Elon Musk's misleading election posts viewed 1.2 billion times: study
X by Elon Musk have amassed nearly 1.2 billion views this year, a watchdog reported Thursday, highlighting the billionaire's potential influence on the highly polarized White House race.
Ahead of the November election, researchers have raised alarm that X, formerly Twitter, is a hotbed of political misinformation.
They have also flagged that Musk, who purchased the platform in 2022 and is a vocal backer of Donald Trump, appears to be swaying voters by spreading falsehoods on his personal account.
Researchers from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) identified 50 posts since January by Musk — who has more than 193 million followers on the social media site — with election claims debunked by independent fact-checkers.
None of the posts displayed a «Community Note,» a crowd-sourced moderation tool that X has promoted as the way for users to add context to posts, CCDH said, raising questions about its effectiveness to combat falsehoods.
«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.»
The posts analyzed by CCDH carried widely debunked claims, such as that Democrats are encouraging illegal migration with the aim of «importing voters» or that the election
