False or misleading claims about the U.S. election that Elon Musk has posted to X this year have generated nearly 1.2 billion views, according to an analysis published Thursday by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Researchers from the center said they identified 50 instances this year when Musk posted election claims that have been debunked by independent fact-checkers but spread widely on the app anyway.
None of the 50 posts by Musk displayed a “Community Note” to correct his claims or add context, calling into question the effectiveness of X’s user-driven fact-checking system, the center said.
Musk is a supporter of former President Donald Trump, and the report is one of the first efforts to measure the scope of his influence on the election through his presence on X. This is the first presidential contest since Musk bought the app, formerly known as Twitter, and he has its biggest audience, with 193 million followers.
“What Musk is doing is creating a sort of Colosseum-style spectacle of encouraging, amplifying and himself spreading disinformation,” Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said in a phone interview.
X and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday ahead of the report’s publication.
Musk appeared to spread more false information Thursday. The news site Politics.co.uk reported that Musk shared a hoax news article about the U.K.’s considering “detainment camps” on the Falkland Islands. The post got at least 1.8 million views before Musk deleted it, the site reported. X did not respond to a request for comment.
X faces other scrutiny related to the U.S. election. On Monday, five state secretaries of state said X had shared false election information, some of it about ballot deadlines, and a New York congressman has asked for an investigation into whether X improperly prevented users from following an official account for Vice President Kamala Harris. X has not addressed either allegation.
Musk in recent months has escalated his rhetoric about social issues such as immigration and transgender rights, coinciding with his warming relationship with Trump. He recently weighed in on British politics, too, predicting a “civil war” in the U.K. as anti-immigrant riots raged.
Musk is one of the world’s wealthiest people, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, and a victory by Trump in the Nov. 5 election could be a boon for his business empire because of the wide array of regulatory fights it’s engaged in with the federal government.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate has published previous investigations of X, including one about the spread of neo-Nazis and other extremists on the app. Last year, X sued the center, accusing it of cherry-picking information and interfering with its relationship with advertisers, but a federal judge dismissed the case and said X was using the lawsuit to try to silence its critics.
The center’s latest report says Musk is finding a massive audience on his app for debunked claims about voting and U.S. elections.
One claim frequently pushed by Musk is the idea that Democrats are “importing voters.” Musk has alleged that it’s the “goal” of the Democratic Party to “import as many illegal voters as possible” and that Democrats “won’t deport, because every illegal is highly likely to vote at some point.” At least four such posts by Musk got 40 million views or more, according to the center, which relied on X’s public tallies for how often a post has been viewed.
NBC News and other news organizations that have fact-checked claims that noncitizens are registering to vote have found the claims to be false.
Under federal law, only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. And a noncitizen must spend at least five years as a lawful permanent U.S. resident — or three years if he or she is married to a U.S. citizen — to be eligible for naturalization as a citizen, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Last year, the median time spent as a lawful permanent resident before citizenship was seven years, according to the government.Despite the fact-checks, Musk has continued to push variations of the claim, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. The center said he posted about it at least 42 times this year, getting 747 million views.
A different viral post from Musk appeared to break X’s own rules against misleading videos. Last month, he got more than 134 million views on a parody video about Harris, without a disclaimer on the post making it clear that the video used an altered voice.
The Harris campaign said in a statement after that video spread that Musk and Trump were promoting “fake, manipulated lies.”
Ahmed, of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said he was alarmed to see that none of Musk’s posts with election misinformation had fact-checking labels from X’s Community Notes program. Under that system, certain users can propose adding a correction or context to a post, and if enough other X users vote in favor of the proposed note, the note becomes visible to everyone. The program launched in 2021, before Musk bought the app, and he has continued it.
“Elon Musk has told advertisers, the government and others that Community Notes are his solution to the disinformation problem on X, but it clearly isn’t working given that his lies remain unchallenged,” Ahmed said.
He said it was unclear why Musk’s claims aren’t being fact-checked on the app he owns.
“We deserve more clarity as to what the rules are. Is it one rule for Elon and another rule for everyone else?” he asked.
