As Elon Musk continues to aggressively share conspiracy theories and misinformation about elections on X, election officials are fighting back.
But even as they are speaking out to try to counteract Musk, the owner of X since 2022, they’re being drowned out on a platform that seemingly favors falsities.
Corrections to Musk’s lies from election officials like Michigan County Clerk Barb Bynum, who regularly uses her 25,000-follower account to share accurate information about how elections work, have oftentimes received far less engagement on the platform.
“My microphone is significantly smaller than the owner of Twitter’s, but I still have to use my platform to correct mis- and disinformation, especially when it is about election administration and the integrity of our elections,” Bynum said in an interview with NBC News.
In three instances in the last month, Musk’s posts highlighting election misinformation have been viewed over 200 times more than fact-checking posts correcting those claims that have been published on X by government officials or accounts.
Musk frequently boosts false claims about voting in the U.S., and rarely, if ever, offers corrections when caught sharing them. False claims he has posted this month routinely receive tens of millions of views, by X’s metrics, while rebuttals from election officials usually receive only tens or hundreds of thousands.
Musk, who declared his full-throated support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in July, is facing at least 11 lawsuits and regulatory battles under the Biden administration related to his various companies.
Earlier this week, Musk gave new life to a false election conspiracy theory: that because Michigan has registered more voters than are eligible voting-age adults, it indicates mass fraud in the swing state.
Bynum posted an explanation: Federal law requires the state to keep voters on voter rolls until they miss two elections. Inactive voters do not receive ballots.
Musk’s post got 32.2 million views. Bynum’s most widely viewed post on the topic saw 63,000. A Community Note — a feature that allows certain X users to vote to add context to posts — was later appended to Musk’s statement including details that were highlighted by Bynum. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson also spoke out about Musk’s tweet, a statement that became a national news item and has been viewed 33 million times. But among officials who have tried to counteract Musk’s misinformation, the amount of attention Benson received is not the norm.
Musk’s posts are nearly inescapable on X. He has 202.2 million followers, by far the most of anyone on the platform. After Musk purchased the site, he ordered engineers to make his posts show up more frequently in the feeds even of people who don’t follow him, according to reporting from the tech news site Platformer and “Character Limit,” a book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, by New York Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. (NBC News has not independently confirmed that reporting.)
On Tuesday, Musk shared a claim that a Philadelphia homeless shelter that serves as the benefits mailing address for 5,200 people stood as a front to “harvest” ballots on behalf of “transients.” Musk’s post did not address the fact that Americans are not legally required to have a home to vote, and can use a shelter to register.
Seth Bluestein, a Republican Philadelphia city commissioner, corrected Musk: not everyone who receives benefits at the shelter uses it to register at that address, and fewer than 150 ballots were mailed to the shelter in 2020.
Bluestein’s tweet received 15,400 views to Musk’s 16.2 million.
“Whether you have 200 million followers or one follower, it is important for everybody to be thoughtful in what they are sharing and get the facts before posting or resharing inaccurate information,” Bluestein told NBC News.
Musk’s habit of making and sharing false claims to underscore his support for Trump — who for most of his political career has also pushed false claims of voting fraud conspiracies — is habitual. On Tuesday, he shared a fake cover story of the Atlantic magazine headlined “Donald Trump is literally Hitler.” Last week at a Pennsylvania rally, he suggested support for the debunked claim that Dominion voting machines were part of a scheme to rig the last U.S. election and falsely claimed that they were used in Philadelphia.
He also frequently posts in support of the false claim that noncitizens are systematically voting in U.S. elections, a conspiracy theory workshopped by conservative groups to lay legal groundwork to contest the election results if Kamala Harris wins the presidency.
On Oct. 6, Musk shared a claim from an election conspiracy theorist that purported that Henrico County, Virginia, was riddled with fraud in 2020 because voter turnout in some precincts there appeared to exceed the registered number of voters.
The next day, Henrico county’s official account explained the discrepancy: Virginia law required the county to allow voters to choose in-person absentee ballots, which do not track which precinct they came from, making the published precinct count inaccurate. The county’s cumulative total voters were accurate: 77.% of registered voters in the county cast a ballot that year.
Musk’s post received 26.7 million views. The county’s correction received 102,000.
Eddie Perez, a member of the nonprofit OSET Institute, which aims to promote public confidence in elections, as well as the former head of Twitter’s civic integrity team before Musk bought the site and laid off those employees, told NBC News that Musk’s approach is either by accident or design telling people to trust election conspiracists over administrators.
“He is at least implicitly telling people: don’t trust the people that are running elections, trust me, trust x.com, trust Donald Trump. We will give you the real information. And I actually think that that’s the most insidious thing that’s happening here,” Perez said.
“You’re constantly building up a kind of armor against rationality, against fact-finding, and against the idea that election officials and responsible media can even be credible,” he said.
