Elon Musk’s misleading election claims have been viewed more than 2 billion times on X, analysis shows

Washington
CNN
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In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Elon Musk has posted a blizzard of false and misleading claims about the election on his social media platform, which has generated more than 2 billion views this year, according to new analysis from a nonprofit that tracks misinformation.

Musk, the billionaire X owner who endorsed former President Donald Trump in July, has emerged as a leading figure in US politics, in addition to his longstanding reputation as an enterprising science leader at Tesla and SpaceX. He has given more than $118 million to a pro-Trump super PAC and hit the campaign trail to get Trump in Pennsylvania.

On his social media platform, Musk has posted a seemingly endless stream of political messages, many in support of Trump and far-right political narratives, which have generated more than 17.1 billion views since being approved in July, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Musk’s massive megaphone generated twice as many impressions as all political ads on the platform combined during the period, which equates to spending about $24 million in campaign ads, the group said.

CCDH’s research is based on an analysis of publicly available data from X about Musk’s own posts and spending by political campaigns to promote ads on the platform. The nonprofit tallied how many views Musk got on 87 specific posts that contained false claims about the 2024 election that were rejected by fact-checkers. CNN has also shot down many of these false and twisted claims, including Musk’s baseless claim that undocumented immigrants vote en masse in US elections for Democrats.

As polls have shown a close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Musk has used the platform to repeatedly raise the false claim that Democrats are “importing voters” by “flying millions” of undocumented immigrants into the United States so they can vote for Harris in the 2024 election and “turn swing states permanently blue.” He has posted dozens of iterations of this debunked far right conspiracy theory to his more than 200 million X followers.

“Given the sheer frequency of Elon Musk’s posting of disinformation and partisan rhetoric, it’s almost inevitable that he will be one of the top spreaders of election-related disinformation this cycle,” Imran Ahmed, the group’s founder, told CNN Saturday.

A spokesman for X did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on the new data.

Ahmed, a fierce Musk critic, said X has become a “perpetual disinformation machine” since Musk removed many of the site’s firewalls that protected the platform from disinformation. The 2024 election is the first presidential cycle with the platform under Musk’s control since his takeover of the company formerly known as Twitter two years ago.

“He’s using the platform to convince people that elections are rigged,” Ahmed said, adding that he thinks “it’s such a tragic waste of a phenomenally powerful tool.”

X discloses data on how much political campaigns spend to pay for ads on the platform, and it’s also public how many impressions those ads get. Based on that information, Ahmed’s group determined that Musk’s election-related posts — boosting Trump and slamming Vice President Kamala Harris — were worth about $24 million.

CCDH is a regular target of Musk’s vitriol, and he recently called the group a “criminal organization”. He sued the group last year, but the case was thrown out by a federal judge who said in a blistering ruling that the lawsuit was intended to “punish” the group for criticizing X.

Musk’s latest outburst against the group came after internal documents were released that showed one of its priorities was to “kill Musk’s Twitter.” Ahmed told The Guardian that this referred to combating Musk’s pro-disinformation business model.