Elon Musk's misleading election claims have been viewed more than two billion times on X, according to analysis

Washington
CNN
—

Ahead of the high-stakes 2024 presidential election, Elon Musk has posted a barrage of false and misleading claims about the election on his social media platform, generating more than 2 billion views this year, according to a new analysis by a nonprofit that tracks misinformation.

Musk, the billionaire X owner who endorsed former President Donald Trump in July, has become a leading figure in U.S. politics in addition to his long-standing reputation as an enterprising science leader at Tesla and SpaceX. He has donated more than $118 million to a pro-Trump super PAC and campaigned to run for Trump in Pennsylvania.

According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk has posted a seemingly endless stream of political messages on his social media platform, many supporting Trump and far-right political narratives, generating more than 17.1 billion views since the endorsement in July have. Musk's giant megaphone generated twice as many views as all political ads on the platform combined during that period, amounting to about $24 million in campaign ads, the group said.

CCDH's research is based on an analysis of publicly available data from X about Musk's own political campaign contributions and spending to promote ads on the platform. The nonprofit tallied how many views Musk received on 87 specific posts that contained false claims about the 2024 election that were debunked by fact-checkers. CNN has also refuted many of these false and distorted claims, including Musk's baseless claim that undocumented immigrants vote en masse for Democrats in US elections.

As polls have shown a close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Musk has repeatedly used the platform to spread the false claim that Democrats are “importing voters” by “flying millions” of undocumented immigrants into the US. , so they can vote for Harris in the 2024 election and “make swing states permanently blue.” He posted dozens of reruns of this debunked far-right conspiracy theory to his more than 200 million X followers.

“Given the sheer frequency with which Elon Musk posts disinformation and partisan rhetoric, it is almost inevitable that he will be one of the main spreaders of election-related disinformation this cycle,” Imran Ahmed, the group's founder, told CNN on Saturday.

A spokesperson for X did not respond to CNN's request for comment on the new data.

Ahmed, a harsh Musk critic, said X had become a “perpetual disinformation machine” since Musk removed many of the site's guardrails that protected the platform from disinformation. The 2024 election will be the first presidential cycle in which the platform will be under Musk's control since he took over the company formerly known as Twitter two years ago.

“He is using the platform to convince people that elections are rigged,” Ahmed said, adding that he believes “it is such a tragic waste of a phenomenally powerful tool.”

X discloses data on how much political campaign spending was spent on ads on the platform, and it is also public how many views those ads receive. Based on that information, Ahmed's group determined that Musk's election-related contributions — boosting Trump and condemning Vice President Kamala Harris — were worth about $24 million.

CCDH is a regular target of Musk's hate and he recently called the group is a “criminal organization.” He sued the group last year, but the case was dismissed by a federal judge, who said in a harsh ruling that the litigation was aimed at “punishing” the group for its criticism of X.

Musk's latest outburst against the group came after internal documents were released that showed one of its priorities was to “kill Musk's Twitter.” Ahmed told The Guardian that this involved combating Musk's pro-disinformation business model.