Elon Musk Is Disseminating False Information Ahead of the Election, but X’s Fact Checkers Are No More

Lawyers who specialize in civil rights and Democrats are raising concerns about the claims that Mr. Musk has made regarding voting. The candidates for vice president deemed his posts to be “profoundly irresponsible.” In the spring of 2020, President Donald J. Trump sent statements on Twitter in which he warned that an increased reliance on mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election.”

The platform responded by publishing a correction, which disproved his assertions.This month, Elon Musk, who has since purchased Twitter and rebranded it as X, echoed several of Mr. Trump’s accusations about the American voting system. He put forward twisted and erroneous beliefs that American elections were wide open for fraud and unlawful voting by noncitizens. Musk’s comments were made in response to Mr. Trump’s statements. There were no fact-checks performed at this time. The postings reached massive audiences with the assistance of the X algorithm, which was directly under Mr. Musk’s control. In some instances, the posts received many millions of views.

Since he took control of the website, Mr. Musk has removed the system that the platform uses to report information that falsely claims to be related to elections, alleging that this constitutes interference in the political process.

Civil rights attorneys, election administrators, and Democrats are all becoming increasingly concerned as a result of his early attacks on a tried-and-true voting system during the election year. They are concerned that his influence over the huge social media platform offers him an enormous potential to rekindle the suspicions about the American election system that were so prominent in the days leading up to the incident at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Following Mr. Trump’s victory in New Hampshire, which brought the race closer to the general election grounds, the Biden campaign, for the first time, directly challenged Mr. Musk for his handling of election content on X: This week, Julie Chavez Rodrguez, the Joe Biden campaign manager, made a statement to The New York Times in which she stated that “it is profoundly irresponsible to spread false information and sow distrust about how our elections operate.”

She continued by saying, “Given that it is coming from the proprietor of a social media platform, it is even more dangerous.”

The same thing that is making the Biden campaign angry is making pro-Trump Republicans and other individuals happy. These individuals portray the old Twitter as a component of a government-controlled censorship system that made Mr. Biden more successful in 2020. Under a system that is currently being challenged in the Supreme Court, government authorities would notify platforms about posts that they deemed to be harmful, but it was ultimately up to the corporations to decide whether or not to take action.

A content label stated, “Get the facts about voting by mail,” and it was displayed. The item that was hyperlinked stated that “experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud.”When asked about the allegations made by the Democrats, Harmeet K. Dhillon, a lawyer whose firm represents Mr. Trump, responded, “Oh, boo hoo.” An election-denying client’s account was suspended by the company after getting a notification from the California election officials, which is the kind of government interaction that Mr. Musk has vehemently opposed. Ms. Dhillon has filed a lawsuit against the company for this action. Having made the observation that the platform had become “a much better place for conservatives,” she went on to say that Mr. Musk was incredible.

A request for comment was sent to X, but they did not answer. Linda Yaccarino, the site’s chief executive officer, claimed in a blog post earlier this week that the platform had expanded its alternative method of fact-checking false information by utilizing user-provided crowdsourced “community notes.”

However, Mr. Musk’s vote messages did not contain any notes of this nature. On the other hand, they were on a post that another X member had written. This user made the outrageous assertion that Mr. Biden won the New Hampshire primary election only through the use of canvassing.

With the rise of artificial intelligence, increasingly realistic deep fakes, and a growing acceptability of political violence, the freer flow of misleading voting information is not the only perceived threat to elections that is building on social platforms. More and more people are becoming comfortable with political violence.