NEW YORK (AP) — Hours after a apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life this weekend, Elon Musk took to his social platform X to post a thinking emoji and a comment that “no one is even trying to assassinate” the Democratic president and vice president.
Amid anti-Muslim riots in the UK – which were fueled by a false rumor – Musk said that “Civil war is inevitable” in the country.
And when an anonymous X user twisted the data to claim an increase in questionable voter registrations in three US states, Musk amplified the false message and called it “extremely worrying.”
All three posts quickly drew a backlash from public officials, who called Musk’s comments irresponsible and misleading. While his comments have been viewed millions of times and shared by thousands, they also illustrate the ability of one of the world’s most influential people to spread fear, hate and misinformation during tense political moments around the world. That’s especially true given that he owns the social platform that was once Twitter, giving Musk the authority to shape how his content reaches users.
Elon Musk’s inaccurate messaging to his 200 million followers and the lack of safeguards on his site have raised concerns about how he could manipulate public trust as Election Day approaches in the United States. He recently endorsed Trump’s presidential bid and has become more personally involved in politics, even agreeing to lead a Government Efficiency Commission if Trump is re-elected.
Trump praised Elon Musk at an event Monday night on X, praising the tech billionaire’s endorsement and calling him a “friend.” Musk did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Experts and election officials worry that Musk could incite people to question the legitimacy of the vote. But they also worry that his comments could motivate threats and violence against poll workers or candidates.
“X and Musk are raising the political temperature in a dangerous and irresponsible way at a critical time,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “It’s shameful.”
The 53-year-old billionaire who bought and transformed Twitter In 2022, he designed his social media site as a marketplace of ideas where people could express themselves freely without censorship, a move praised by many conservatives. He has often presented X as a superior source of information to mainstream media, one where users can post without fear and discern the “truth.”
Yet Musk’s changes to the company over the past two years have also allowed misinformation to spread largely unchecked.
He dismantled the company Trust and Security Advisory Group and stopped applying content moderation And hate speech rules that the site followed before its takeover. It has restored the accounts conspiracy theorists, encouraged engagement on the platform with payments and content partnerships, and instituted a community notes feature that sometimes resulted in misleading comments placed on posts.
Baseless allegations from both sides of the political spectrum are racking up thousands of shares on Musk’s X after a gunman shot Trump in the ear during a assassination attempt in pennsylvania, Far-left users shared false conspiracy theories that the former president had set it up. And after the debate Between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, far-right users spread a false claim that Harris was wearing an earpiece.
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Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Musk had degraded the site to a point where it was a shadow of what it was in 2020, when it was considered a fairly reliable clearinghouse for information.
“Twitter, or X, has a very different public reputation today. There’s a reason millions of people have left the platform and advertisers have left,” Hasen said. “It’s spreading terrible messages. … The question is whether the marketplace of ideas will function well enough” for people to recognize that those messages are untrustworthy, Hasen added.
Musk and many Republicans disagree. They say the site, under its previous ownership, unfairly censored accurate information about the origins of COVID-19 and President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, when the facts weren’t immediately available.
Elon Musk uses his platform to post about his companies Tesla and SpaceX, to share his personal views on whether more people should have children, and to make jokes in response to memes and other content he finds entertaining. He also increasingly uses the site to amplify unfounded claims by politicians, including those that Democrats are “Importing” migrants in the country to vote and that Haitian Migrants in Ohio kill and eat pets.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in an interview earlier this month that Musk’s campaign posts have created a “maelstrom of misinformation” that makes it harder for election officials to provide voters with facts.
“I know the vast majority of election administrators are just trying to keep their heads down and do their jobs,” she said. “The challenge is how do we make sure that citizens, many of whom follow Elon Musk or are members of X, or the platform, are getting information about what we’re doing.”
Some election officials have tried to reach out to Musk and his supporters directly to inform him. In July, the Republican election clerk in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, invited Musk, via an X-rated post, for a tour of the county’s election facilities.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, organized a letter to Musk along with four other secretaries of state this summer after Musk’s artificial intelligence platform, Grok, published misinformation about election rules. He said Musk deserves credit for belatedly correcting the misinformation.
Simon said that before Musk bought Twitter, the platform was useful in correcting election misinformation and that he hopes Musk can do the same, regardless of his personal beliefs.
“It’s one thing if you don’t like a particular voting system in Minnesota,” Simon said, but factually false information about voting needs to be corrected.
Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, also commented on one of Musk’s posts last month to correct a misconception that most U.S. elections do not use paper ballots. She wrote that in the last presidential election in 2020, “all states with close presidential vote counts actually used paper ballots, which allowed for votes to be counted, recounted, and verified to ensure accuracy.”
X’s owner has occasionally backtracked when he acknowledged that his posts were misguided. Earlier this month, he sparked outrage when one of his posts promoted an interview between far-right podcast host Tucker Carlson and a Holocaust revisionist. He later deleted it.
Musk too I deleted Sunday’s message White House spokesman Andrew Bates, however, responded by calling the message “irresponsible” and saying that violence “should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about.”
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, said most celebrities are careful with their words because they know not everyone will get their jokes or react in a measured way. Musk, he said, never had that kind of filter.
Still, Vaidhyanathan believes Musk’s influence may be overblown when it comes to political disinformation. His platform has lost money and advertisers, and he’s just one of many figures who have a long history of making false claims about the election.
“Musk is just another voice in this cacophony,” he said.
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Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta, Chris Megerian in Washington and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.
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