A brand new report from the British non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) discovered X proprietor Elon Musk unfold misinformation concerning the US election and the Democrats’ presidential marketing campaign in 50 posts this yr alone. His assertions proceed to go unchecked on the platform, not even by means of its personal “Neighborhood Notes” function. CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed says the absence of those grassroots fact-checks present “that his enterprise is failing woefully to comprise the type of algorithmically-boosted incitement that everyone knows can result in real-world violence, as we skilled on Jan. 6, 2021.”
The report cites 50 posts made on Musk’s X account from January 1 to July 31 that made claims concerning the election which have been confirmed false by impartial fact-checkers. The posts overwhelmingly contain allegations of the Democratic get together importing voters to achieve an electoral benefit. He pushed conspiracy theories that “The Dem Party goal is to import voters” on March 28 and “Dems won’t deport, because every illegal is a highly likely vote at some point” on February 26. The actual fact checking web site Politifact rated the latter declare as “False” citing the three.6 million immigrants faraway from the US below President Biden’s administration between February 2021 to September 2023.
Round half a dozen of Musk’s posts additionally falsely insist the US election system is meaningfully susceptible to fraud. He known as for the elimination of digital voting machines due to their “risk of being hacked by humans or AI” in a X submit he made on June 15. He additionally asserted that “Mail-in and drop box ballots should not be allowed,” accompanied by a video of Fox Information’ Jesse Waters and Speaker of the Home Mike Johnson making claims concerning the ease of which non-citizens can vote in American elections. Neither submit has been corrected. (The Brennan Center for Justice has known as situations of voter fraud “extraordinarily uncommon” and notes that states have “a number of layers of safety to guard in opposition to malfeasance.”)
Certainly one of Musk’s posts even featured an AI-generated deepfake of Democratic nominee and present Vice President Kamala Harris. The faked fooage options the voice of somebody claiming to be Harris speaking about how she’s the “final variety rent” and the way she tries to “sound black” and “pretends to rejoice Kwanzaa.” As soon as once more, the submit has no neighborhood word or correction, regardless that sharing “artificial, manipulated, or out-of-context media” is in direct contravention of X’s policies.
The CCDH report says the mixed 50 tweets have been seen roughly 1.2 billion instances on X.
Primarily based on these and different posts written by Musk, Ahmed known as for the modification of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1986 to incorporate social media firms “to be held liable in the identical means as any newspaper, broadcaster or enterprise throughout America.”
The CCDH is at present concerned in a legal battle with Musk and X Corp. The dad or mum firm of X filed a federal lawsuit in San Francisco in opposition to the non-profit group claiming it illegally scraped its servers and purposely picked hateful posts as a part of “a scare marketing campaign to drive away advertisers,” in accordance with courtroom paperwork.
We tried to achieve X for an opportunity to remark however are unlikely to obtain a fulsome response — the positioning successfully dissolved its public relations staff below Musk’s stewardship.
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