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CBS Evening News

The X factor: How Trump ally Elon Musk is using social media to prime voter mistrust ahead of 2024 election






    By
                        
                      Julia Ingram, 
                              
                      Madeleine May


October 21, 2024 / 8:17 PM EDT
          / CBS News
        



















Elon Musk's PAC giveaway raises legal concerns 













Elon Musk's PAC giveaway raises legal concerns
02:32

Elon Musk has used the social media platform he owns to amass nearly 3.3 billion views on X by fueling doubts about election security issues since January this year — making the tech mogul one of the most viral voices on elections during the 2024 campaign, a CBS News investigation has found. Musk has frequently shared conspiratorial narratives that have been vexing to public officials who are trying to maintain Americans' confidence in the election in the face of a barrage of misinformation and disinformation.  At his first solo appearance at a pro-Trump rally in Philadelphia last week, Musk claimed, "Statistically there are some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely." He then repeated debunked claims about the validity of vote tallies produced by Dominion voting machines. But even before he took the stage, Musk had already emerged as a prolific conduit for election misinformation on X, formerly known as Twitter.  "The goal all along has been to import as many illegal voters as possible," Musk posted in July, echoing the conspiracy that Democrats are purposefully letting immigrants enter the country illegally to vote in the upcoming presidential election. The post gained 45.8 million views.  The CBS News Confirmed team fact-checked Musk's posts on election security and found that 55% contain misleading or false statements, or amplify posts that do. Further analysis of these posts showed that 40 of the accounts Musk replied to or reposted were accounts researchers have identified as promoters of voter fraud claims. 


Musk did not respond to CBS News' request for comment. CBS News collected more than 48,000 of Musk's posts over the past four years, with support from the International Center for Journalists Disarming Disinformation program and the research group Convocation Research+Design. The analysis focused on X posts on the topic of election administration, security and operation.  An analysis of nearly 17,000 of Musk's posts from this year, as well as thousands more he replied to or reposted, found 361 posts specifically on the topic of potential election fraud in U.S. elections. Although these election posts represent a small fraction of the dozens of posts Musk publishes each day, each one had an average of 9.3 million views as Musk continues to be the most followed profile on X.  Experts are concerned that such high audience engagement on posts amplifying election fraud conspiracies could set the stage for possible post-election chaos.  


"On election night, if Trump believes he's losing, he is likely to spread massive amounts of disinformation about the existence of fraud," said David Becker, executive director of the Center of Election Innovation and Research.  "I think we can say with near certainty, Elon Musk is going to take those comments and spread them out to hundreds of millions of people to be consumed immediately, while election officials are busy counting ballots," Becker said. Mekela Panditharatne, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice's Elections & Government Program, agreed. "I think that this is galvanizing unfounded fears and concerns about the election process, and preparing for the possibility of unfounded challenges to election results in the aftermath," she said.  Musk's increased engagement with election conspiracies has mirrored his embrace of the establishment political right.  The tech entrepreneur said that he voted Republican for the first time in a Texas congressional race in June 2022. A month later, he wrote that he thought it was time "for Trump to hang up his hat." Over the next two years, posts criticizing President Biden and the prosecution of Trump became more frequent.  On July 13, 2024, the day of the first attempted assassination of Trump, Musk announced his formal endorsement of the Republican candidate for a second term. Since then, his posts have shown full-throated support for Trump. 
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks on stage at a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 5, 2024.

            
                JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

                          
"I have never been materially active in politics before, but this time I think civilization as we know it is on the line," Musk posted last month. "If we want to preserve freedom and a meritocracy in America, then Trump must win." 


Since then he has campaigned with the former president in Arizona and contributed more than $74.95 million to the America PAC, a super PAC that supports Trump's reelection. Musk has also used his platform to go head-to-head with election officials who try to refute his conspiracies. This weekend he posted on X claiming that Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens. Michigan Secretary of State Joceyln Benson responded with a correction, saying that there are not more voters than citizens in the state. "There are 7.2 million active registered voters and 7.9 million citizens of voting age in our state," her post said. "@elonmusk is spreading dangerous disinformation."  "Jocelyn Michelle Benson, shame on you for blatantly lying to the public!" Musk responded. The post amassed 24.2 million views and 39,000 retweets in less than three days.  The skepticism online directed towards election officials like Benson can have real-world impacts. The secretary said that she and her team received an uptick in threats and harassing messages directed to her office after Musk's post. She ended up asking her security team to focus on protecting her children and her executive assistant after messages started coming in using extreme language and echoing the concerns about voter registration numbers, citing two incidents of swatting earlier this year.  "It's unnerving because his actions lead to a direct uptick in threats to me and other election officials around Michigan," she told CBS News. "This is all happening when early voting is unfolding in Michigan, and while my team needs to be focused fully on making voting work properly, they are having to deal with this instead." Benson's experience is not unique. "We have seen a number of election officials who have expressed the view that Musk's posts coincide with a surge in questions from constituents about the integrity of the process," said Panditharatne. "Musk's posts have encouraged vitriol directed at election officials."  Musk focuses on non-citizens, machines and mail voting More than half of Musk's posts on election security this year relate to non-citizen voting or representation in Congress, with many repeating the conspiracy that Democrats under the Biden administration are intentionally allowing an increase in immigration to boost their political power. 


