NEW DELHI: Billionaire owner of X and Trump supporter Elon Musk has been accused of spreading false or misleading claims on the US election and influencing the highly polarised White house race. According to a report by a watchdog organisation, Musk’s flagged social media posts have garnered nearly 1.2 billion views this year.
Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), identified 50 posts by Musk since January that contained election claims debunked by independent fact-checkers.None of these posts displayed a ‘Community Note,’ a crowd-sourced moderation tool promoted by X to add context to posts.
The posts analyzed by CCDH carried widely debunked claims, such as Democrats encouraging illegal migration to ‘import voters’ or the election being vulnerable to fraud, both of which garnered hundreds of millions of views.
“Elon Musk is abusing his privileged position as owner of a politically influential social media platform to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust,” warned CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed.
“The lack of Community Notes on these posts shows that his business is failing woefully to contain the kind of algorithmically-boosted incitement that we all know can lead to real-world violence,” he added.
This comes days after Musk was accused of sharing a deep fake video of Vice President Kamala Harris in which a voiceover mimicking Harris calls President Joe Biden senile before declaring that she does not “know the first thing about running the country.”
The video carried no indication that it was parody until Musk later clarified it was meant as satire.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of five US secretaries of state also sent an open letter to Musk, urging him to fix X’s AI chatbot known as Grok after it produced election misinformation that was amplified by other platforms.
X has stoked controversy after stoking tensions during recent far-right riots across England and has gutted trust and safety teams and scaled back content moderation efforts once used to tame misinformation, making it what researchers call a haven for disinformation.
Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), identified 50 posts by Musk since January that contained election claims debunked by independent fact-checkers.None of these posts displayed a ‘Community Note,’ a crowd-sourced moderation tool promoted by X to add context to posts.
The posts analyzed by CCDH carried widely debunked claims, such as Democrats encouraging illegal migration to ‘import voters’ or the election being vulnerable to fraud, both of which garnered hundreds of millions of views.
“Elon Musk is abusing his privileged position as owner of a politically influential social media platform to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust,” warned CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed.
“The lack of Community Notes on these posts shows that his business is failing woefully to contain the kind of algorithmically-boosted incitement that we all know can lead to real-world violence,” he added.
This comes days after Musk was accused of sharing a deep fake video of Vice President Kamala Harris in which a voiceover mimicking Harris calls President Joe Biden senile before declaring that she does not “know the first thing about running the country.”
The video carried no indication that it was parody until Musk later clarified it was meant as satire.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of five US secretaries of state also sent an open letter to Musk, urging him to fix X’s AI chatbot known as Grok after it produced election misinformation that was amplified by other platforms.
X has stoked controversy after stoking tensions during recent far-right riots across England and has gutted trust and safety teams and scaled back content moderation efforts once used to tame misinformation, making it what researchers call a haven for disinformation.