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The biggest spreader of political divisiveness and incendiary posts on Elon Musk’s revamped Twitter is turning out to be Musk himself.
In just the last two weeks on the platform — since rebranded X — the billionaire provocateur unloaded a string of posts that poured fuel on the fire of Britain’s worst anti-immigration riots in decades; shared a doctored video of Vice President Kamala Harris deeming herself the “ultimate diversity hire” for president; and claimed without evidence that the Biden-Harris administration is “importing vast numbers” of illegal aliens to swing the November election.
Musk’s latest flurry of innuendo, half-truths and lies online is making it increasingly clear that it is the tech mogul — and not just his platform — who poses the greatest challenge to governments struggling to rein in content that can incite extremist violence.
“Elon is weaponizing this in a way it hasn’t been weaponized before,” Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko said of Musk’s posts and hands-off approach to others’ content on X. “It just is sort of questionable why he’s allowed to do what he’s doing.”
X did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Angry officials are trying to find levers to pull to influence the world’s richest man.
Some British MPs said Tuesday they plan to haul Musk in for questioning in front of parliament over his posts amid the U.K. riots. Michigan’s secretary of state and North Carolina’s Board of Elections said this week they are launching investigations into potential misuses of personal data by a Super PAC created by Musk after they received complaints.
And on Monday, five state election officials sent a letter to Musk urging him to fix an AI tool on X that falsely suggested last month that Harris was ineligible to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said he recruited other officials, including his Republican counterpart in Pennsylvania, to sign on to the letter because the company had reacted with indifference to earlier complaints.
“It’s important to speak up loudly now because a similar mistake in the future, over the next 92 days, might be a higher-stakes situation,” said Simon, a Democrat. “Today, it’s about ballot access, but if left unchecked and unpoliced, what if next month, it’s about voter registration rules?”
But a strongly worded letter is still just … a strongly worded letter.
“The fact that we have secretaries of state begging a narcissistic billionaire to behave himself suggests to me that we as a society are highly endangered and unprotected by a lack of responsibility and hard decision making that should be made at the highest levels of government,” said Sarah T. Roberts, a former staff researcher at then-Twitter, now a professor at UCLA studying platforms.
And higher-stakes situations are already unfolding in the U.K. British authorities are mobilizing some 6,000 officers as far-right groups plan to target as many as 30 spots around the country following a fatal stabbing attack by a suspect falsely identified as a Muslim immigrant.
Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has doubled down. He initially declared that “civil war is inevitable” in the U.K., comments that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office said had “no justification.” Musk responded by smearing Starmer as “twotierkeir” — an apparent reference to claims that British police treat violence less harshly when the perpetrators are not white. U.K. Justice Minister Heidi Alexander has urged “everyone who has a platform” to exercise “their power responsibly.”
Musk also went on a broader battle footing. On Tuesday, X brought a federal antitrust lawsuit against advertisers who had paused their spending after Musk’s acquisition of the site. “We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” Musk said. “To put it simply, people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is undermined and some viewpoints are not funded over others as part of an illegal boycott,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote in an open letter.
The drama seems to have only burnished Musk’s rising star with the American right.
On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump announced that he will be doing “A MAJOR INTERVIEW WITH ELON MUSK” next week.
When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he promised he would overhaul its approach to moderating content and make speech on the platform “as free as possible.”
One of his first moves as “Chief Twit” was to reinstate Trump’s account. Twitter had permanently suspended it to reduce “risk of further incitement of violence” after Trump tweeted support for his followers who had launched a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol.
By 2023, Musk had rebranded the platform as X, axed half of its election integrity team, dissolved its trust and safety council, and done away with Twitter’s old user verification system by allowing anyone to pay for “blue checks” that high-profile users had previously earned after submitting proof of their identities.
The moves provoked pushback. Companies drew down their ad spending due to concerns that campaigns would appear alongside hate speech; Musk told them to “go fuck yourself.”
