Elon Musk is spreading election misinformation, but X’s fact checkers are long gone
In the spring of 2020, when President Donald Trump wrote messages on Twitter warning that increased reliance on mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” the platform ran a corrective, debunking his claims.
“Get the facts about mail-in voting,” a content label read. “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud,” the hyperlinked article declared.
This month, Elon Musk, who has since bought Twitter and rebranded it X, echoed several of Trump’s claims about the U.S. voting system, putting forth distorted and false notions that American elections were wide-open for fraud and illegal voting by noncitizens.
This time, there were no fact checks. And the X algorithm — under Musk’s direct control — helped the posts reach large audiences, in some cases drawing many millions of views.
Since taking control of the site, Musk has dismantled the platform’s system for flagging false election content, arguing it amounted to election interference.
Now, his early election-year attacks on a tried-and-true voting method are raising alarms among civil rights lawyers, election administrators and Democrats. They worry that his control over the large social media platform gives him an outsize ability to reignite the doubts about the U.S. election system that were so prevalent in the lead-up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
As Trump’s victory in New Hampshire moved the race closer to general election grounds, the Biden campaign for the first time criticized Musk directly for his handling of election content on X: “It is profoundly irresponsible to spread false information and sow distrust about how our elections operate,” the Biden campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said this week in a statement to The New York Times.
“It’s even more dangerous coming from the owner of a social media platform,” she added.
What is angering the Biden campaign is delighting pro-Trump Republicans and others who depict the old Twitter as part of a government-controlled censorship regime that aided Biden in 2020. Under a system now in dispute at the Supreme Court, government officials alerted platforms to posts they deemed dangerous, though it was up to the companies to act or not.
“Oh, boo hoo,” Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer whose firm represents Trump, said of the Democrats’ complaints. Dhillon has sued the company for suspending an election-denying client’s account after receiving a notice from the California election officials — the sort of government interplay Musk has repudiated. She noted the platform was now “a much better place for conservatives,” and said of Musk, “he’s great.”
X did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this week, its CEO, Linda Yaccarino, wrote in a blog post that the platform had expanded its alternate approach to fact-checking misinformation — through crowdsourced “community notes” written by users.
There were no such notes on Musk’s voting messages. But they were on a post by another X user that made the wild claim that Biden won the New Hampshire primary only through ballot stuffing.
The freer flow of false voting information is hardly the only perceived threat to elections building on social platforms, with the rise of artificial intelligence, increasingly realistic deepfakes and a growing acceptance of political violence.
That Biden’s campaign would single out Musk points to the unique role he is already playing in the 2024 election.
No major media owner of the modern era has used his national platform to insert himself so personally and aggressively into a U.S. election.
While Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire, which includes Fox News, has exercised unrivaled influence over U.S. politics for decades, he has largely kept behind the scenes, generally leaving it to his editors, producers and hosts to determine the specifics of the coverage.
And while Facebook is larger than X, its owner, Mark Zuckerberg, is answerable to shareholders and responsive to advertisers. He has sought to avoid being personally drawn into the political fray.
Musk jumped in within days of taking ownership of the site, urging his followers to vote Republican. He has been open in his disdain for Biden, whose White House has at times responded in kind.
Then again, Musk has no shareholder concerns at X, which he took private in late 2022. He has dismissed advertiser complaints or calls to block content that might degrade confidence in democracy.
Exhibiting a distinctly 21st-century form of raw media power, X has also throttled and punished Musk’s perceived competitors and foes while reinstating accounts that were previously banned for content violations, some relating to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The platform’s algorithm — which dictates how posts are circulated on the site — also now gives added promotion to those who pay to be “verified,” including previously banned accounts.