The BRAG Media
Rolling Stone Australia
Send us tip / op-ed / video
Subscribe
Home Culture Culture News

How Elon Musk and X Became the Biggest Purveyors of Online Misinformation

The tech billionaire always had a problem with telling the truth — now he has an entire social network built on lies

By Miles Klee
Elon Musk

Apu Gomes/Getty Images

Elon Musk has trouble telling the truth. Whether he’s overpromising on what his companies can accomplish or twisting the facts about his own children, it’s clear he doesn’t feel constrained by reality, which is no doubt what made him into the mogul of misinformation he is today.

Almost two years after Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter (now X), he and the platform — where he reigns not just as owner but the most-followed user — have become essential to the life cycle of incendiary falsehoods and conspiracy theories. While mainstream social media companies have long tried to prevent such content from gaining traction, leaving extremists to ply their lies on smaller, obscure, unmoderated networks, Musk fired the Twitter teams tasked with battling deceptive material. He also reinstated thousands of accounts that had received permanent bans, including neo-Nazis and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones, often engaging with these people himself. On top of that, he changed the verification system into a pay-to-play scheme in which subscribers enjoy boosted visibility; at the same time, it became harder to tell which accounts belonged to genuine public figures.

The removal of Twitter’s (imperfect) guardrails meant that suddenly, for the first time, a major online resource many relied on for news and information was overrun by the manipulative trolls formerly relegated to the fringes of the social web. Misinformation about wars, health, climate change, elections and more flourished alongside violent rhetoric and hate speech, in a digital forum that has actual influence on the course of human events.

At the center of it all is Musk, whose turn to hard-right ideology has led him to spout and amplify untruths with abandon, algorithmically forcing them onto an audience of millions. But he wasn’t always so deep into the reservoir of easily debunked rumors and bogus claims. In this timeline, we trace how he turned X into a misinformation machine.

2018-2019:

The year 2018 was a pivotal one for Musk: as he became a full-fledged pop celebrity by dating Grimes and smoking weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Tesla was hemorrhaging millions of dollars in its struggle to get the Model 3 out of “production hell.” Musk called this period “excruciating” in an interview, claiming he was working brutally long hours.

Still, he found plenty of time for Twitter, where he was making more of an effort to come off as funny — this is when he leaned into memes. The stabs at comedy, combined with more erratic and impulsive posting habits, caused trouble here and there. In one tweet, he insulted a British diver who dismissed his idea of using a submersible in the rescue of a Thai youth soccer team trapped in a flooded cave system, calling him a “pedo guy.” Musk beat a defamation suit after his lawyers argued the insult was a “joke” that he’d retracted, even though he’d doubled down in subsequent emails to BuzzFeed, insisting the diver was a “child rapist.” More consequentially, Musk tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, which was not true. He settled fraud charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission, agreeing to pay a $20 million fine for a misleading remark that “led to significant market disruption,” with Tesla paying an additional $20 million and Musk forced to step down as chair of the company board.

Each of these incidents demonstrated Musk’s propensity for distortion, or at least his ability to believe something he’d simply made up. They also revealed the potentially significant ramifications of his unfiltered commentary. As two pieces of misinformation, these tweets seemed to facilitate personal ends rather than political ones: revenge on a man who had undermined his image as a tech innovator, and control over the company that accounts for the bulk of his fortune. It was only after Covid-19 gripped the planet that he developed an appetite for broader, polarizing forms of specious propaganda.

2020:

On March 19, 2020, as the U.S. entered lockdowns to limit the spread of a contagious new virus, Musk made a bold prediction on Twitter: “Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US […] by end of April,” he wrote. Instead, Covid-19 would kill well over a million Americans.

Being dead wrong about the course of the pandemic is certainly embarrassing for a self-styled genius, and sowing complacency about the threat was unhelpful. But a few minutes later, Musk did something worse: he claimed in a tweet that children were “essentially immune” to Covid, which is entirely false. Despite Twitter making efforts to crack down on medical misinformation, they let the post stay up, and Musk has not deleted it to this day.

The comments were part of a developing narrative for Musk: In his view, panic over the coronavirus was “dumb” and might “cause more harm than the virus.” He said that Covid is comparable to influenza; in fact, it’s more contagious and deadlier. He railed against lockdown measures as “fascist” in a Tesla earnings call because they had shuttered the company’s factories and halted production, tweeted without evidence that Covid tests return an 80 percent false positive rate, and speculated that the drug hydroxychloroquine could be an effective treatment for infections. (Later data showed it is not.) At every step, he argued that the U.S. response to Covid was a harmful overreaction, yet the country experienced a much higher death rate than other large, wealthy nations.

Musk’s refusal to acknowledge the scope and effects of the crisis as he offered misleading views on it put him in alignment with right-wing figures likewise questioning government measures and spinning up conspiracy theories. By the end of 2022, he was mashing up culture-war gender grievances with his Covid trutherism in a tweet blaming the pandemic on Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases through that year. “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Musk tweeted. Two months later, he appeared to directly endorse the conspiracy theory that Fauci “funded the development” of Covid-19.