The European Commission in July found X’s blue checkmark policy “deceptive” and in violation of the EU Digital Services Act, which could lead to hefty fines. Musk responded by accusing the body of offering his platform an “illegal secret deal” to pressure him to censor speech.
But Republican hardliners have heralded Musk’s changes. They say the earlier Twitter weaponized its content moderation policies to silence them, unfairly branding legitimate conservative opinions as “disinformation.”
“No one is doing more for free speech on the internet than Elon Musk and his platform is working better than ever,” said Russell Dye, a spokesperson for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jordan spearheaded investigations into “Big Tech censorship,” relying in part on internal documents Musk made public over Twitter’s decisions to remove posts linking to a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
And as the right embraced Musk, he embraced the right.
It was an ideological shift for the former Democratic donor who said he voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.
By November two years later, Musk endorsed for president Florida’s combative Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who promised his state was “where woke goes to die.” In July, Musk publicly endorsed Trump, and on Wednesday he wrote, without evidence, “Kamala is quite literally a communist.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said in an interview that X had been co-opted. “Jim Jordan and the MAGA Republicans were whining for years about bias against them on Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “They’ve now essentially gotten everything they want, and X is a right-wing propaganda and disinformation vehicle for Elon Musk himself.”
The new synergy between Musk and the Republican standard bearer has emerged as Trump’s campaign continues to brand other platforms like Instagram and YouTube as a threat.
“Big Tech companies like Meta and Google have been exposed for spreading misinformation and disinformation about President Trump in a blatant attempt to interfere in the election,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said. Trump’s campaign did not directly address misinformation on X or about Musk.
Meta declined to comment, but has said its platforms incorrectly applied a fact check label to a photo of Trump after he survived a July assassination attempt, before fixing the error. Google did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
In the final months before the U.S. elections, Musk has hurled himself into weedy issues of election administration.
In June, Musk called for the elimination of electronic voting machines, even though the vast majority of voting machines in use today — including in every swing state — print a paper ballot voters can verify on site.
He has also repeatedly shared or retweeted unsubstantiated claims that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are registering to vote in this election, and that Democrats are helping them. He later implied that anyone opposing a new GOP-backed law aimed at preventing non-citizens from voting deserved the death penalty.
David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said he is particularly concerned about Musk’s ability to amplify falsehoods about elections given his nearly 200 million followers on X.
Musk’s posts can rack up “tens of millions” of views in a day, whereas election officials might only get 1,000 to 2,000 views in that same period, he argued.
“His ability to spread disinformation as a superspreader is unmatched,” Becker said.
Other countries have tried and failed to hold Musk accountable. Musk’s X refused to hide posts of a stabbing attack in Australia, resulting in a federal court case that the platform won. A Supreme Court justice in Brazil ordered an investigation into Musk over his alleged dissemination of fake news.
Raskin said he is hopeful that a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision backing the government’s right to flag disinformation to tech platforms would help “renew the commitment” of government officials to combat false information on elections.
But the Biden administration dramatically scaled many of those efforts back while the case worked its way through the courts, and Raskin said he wasn’t sure to what extent federal agencies “have restored the kinds of checks that existed before.”
For the Harris and Trump campaigns, the roles of social media and the rampant misinformation are not unique to the 2024 cycle. Nevertheless, Musk’s ability to set the rules on X and his bully pulpit on it presents a unique challenge this November.
Parkhomenko, the strategist, said there are fewer tools to restrict Musk’s reach since his takeover took the company private: “There’s not as many options on the table as there might be, if this was something else, like a publicly traded company,” he said.
A Harris campaign official, granted anonymity to share internal operations, said that it has a team in place to handle social media disinformation.
X remains a dominant feature of the election landscape. Biden, with 38 million followers, used the platform to announce he would withdraw from the race.
Even after Trump was ousted and founded Truth Social, his posts on his own platform gather momentum when they are reposted on X — including his announcement of his upcoming interview with Musk.
