The growing danger of Elon Musk’s misinformation machine

Elon Musk spent Election Day on X praising men, amplifying anti-immigrant conspiracies, and accusing Democrats of voter fraud. It was all pretty on-brand for the billionaire, who has become one of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters and a one-man misinformation machine. When it was clear early Wednesday morning that Trump would win the presidency, Musk told his followers: “You are the media now.” A statement like that would have been laughable even a month ago, when estimates showed that X, formerly Twitter, had dropped nearly 80 percent in value since Musk purchased the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Until its transformation into X, the platform was regarded by some as a once-vibrant place on the internet that Musk utterly destroyed. But after Musk spent at least $119 million to get Trump elected and turned his platform into a MAGA megaphone — and then Trump won — the social media site’s real value is starting to take new shape. From the day his Twitter purchase went through, Musk vowed to make free speech central to the platform’s future. He purged the company’s trust and safety staff, setting a precedent that other social media companies followed. Since then, however, Musk has been willing to let authoritarian regimes dictate how X will work in their countries. In the United States, more free speech on X meant more misinformation and an embrace of right-wing politics. X is certainly not the biggest social media platform, but as other major platforms continue to shy away from policing content and Trump heads back to the White House, X certainly looks more influential than it did last week. You might not like this. Since buying the platform in 2022, Musk has helped turn X into an epicenter of election misinformation. With 203 million followers, Musk has the biggest reach on X and is the platform’s most prominent pusher of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda. At Musk’s request last year, X changed the site’s algorithm to put his posts in more people’s feeds — posts that increasingly urged people not to trust the outcome of the election. The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates that Musk’s misleading posts about the election have been viewed more than 2 billion times this year. Gone are the warning labels that Twitter once used to flag false or misleading information. Musk replaced that system with a crowd-sourced fact-checking program called Community Notes. He called it “the best source of truth on the internet.” Unfortunately, the new system doesn’t work very well. [Image: When he wasn’t onstage, Elon Musk spent much of the Trump campaign’s October 27 Madison Square Garden rally standing alongside Melania Trump. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/11/GettyImages-2182521573.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] So if your feed feels as though it’s especially full of right-wing voices and conspiracy theories, that’s because it probably is. It’s not exactly a coordinated effort by Musk’s lieutenants to push your views to the right. It’s just how X is designed these days. It’s way too soon to tell just how big a role X played in Trump’s reelection. We also don’t know what, if anything, Musk will do differently with the platform as he eyes some sort of role in the new administration. You can count on continuing to question everything you see on social media, though. “The problem will get worse because there are no guardrails in place right now,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “All the trends are moving in the wrong direction.” Indeed, thanks to the apathy of social media platforms and the rise of AI, lying on the internet has never been easier. And if you’re on X, it’s part of the appeal. The right will continue to rule X Leading up to the election, opinions on the fate of X were grim. There were plenty of reports on the dangers of election misinformation on the platform or Musk’s broken promises about what X would do by now. Bloomberg columnist Dave Lee argued that the platform was simply failing, losing users and relevance. That seems less likely now. Despite rumors of its demise, X is still quite big. X told advertisers as recently as September that it has over 570 million monthly active users, dwarfing right-wing platforms like Truth Social and Rumble, whose users are in the hundreds of thousands. It is also much bigger than platforms like Mastodon and Blue Sky, which progressives fled to after Musk bought Twitter. Meanwhile, Meta recently said its Twitter-replacement platform, Threads, has 275 million monthly active users. A big difference between the two? Meta limits the amount of political content you see on Threads. It looks like people are either staying on X or flocking to it for unfiltered politics news. Political news on Twitter used to be marginal, where celebrities were the main draw. The celebrities have left, and now X is the most popular major social media platform for keeping up with politics, according to a Pew survey published in June. There has also been a major partisan shift. Democrats historically dominated political discussion on the platform, but X has become dominated by right-wing voices in just the last couple of years. Posts from Republicans are far more likely to go viral on X, and once-popular Democrat accounts have seen their audiences disintegrate, according to a recent Washington Post investigation. [Image: Elon Musk jumped onstage at an October 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and became a meme in the process. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/11/GettyImages-2176089209.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Republicans have also changed their minds about the platform’s impact on democracy. While Twitter was once framed as the platform that censored conservative voices, X has become the right’s favorite place for freedom. Only 17 percent of Republicans thought Twitter was good for democracy in 2021, but 53 percent said X was good for democracy in 2024, according to the Pew study. “Democratic users are much more likely to think people getting harassed is a major problem on the platform, and on the flip side, Republicans who post about politics are especially likely to do so because their views feel welcome there,” Colleen McClain, one of the authors of the Pew study, told me this week. McClain added that “in recent years, we haven’t seen any mass exodus or flocking to or from X in our data, either overall or by party.” None of this should come as a huge surprise if you’ve spent any time on X. But the partisan split took on new dimensions leading up to this year’s election, if only because the Republicans who felt like their voices were heard on X also felt heard at the ballot box. Their guy won, and maybe the weird, violent memes on X helped. Elon Musk is just getting started We don’t know if X will grow or change — or just stay its same problematic self — as Trump prepares to take office again. We do know Musk isn’t done with politics. Musk was at Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago as the results rolled in on election night, and there’s good reason to believe we’ll see the SpaceX owner in DC soon enough. As far as politics go, Musk says he’s not done funding political races. In a livestream on X, Musk said his America PAC would “keep going after this election, and prepare for the midterms and any intermediate elections.” Trump, meanwhile, said in his victory speech, “We have a new star. A star is born — Elon!” In September, Trump promised Musk a role heading up a task force to review federal expenditures, one that would make “drastic reforms” to the federal government. This makes sense because Musk had been the one who pitched the idea for such a task force to the president-elect. Trump even suggested a new job title, “Secretary of Cost Cutting,” while Musk suggested he’d be head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which does not exist and whose acronym is a reference to a dog-themed cryptocurrency. Musk later said at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally that he wanted to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, which would be very difficult. It’s easy, however, to see how Musk’s many companies stand to benefit immensely from a close relationship with the Trump administration. SpaceX is already one of NASA’s primary contractors, pulling in hundreds of millions if not several billions of dollars with every contract. Musk’s contact with Vladimir Putin reportedly put these contracts in jeopardy, although knowing what we know about Trump’s affinity for the Russian autocrat, the president-elect might not mind this. Tesla also stands to benefit, which explains why the company’s stock soared after Trump’s victory was secured. The EV company wants to roll out a massive fleet of robotaxis, a tall order that comes with significant regulatory challenges. Tesla’s self-driving car program in general has faced pushback from federal authorities, including a recently announced investigation into the system. Regulatory approval and investigations can be easier, of course, if you bankrolled the president’s final push to reelection. Musk’s bet on developing artificial general intelligence, xAI, can also look forward to more cooperation from the federal government. The second Trump administration could pave the way for xAI to get access to cheap energy, especially as it faces heat for running gas generators without permits to power its data center in Memphis. [Image: The image of Elon Musk carrying a sink won laughs online but did not endear the billionaire to his new employees at Twitter. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/11/GettyImages-1244262469.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] On top of these lucrative potential deals, the idea that X might win new relevance and influence must feel like a bonus to Musk. For its right-wing users, though, X is finally the digital town square they were promised so many months ago. It seems like just yesterday, Musk was carrying a sink into Twitter’s headquarters on his first day as the company’s owner. (“Let that sink in” is supposed to be the joke there.) Musk paid tribute to that post on X just after midnight on election night. Except this time, in a doctored photo, he was carrying a sink into the Oval Office. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!