But it was as early as May 2020 that Musk directly signaled his affinity for far-right ideas, and all the misinformation that comes with adopting this dogma. “Take the red pill,” he tweeted that month, referring to the capsule that the characters in The Matrix take to wake up from a computer simulation and face a dire reality. Since the release of the film, the concept of the “red pill” has been adopted by a range of reactionaries and hate groups as a political metaphor for recognizing the “true” state of things — that is, rejecting liberal and leftist orthodoxies, typically in favor of falsehoods that reinforce right-wing attitudes.

2021-2022:

As Covid-19 vaccines became widely available and most pandemic precautions faded into memory, Musk had less cause to push misinformation about the virus. (After all, Tesla’s factories were open again, and Musk had taken the jab despite his earlier skepticism.) Yet twice in 2020 he had tweeted an opinion that ensured his continued entanglement with the kind of right-wing influencers who bend facts and fabricate misleading context in order to advance their agendas.

“Pronouns suck,” Musk wrote the first time, openly agreeing with Republicans who have stoked a moral panic over the existence of transgender and non-binary people. The tweet received admiring replies from that cohort and high engagement overall. It also led his then-partner Grimes to advise him to turn his phone off or call her. “I cannot support hate,” she responded. “Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.” Months after that, Musk doubled down, tweeting, “I absolutely support trans, but all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare.”

Meanwhile, he was amassing a larger audience, perhaps due in part to his increasingly politicized takes. He had close to 70 million followers at the end of 2021, up from about 30 million at the beginning of 2020. By the end of 2022, after he had taken Twitter private, he had surpassed 120 million followers, and he’s now closing in on 200 million. (The second most-followed account, which belongs to Barack Obama, has 130 million followers.) By any metric, Musk’s views, interests, and exchanges with a select company of right-wing trolls seeking to influence his decisions have become unavoidable, defining features of the site.

As Musk sought to wriggle out of his agreement to buy Twitter in 2022, some of his claims about the site strained credulity, such as the repeated protest that the network was crawling with bots. He tweeted that May that far more than 20 percent of accounts might be fake, but his own data scientists dispelled this, finding bots far less prevalent than he insisted. And once he had control of Twitter, Musk proved especially receptive to the complaints of right-wingers who routinely post misinformation and felt the company’s old management had been biased against them, including Malaysian culture warrior Ian Miles Cheong, Chaya Raichik (operator of the anti-LGBTQ hate account Libs of TikTok) and MAGA shitposter-in-chief @Catturd2, an avowed anti-vaxxer and election denier.

It was while cozying up to this crowd that Musk proved gullible enough to fall for — and amplify — the most ludicrous smears and conspiracy theories. In October 2022, Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nany Pelosi, was assaulted with a hammer by a man who had broken into the couple’s San Francisco home looking for the congresswoman. An investigation would reveal the intruder had been consuming far-right conspiratorial content, including QAnon material, and in a tweet, Hillary Clinton criticized Republicans for spreading such “deranged” falsehoods. In a reply, Musk wrote: “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He linked to a story in the Santa Monica Observer, an outlet known to publish outrageous lies, including an article claiming that Clinton herself had died and been replaced by a body double in 2016. The piece Musk shared falsely described the attack on Paul Pelosi as a drunken squabble between the Speaker’s husband and a male prostitute he’d hired. He later deleted the tweet, but not before he caused the conspiracy theory to trend on Twitter.

By now, Musk was all in on conservatives’ project of discounting right-wing motivations for political violence. In the following months, he would go on to serve as a mouthpiece for the kind of extremist propaganda points that has led to mass shootings.

2023:

With Twitter’s moderation teams gutted and previously banned users running amok, the platform was less reliable than ever as a source of information. The fact-checking organization Science Feedback released a study in March 2023 which found that 490 misinformation “superspreader” accounts posting viral false claims had enjoyed a 44 percent increase in engagement under the Musk regime. Musk’s personal account was a factor in this trend: “Four out of the five accounts that have gained the most influence have received replies from Elon Musk’s personal account to at least one of their top ten tweets,” wrote Bastien Carniel, head of policy and data at Science Feedback. “It is most likely that these tweets went viral because of Elon Musk’s decision to reply and bring them to the attention” of his millions of followers, he added.

The problem only got worse, even as Musk continued to boast that Twitter — soon rebranded as “X” — was better at delivering accurate news than traditional media. That May, a gunman killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas, with subsequent reports on the shooter’s social media footprint revealing that he was a white supremacist with Nazi tattoos. Musk publicly doubted these FBI-verified details, wondering if they were part of a “very bad psyop.” He also liked posts from a Twitter user falsely claiming the shooter had been a Mexican gang member. Days later, he continued to argue, bafflingly, that there was “no proof” the swastika-tattooed killer was a white supremacist.

