() – He disinformation megaphone of Elon Musk has created a “huge problem” for election officials in key battleground states who, they told , are struggling to combat the wave of falsehoods coming from the tech billionaire and spreading rampantly on his X platform.
Election officials in key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, have attempted, and largely failed, to fact-check Musk in real time. At least one has attempted to pass personal notes asking him to stop spreading baseless claims that are likely to mislead voters.
“I’ve had friends hand-deliver things to him,” said Stephen Richer, a top elections official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, a Republican who has faced violent threats for saying the 2020 election was secure.
“We have done more actions than most people have available to try to put accurate information in front of (Musk),” Richer added. “They have not been successful.”
Since former President Donald Trump and his allies spread false claims of voter fraud to try to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, debunking election disinformation has become something of a second full-time job for election officials, along with the administration of actual elections. But Musk, with his ownership of Platform X, his well-known endorsement of Trump and his penchant for spreading false claims, has presented a unique challenge.
“The bottom line is that it’s really disappointing that someone with as many resources and as big of a platform as he has would use those resources and allow that platform to be misused to spread misinformation,” Michigan Secretary of State told . Jocelyn Benson, “when it could help us restore and ensure that people may have properly placed their faith in the results of our elections, whatever they may be.”
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Benson has come closest to matching Musk on social media. She rejected a claim he made about registered voters in Michigan, accusing Musk of spreading misinformation. His publication, according to the measurement published in X, obtained more than 33 million views.
Despite that, he failed to convince Musk, who accused Benson of “blatantly lying to the public.”
That’s the conundrum facing officials in key states six days before Election Day: They haven’t identified how to neutralize the misinformation that Musk has increasingly amplified among his 200 million followers and allowed to seep onto the platform. X, formerly known as Twitter, with little intervention.
An X spokesperson did not address Musk’s activities, but said that X is enforcing its policies related to election interference and misleading content.
sent questions about election officials’ concerns to an email address associated with Musk. also requested comment from one of Musk’s lawyers.
Election officials say they are simply outmatched by Musk’s followers and X’s algorithm.
“Election officials have a very tough job: Their job is to be election officials, not to be tweeters,” said Renée DiResta, a disinformation expert and associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
“If no algorithm is going to boost your content in any way, but it is boosting content from prominent people who are deeply distrustful of elections and tweet conspiracy theories, you are at a structural disadvantage,” DiResta added.
This week, Musk directed his followers to report election irregularities to an “Election Integrity Community” on X. The channel is managed by Musk’s independent campaign committee, which is bolstering Trump’s campaign. The channel included some election claims that had already been debunked by state officials.
“It’s just an amazing situation with him at the helm,” said Nina Jankowicz, executive director of the American Sunlight Project, which aims to expose misinformation. “I don’t know if anything can make him verify his facts.”
Benson said his strategy of trying to fact-check Musk on X carries personal risk.
“The first time he attacked our election system, I had to stop and realize that if I responded the way I did, I would ultimately have to make sure my family was safe first, and I called my security team and told them “Knowing that they’re going to expect an increase in threats and everything else, and that’s very real,” he told .
“But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t constantly try, with the truth on our side, to make sure the facts come to light,” Benson added.
Benson also said his team has tried to find unique ways to get accurate election information to Michigan voters by empowering trusted messengers to share it. This week, his office brought together business and labor leaders to brief them on how the state is ensuring every valid vote is tabulated on election night and beyond.
Pennsylvania election officials are also attempting to fact-check Musk’s false claims in X, but acknowledge those efforts are unlikely to hinder the spread of election lies.
“Elon Musk is a big deal,” said a Pennsylvania elections official. The official told that the strategy right now is more about “creating a paper trail” that several claims have been debunked should they appear in any post-election legal challenges, as happened in 2020.
Musk is also making headlines in Pennsylvania because he is trying to move a demand for his $1 million giveaway to voters to federal court, potentially avoiding a hearing Thursday in state court in Philadelphia that he was required to attend. At the center of the legal battle is a $1 million daily giveaway that Musk’s independent pro-Trump campaign committee, called America PAC, is offering to registered voters in battleground states.
This is what Elon Musk said at the Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania
His attorneys filed a “motion to remove” in federal court late Wednesday night. This usually stops the state case and puts the matter in the hands of a federal judge, unless that judge decides to send the case back to state courts.
In Georgia, election officials don’t see much point in trying to engage with Musk directly, and are instead turning to the method they relied on in 2020 to combat misinformation: regular press conferences with election officials refuting the latest election falsehoods. .
The conservative backlash against social media companies that monitor platforms for misleading information about the election has had a chilling effect on social media sites beyond X. But an official from one battleground state said they at least have a point of contact for companies like Meta, while X executives are effectively unreachable.
For experts like Jankowicz, who has been criticized by Republicans and was called to testify before House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, it is a dark irony that they have remained silent about Musk’s activism.
“What Elon Musk is doing – the campaign he is running, the donations he is making, the way he has designed Twitter to be a whirlwind of conservative misinformation – is much closer to election interference than any of the accusations that conservatives have done against social media platforms from 2016 to 2022,” Jankowicz said.
Among Democrats on Capitol Hill, there are concerns that social media platforms are unprepared for the deluge of disinformation about voting in the days before and after Election Day.
“I don’t feel like I have a full answer yet from the platforms themselves about what they’re going to do to ramp up capabilities both in the final days before the election and in the days after the election,” Senator Mark Warner told . the Virginia Democrat who chairs the intelligence committee.
At a Sept. 18 hearing the Warner commission held on foreign electoral influence and social media companies, X was conspicuously absent.
“Our guest witness was X’s Global Affairs Director, Nick Pickles, who resigned on September 6,” an X spokesperson said via email. The spokesperson did not respond when asked why the company did not send someone to the hearing instead of Pickles.
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