Some posts even extend beyond the upcoming presidential election to a future political landscape.  "My prediction is that if Kamala wins, the Dems will import and legalize enough migrants to ensure a permanent one-party rule that is increasingly socialist (to a confiscatory level) and repressive," wrote Musk in a September post. The idea that Democrats are "importing voters" echoes the "great replacement theory," a conspiracy, widely decried as racist, that White voters are being replaced by non-White voters entering the country. "These kinds of lies make the assumption that the 'real' voters are White voters," said Gilda Daniels, author and professor at the University of Baltimore Law School. "That other-ism, that idea that immigration is out of control, and so we have all these people who are not White [voting]." Non-citizen voting is not widespread, and it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in national elections. Non-citizens who vote can face fines, prison time, or even deportation. A Washington Post analysis of the conservative Heritage Foundation's data found that of 2 billion votes cast since 1979, there were only 85 cases involving allegations of non-citizen voting. Other posts that Musk frequently engages with discuss potential tampering with voting machines, vulnerabilities of absentee voting, and the need for stricter photo ID laws. His posts on mail-in ballots have a combined 344 million views, and posts about voter ID have a combined 524 million views. He also advocates for hand-counting paper ballots without machines, which experts say makes it difficult to audit ballots for accuracy.  "They're throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks," said Becker. "As with all disinformation, it is not based at all on truth or actual policies that need to be improved upon or changed. It is based solely upon outcome, because [Musk] is highly invested in seeing a Donald Trump presidency."  


 Amplification of the extreme  An analysis by Convocation Research + Design, or CoRD, a research lab that focuses on disinformation and the far-right, has found that the accounts he replies to reposts the most on this topic primarily post far-right ideas, including the great replacement theory.  "More and more often these accounts Musk is engaging with are far right, and become further right," said Sam Smith, co-founder of CoRD.  "We have witnessed Musk become more right-wing in his posting, as well as more political." Within his most amplified accounts are several profiles known to engage in far right ideology. On the topic of election security, he engages the most with "EndWokeness," an account known for spreading conspiracies about immigration and posting racist memes. Earlier this year, Musk reposted an EndWokeness post falsely claiming that the number of people registering to vote without a photo ID in three states was "skyrocketing."  "Extremely concerning," Musk wrote in a post that gained 65.7 million views. State election officials confirmed that the numbers in the post represented the number of requests from the states to the Social Security Administration to verify voter identities, not new voter registrations.  Researchers are concerned with the way that Musk's engagement with right-wing accounts may alter the posts other X users see on their profiles. "If Musk frequently engages with or amplifies far-right content, the platform's algorithm may prioritize similar content for his followers. This can lead to an unintended exposure to extreme viewpoints, misinformation, or harmful ideologies," said Smith.  


Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are also among the top ten accounts Musk interacts with on the topic of election integrity: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Sen. Mike Lee's alt account "BasedMikeLee," and Steven Miller, former senior adviser to President Trump, who now runs America First legal.  In response to a thread from Johnson on the SAVE Act, a bill that would have required proof of citizenship to vote, Musk wrote "Those who oppose this are traitors. All Caps: TRAITORS. What is the penalty for traitors again?" The repost had 56.8 million views. For election night, and the days after, experts like Becker are concerned about the reach of Musk's posts and the impact they may have on trust in the process. "When we see attacks on the judiciary, when we see attacks on law enforcement, when we see attacks on election officials, when we see attacks on voters themselves, those will probably be amplified by Musk on his platform that he owns," he said. "So, the ability of the truth to reach citizens is going to be extremely limited while the ability of liars to defraud citizens is going to be maximized," Becker said.  Facts about voting Non-citizen voting refers to voting by unauthorized immigrants, green-card holders, or immigrants on temporary visas. Voting by these groups is not widespread. Federal law requires citizenship to vote in national elections, and voters attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens when they register. Non-citizens who vote can face fines, prison time or even deportation. A Washington Post analysis of the conservative Heritage Foundation's data found that of 2 billion votes cast since 1979, there were only 85 cases involving allegations of non-citizen voting. A study of Arizona voter rolls found 1,934 voters in Arizona were non-citizens — 0.04% of the state's registered voters. After the 2016 election, analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice found 30 cases of suspected non-citizens voting reported by election officials out of 23.5 million votes cast in 42 jurisdictions that were reviewed. 	Non-citizen representation: The Constitution states that all people should be counted in the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives, which is used to calculate the number of electoral votes each state receives. Even if the census includes a citizenship question, according to the Constitution, non-citizens would be counted in the population totals used for determining congressional and electoral representation.  Analyses by the Pew Research Center and Center for Immigration Studies found that not counting non-citizens in apportionment of House seats would have minimal impact on the additional seats that historically lean toward Democrats. Voting machines must pass federal and state certification standards to be deployed and are tested before voters cast their ballots to make sure they are working properly. Additionally, while voting machines are highly accurate in counting votes, widely used paper ballots allow those machine counts to be checked and audited by people. Forty-nine states performed a post-election audit of some kind, including Pennsylvania, which found just 24 discrepancies among the 201,715 total votes officials reviewed in 2023. That's about 1/100 of 1% of all ballots audited. According to the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and others, "All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race" had paper records of each vote.Mail-in voting: Historically, mail ballot systems have had bipartisan trust. Security measures protect against vulnerabilities such as tampering, impersonation and ballot stuffing. Mail-in ballots are enclosed in sealed envelopes that are confirmed for eligibility. The voter's identity is verified by signature and other identifying information to ensure it matches details on file. Multiple election staff members or bipartisan teams are present when ballots are retrieved and handled throughout the process. Election officials track issued ballots to prevent duplicate voting with serial numbers or barcodes, and the number of ballots received is compared to the number of voters who applied for a ballot. Suspicious ballots are investigated and relayed to law enforcement as needed.

Laura Doan, 
                                                  
                                  Emma Li, 
                                                  
                      Rhona Tarrant and 
                                                  
                                  James LaPorta
                  
        contributed to this report. 
      



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Julia Ingram


Julia Ingram is a data journalist for CBS News Confirmed. She uses data analysis and computation to cover misinformation, AI and social media.



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