That same week, Musk started down a path toward antisemitism, tweeting that billionaire philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros, who gives money to liberal causes, “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization” and “hates humanity.” Soros is of Jewish descent and frequently attacked in antisemitic terms as the supposed head of a grand conspiracy of elites. In the fall, Musk went further, showing support for white supremacists calling to ban the Anti-Defamation League, an organization intended to combat antisemitism, from the website. Their hashtag campaign, #BanTheADL, was rife with antisemitic memes. Musk went on to baselessly blame the ADL for advertisers fleeing the toxic new Twitter, saying they were “trying to kill this platform” by raising concerns about hate speech targeting Jewish people. Finally, in the weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel sparked an explosion of warzone misinformation on the site, Musk endorsed a user’s antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews have promoted “dialectical hatred against whites” and deliberately facilitated mass migration into the U.S. by “minorities” as “the actual truth.”

Throughout these episodes, Musk stepped up his habitual fretting about an imminent population collapse, a theoretical crisis that actual demographers say he has wildly overblown. Now, however, he was connecting this fear to racist conspiracy theories like one that posits a looming “Great Replacement,” in which white people of western nations are overtaken in number by non-white immigrants due to their low birth rates. Versions of this theory variously blame Jews specifically or liberal politicians for letting too many migrants in; by January 2024, Musk was tweeting his convinction that the Biden administration was illegally funneling them across the border with the expectation that they would be “Dem voters” in the future. Undocumented immigrants, of course, cannot vote, nor do they have a legal pathway to attain citizenship and voting rights. Moreover, Great Replacement beliefs have motivated deadly mass shootings targeting Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand; Latinos in El Paso, Texas; Black people in Buffalo, New York, and Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Musk has appeared receptive to related notions, such as the myth that white people in South Africa live under the threat of “white genocide.”

And these are just the falsehoods Musk tweeted himself. As the Science Feedback research points out, he follows a number of accounts that flood X with misinformation, and he is happy to boost their visibility with a one-word reply (“Concerning,” “Crazy,” “Evil”) or just punctuation (“!!”). It could be anything from someone smearing a drag queen as a sexual predator to unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud. Musk didn’t miss an opportunity to float his nonsense offline, either, particularly when inveighing against what he calls “the woke mind virus.” In an embarrassing interview on Real Time With Bill Maher, he offered the implausible claim that American students are now taught that George Washington was a slave owner — but no other facts about him. Over and over, in every venue, he was utterly indifferent to truth.

2024:

This year, Musk has maintained his engagement with extremists and hate speech accounts, helping them foment outrage over immigration and allowing antisemitism to go virtually unchecked on X compared to its main competitors. He routinely participates in the demonization of transgender people and has accused the World Professional Association for Transgender Health of “mutilating children.” It’s a personal subject for Musk, who has a trans daughter, Vivian Wilson. In a July interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a fellow anti-wokeness crusader, Musk deadnamed and misgendered her while explaining that her transition was what inspired him to fight the “woke mind virus” in the first place, because it had “killed” her. (Wilson legally changed her name and gender in a California court shortly after her 18th birthday in 2022, saying she no longer wished to be related to her father.) Responding on the Meta-owned social media platform Threads, Wilson said Musk had wholly fabricated details of her childhood and their relationship, as he was a mostly absent parent.

Another point of interest for Musk of late is the presidential election. As early as January, he was harping on the supposed vulnerabilities of the U.S. electoral system to fraud via mail-in ballots and non-citizens voting, falsely claiming in a tweet that “illegals are not prevented from voting in federal elections.” Musk fired X employees tasked with battling election and political misinformation last September, reasoning that this project amounted to election interference, and his lies regarding the U.S. presidential race have gone unchallenged by Community Notes, a crowdsourced fact-checking feature.

More recently, Musk — who declared his unequivocal support for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump after an assassination attempt on the former president last month — shared a deepfake video of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, without disclosing that it was manipulated. In the clip, a voice meant to sound like Harris declares, “I am the ultimate diversity hire.” On Thursday, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (an anti-extremism watchdog X unsuccessfully sued for reporting on the proliferation of racist content across the platform) released an analysis that found that 50 misleading or false Musk tweets about the U.S. election in 2024 have amassed 1.2 billion views in total. None have received a Community Note. And on Monday, five secretaries of state sent an open letter calling on Musk to “immediately” make changes to X’s AI chatbot, Grok, which had produced false claims about Harris missing a ballot deadline in nine states — misinformation then seen by millions of users.

For good measure, Musk has additionally waded into U.K. politics, on Thursday sharing and then deleting a hoax headline that claimed Prime Minister Keir Starmer was weighing the possibility of sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” on the Falkland Islands. He had reshared the doctored screenshot from Ashlea Simon, chair of the far-right party Britain First, and it was evidently viewed some two million times before he took it down.

Where can Musk go from here? He is easily duped by phony images and unsourced claims, doesn’t know or care that his right-wing entourage routinely misrepresents reality, has committed himself to the deluded MAGA mindset, and long ago eliminated the checks and balances that could have prevented his (or anyone else’s) disinformation from trending on X. He’s built himself an unrivaled megaphone for countering journalism with propaganda, rumor, innuendo and harassment. Expect him to keep it blaring in the run-up to the election and then, if Trump loses, turn up the volume higher still. If there’s one principle Musk has held dear all along, it’s that by repeating bullshit loudly and often enough, you can eventually make it come true.

 

Rolling Stone
Subscribe