Report: Elon Musk - X central to facilitating spread of misinformation

Billionaire Elon Musk's false or misleading claims about the U.S. election have racked up 2 billion views on social media platform X this year, according to a report by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, Reuters reports. The platform also plays a central role in facilitating the spread of misinformation about critical battleground states that are likely to determine the outcome of the presidential race, election and disinformation experts said. An X spokesman said the company's Community Notes feature, which allows users to add additional context to posts, is more effective at helping people identify misleading content than traditional warning flags on posts. Since taking over the company formerly known as Twitter, Musk has reduced content moderation and laid off thousands of employees. He has lent his support to former President Donald Trump. Musk's power helps create "network effects" in which content on X can end up on other social networks and messaging platforms like Reddit and Telegram, said Kathleen Carley, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an expert on disinformation. "X is a pipeline from one platform to another," she said. At least 87 of Musk's posts this year promoted claims about the U.S. election that fact-checkers have classified as false or misleading, accumulating 2 billion views, according to the Center for Combating Digital Hate's report. In Pennsylvania, one of the seven key states, some X users have taken advantage of cases where local election administrators have reported incomplete voter registration forms that were not processed, falsely portraying the events as examples of election interference, Philip Hensley-Robin, Pennsylvania executive director at Common Cause, said during a news conference. Common Cause is a nonpartisan organization that promotes responsible governance and voting rights. Cyabra, a firm that uses artificial intelligence to detect online disinformation, said that an X account with 117,000 followers played a key role in helping spread a fake video that claimed to show the destruction of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania for Trump. An X spokesperson said the platform had taken action against many of the accounts that shared the video.