the platform-containing falsehoods related to the election, and which were debunked by independent fact-checkers. No such notes appeared on any of the posts, despite X promoting user-generated context through its “Community Notes” capability, which gives a strong reason to question whether the platform is handling misinformation as well as it should.
Once again, Elon Musk is using his ownership of a politically influential platform to pump misinformation into the public sphere that sows division and distrust,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH. The posts included several widely debunked claims, such as the notion that Democrats are allowing illegal migration to “import voters” and that the election process is ripe for fraud. Together, the various posts featuring these claims have received hundreds of millions of views.
In one particularly contentious move, last week Musk shared a deepfake AI video of Vice President Kamala Harris seeming to criticize President Joe Biden. The video had views in the millions with apparent lacks of satire indications other than a laughing emoji until Musk decided much later that this was what he had meant.
Nora Benavidez of the Free Press Action Fund immediately condemned Musk’s actions as possibly amounting to election interference and called for greater accountability on the part of the public, regulatory agencies, and advertisers.
Musk, who purchased X for $44 billion in 2022, has shown more intense scrutiny over his impact on voter perception. Other recent criticism includes the hiccups with X’s AI chatbot, Grok, which spread misinformation about the election, shortly after President Biden endorsed Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.
X has not commented on any of these issues, and its minimal content moderation and promotion of misinformation have come under severe criticism in recent far-right riots in England.