Musk spreads misinformation, but X’s fact checkers 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 triedand-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 last 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 protrump 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. Last 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.
In 2020, Twitter’s “election integrity hub,” which had an open line with outside groups and political campaigns, either deleted or added context to posts with misleading information about voting.
Posts with false information about when and where to vote, for instance, would be removed. Those with misleading information about mail voting, like Trump’s, would get notices pointing users to alerts and fact-checking articles.
As Trump and his allies ramped up their attacks on mail voting — a preferred method for Democrats during the coronavirus pandemic — Twitter expanded its policy to remove or label claims that “undermine faith” in elections.
Those measures proved only so effective. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and the other major platforms, which had similar measures, were also awash in election lies, and they faced criticism in the months after the Jan. 6 attack that they didn’t do enough.
Agreeing with critics who say the measures caused unfair and one-sided censorship, Musk said he cut the integrity team last fall because it was in fact “undermining election integrity.” He added, “They’re gone.” (His CEO, Yaccarino, quickly disputed that characterization, saying the work would continue and even expand.)
Maya Wiley, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which communicated regularly with the platforms in 2020, said Musk’s decision had ripple effects. “It’s also given a free pass to folks like Facebook and Youtube,” she said.