False or misleading US election claims posted by Elon Musk on X have been viewed nearly 1.2 billion times this year, a watchdog reported on Thursday, highlighting the billionaire’s potential influence on the highly polarised White House race.
Ahead of the November election, researchers have raised concerns that X (formerly Twitter) has become a hotbed of political misinformation.
They have also said that Musk, who bought the platform in 2022 and is a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, is influencing voters by spreading falsehoods on his personal account.
Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) identified 50 posts since January by Musk — who has more than 193 million followers on the social media site — that contained election claims debunked by independent fact-checkers.
The CCDH said that none of the posts displayed “community notes”, a crowd-based moderation tool that X has promoted as a way for users to add context to posts, raising questions about its effectiveness in combating falsehoods.
“Elon Musk is abusing his privileged position as the owner of a politically influential social media platform to spread misinformation, fuelling divisions and mistrust,” warned CCDH Chief Executive Officer Imran Ahmad.
“The lack of community notes on these posts shows that their business is failing miserably at preventing the kind of algorithm-enforced incitement that we all know can lead to real-world violence.”
The posts analyzed by CCDH contained widely debunked claims, such as that Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration for the purpose of “importing voters” or that the election is vulnerable to fraud. Both claims were viewed hundreds of millions of times.
Last week, Musk faced severe criticism for sharing an AI deepfake video with his followers showing Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
In it, a voiceover imitating Harris calls President Joe Biden old and then declares that she “doesn’t know anything about running a country.”
The video, viewed by millions, had no indication that it was a parody – except for a laughing emoji. Only later did Musk clarify that the video was intended to be satirical.
“Musk is behaving as if he faces no charges, despite growing evidence that he is personally playing a harmful role in fuelling misinformation and division ahead of the US election,” Nora Benavidez of the advocacy group Free Press Action Fund told AFP.
“Because their behavior increasingly approaches election interference, it is up to others — the public, regulatory agencies, and advertisers — to hold them accountable for their anti-democratic behavior.”
Musk, who bought the platform for $44 billion in 2022, faces growing scrutiny over his potential influence on voters.
On Monday, a bipartisan group of five US secretaries of state sent an open letter to Musk, urging him to fix X’s AI chatbot Grok because it was spreading election-related misinformation.
Last month, hours after Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris as the Democratic nominee, Grok posted misinformation about ballot deadlines that were extended by other platforms.
X — which also faced criticism for stoking tensions during the recent right-wing riots in England — has dismantled trust and safety teams and reduced content moderation efforts once used to police misinformation, turning it into what researchers call a hotbed of misinformation.
X did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
