Target Musk: X owner’s Trump embrace puts him in crosshairs of left’s ‘disinformation’ machine

Elon Musk, owner of X, has repeatedly been criticized for threatening democracy by stating his political views on his social media platform while government officials use social media censorship on other platforms to prevent what they consider to be election misinformation.

Musk’s interview of former President Donald Trump on Monday triggered numerous news articles and political letters regarding his handling of election information on X.

However, the media and government officials have promoted some election involvement by other Big Tech platforms and billionaires, as they worked with social media platforms to censor election information.

Leading up to and following Musk’s interview with Trump, multiple media outlets criticized the tech billionaire’s involvement in elections.

On Tuesday, Musk reposted a screenshot of negative news headlines regarding his interview with Trump.

“A wall of negative headlines was so predictable,” Musk wrote, later adding, “All this does is drive even more people to listen to the conversation themselves and realize how much the legacy media lies to them!”

Ahead of the interview, The Guardian published a story on Monday headlined, “Elon’s politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation.” U.S. News and World Report had an article last week with the headline, “X-Factor: How Elon Musk Is Influencing the Presidential Election.” Germany’s Deutsche Welle ran a story last week titled, “How Elon Musk uses X to meddle in world politics.” An NBC News article from last week was headlined with “Elon Musk's misleading election claims have accrued 1.2 billion views on X, new analysis says.”

The Guardian claimed that because of Musk’s ownership of X, elections officials’ fear has come true regarding “a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.”

NBC News’ article noted that an analysis by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that there have been “50 instances this year when Musk posted election claims that have been debunked by independent fact-checkers but spread widely on the app anyway.”

Government officials and politicians have also targeted Musk for election disinformation on X. European Union Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton on Monday posted a letter on X, suggesting that the content of the Trump interview could potentially be relevant to an ongoing probe of X. However, Breton did not receive approval from the president of the European Commission, according to the body on Tuesday.

Last week, five secretaries of state sent a letter to Musk, demanding he make changes to his Grok chatbot after it gave false election information.

The secretaries, all but one of whom are Democrats, said that hours after President Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race, "false information on ballot deadlines produced by Grok was shared on multiple social media platforms."

The letter recommended that the solution be to follow OpenAI's example, which included programming ChatGPT "to direct users to CanIVote.org - a nonpartisan resource from professional election administrators of both major parties - when asked about elections in the U.S."

Following the X interview between Musk and Trump, the United Auto Workers Union on Tuesday announced that it had filed federal labor charges against both the Tesla CEO and the former president over alleged worker intimidation.

The union pointed to the Monday interview, saying that "Trump and Musk had a rambling, disorganized conversation on Monday evening in front of over one million listeners in which they advocated for the illegal firing of striking workers."

However, while Musk has been the target of critical headlines, another tech billionaire is receiving favorable ones.

Earlier this month, the Washington Post published an article with the headline, “Without Zuckerberg money, limited private funding available for elections.” The story noted how Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is staying out of this election cycle, in contrast to 2020 when he donated most of the $350 million that the Center for Tech and Civic Life granted to local elections offices for election administration.

The nonprofit has claimed its 2020 election grants — colloquially known as "Zuckerbucks" — were allocated, allegedly without partisan preference to make voting safer amid the pandemic. However, a House Republican investigation found that less than 1% of the funds were spent on personal protective equipment. Most of the funds were focused on get-out-the-vote efforts and registrations.

While CTCL claims that more grants were awarded to counties won by former President Donald Trump than President Joe Biden, the nonprofit gave larger grants and more money per capita to Democratic counties than to Republican ones. Trump won more than five times as many counties as Biden in 2020.

Amid controversy surrounding the disproportionate resources funneled to Democratic jurisdictions and claims that the imbalance helped sway the election in Biden's favor, 28 states have either restricted or banned private funding of election offices, according to Capital Research Center.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself has interfered with U.S. elections almost 40 times since 2008, according to a study conducted by the Media Research Center.

Government officials have repeatedly worked with social media platforms and Big Tech to censor what they consider to be election mis- and disinformation, particularly during the 2020 and 2022 elections.

In Maricopa County, Ariz., during the 2022 elections, a plan was drafted to monitor and combat election disinformation. The plan suggested the county “should partner with people whose opinions are respected, whose values of democracy we share, and whose reach is greater—or different in important ways—than ours.”

The county previously told Just the News that the plan “was a draft document of ideas that were brought up in a meeting but never implemented.”

On the national level, Congress has investigated election censorship by social media companies with the federal government.

In February 2023, House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., alleged that Big Tech giants such as Twitter are "under the control of people who are hostile to the fundamental American principles of free speech" and colluded with federal agencies to censor stories embarrassing to President Joe Biden and his family. 

Comer said his investigators had substantiated that there was "coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process" that began even before Twitter famously censored New York Post stories in October 2020 about the contents of Hunter Biden's now infamous laptop.

Mike Benz, executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, told Just the News on Tuesday that the media and Democrats “don’t want to emphasize the role of influential billionaires on their side because a lot of their talking points involve being against” wealthy individuals. Therefore, “when the system is on their side, it’s a self-own.”

However, the left has “lost some of their billionaire assets this time around,” he added, as Zuckerberg isn’t privately funding election administration this year as he did in 2020.

Also, Trump has had “many Silicon Valley investors that he didn't have in 2020,” Benz said, which has helped him amid his criminal and civil lawsuits.

Musk buying X is “a nightmare” for the heads of social media platforms since they “had total information control” from about 2017 until 2022. Now that “information can flow freely on X,” it can be spread to other social media platforms, Benz explained.

“Elon is very unique from many angles,” including being a “universally beloved figure outside of politics,” so the media “don't know what to do with him, other than try to cut him down to size,” he noted.