Elon Musk allegedly made false and misleading claims about the U.S. elections, which garnered approximately 2 billion views on X, according to a report from Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit group, released the report on Musk’s alleged proliferation of false information through X.
Aside from false claims about the elections, X was also reportedly playing a crucial role in spreading misleading information about battleground states, which experts stated can determine the outcome of the U.S. presidential elections.
According to a spokesperson for X, the Community Notes feature of the platform allows the addition of context to posts by users, and is said to easily assist users in identifying false information.
However, based on the report, “at least 87 of Musk’s posts this year have promoted claims about the US elections that fact-checkers have rated as false or misleading, amassing 2 billion views.” It found out that none of those 87 posts featured a Community Note, the name of X’s user generated fact-checks.
The report also noted that Musk’s posts containing terms to do with politics and the US elections have amassed a total of 17.1 billion views on X since the billionaire publicly endorsed Trump on July 13th.
Researchers identified a total of 746 posts from Musk made between July 13 and October
25 that mention terms associated with the US elections, such as “Donald Trump”, “Kamala
Harris”, “voting” and “ballots”. Posts in which Musk quoted other posts mentioning political
terms were included but reposts were not.
From the time that Musk took over Twitter, which later on became X, he allegedly curtailed the content moderation feature of the social media platform. He also laid off thousand of employees, and threw his support for former president Donald Trump, who, at the moment, is in a tight race against Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election.
Kathleen Carley, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, revealed that Musk has almost 203 million followers, which creates a huge impact when it comes to reaching more people. Content on X can jump from one social media platform to another, like Reddit and Telegram. She defined X as a “conduit from one platform to another,” Reuters reported.
In a press briefing on Monday, Philip Hensley-Robin, Pennsylvania executive director at Common Cause, said that in Pennsylvania, some of the users of X have seized instances where administrators of local elections flag incomplete voter registration forms. These are then falsely casted as examples of election interference.
According to Hensley-Robin, there were X accounts that implied, “there was voter fraud, when in fact, we know very clearly that election officials and election administrators in all of our counties were following the rules and … therefore only eligible voters are voting.”
Another firm, Cyabra, which uses AI to recognize disinformation online stated that an X account that has 117,000 followers played a key role in helping propagate a fake video, which showed that mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania favoring Trump were being destroyed.
