There are a lot of unfortunate similarities between billionaire Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump. Both are petty and small-minded and crave the adulation of some of the most toxic people on the internet. But the most confounding connection hovers over Musk’s administration of X, just as it did over Trump’s White House, which is the question: “Just how much of this is on purpose?”
Since acquiring X in late 2022, Musk has worked overtime to take a sledgehammer to what he’s perceived as the website’s faults. He’s laid off most of the staff, instituted wild swings in content moderation policy and otherwise broken what was once a vital part of the information ecosystem. The damage done is coming into sharp focus ahead of this fall’s presidential election, as a series of actions from the site broadly, and from Musk himself, raise suspicions of the reactionary CEO’s putting his thumb on the scale for Trump.
After the success of a “Black Women for Harris” call on Zoom, another group, “White Dudes for Harris,” quickly followed its lead with a Zoom fundraiser of its own — raking in $4 million to support Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. But during that same call, the group’s X account, @dudes4harris, was suspended. Many quickly pointed fingers at Musk, accusing him of suspending the account because of its success and trying to keep more X users from donating.
It’s not insignificant that just days before, Musk retweeted a Harris parody ad, in which a deepfake version of Harris appeared to call herself “the ultimate diversity hire.” Despite being a deepfake — digitally altering video of Harris’ mouth to match a voiceover — there was no label to indicate the video was manipulated, potentially breaking X’s own policies.
Meanwhile, the “artificial intelligence” tool that Musk ordered built for the platform, Grok, has put out misleading info of late, falsely claiming that Harris has missed the ballot deadline in key swing states after President Joe Biden dropped out last month. And as CNBC reported, a federal political action committee that Musk created set up a website that claimed to help viewers register to vote. People with ZIP codes in battleground states, however, got no such help, instead only having their personal data collected.
The last two of those have prompted major concern from election officials. A group of five secretaries of state drafted an open letter to Musk to call him to task for Grok’s misinformation and urge him to fix the bot’s output. Separately, a spokesperson for Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who signed on to that letter, also informed CNBC that her office is investigating whether America PAC’s information-gathering bait-and-switch was a violation of state election law.
To be sure, none of the above cases are slam dunk evidence of shady practices at Musk’s X. The PAC’s webpage could just be broken, as one person with knowledge of its operations told CNBC that the links in question once worked — which tracks with Musk’s generally incompetent management of the site formerly known as Twitter. Experts likewise told CNBC that it’s unclear whether any Michigan laws were violated, even if it weren’t merely an innocent snafu. Grok’s promoting misinformation about ballots could also be less about Musk’s own issues and more about the shoddy state of AI in general.
As for the “White Dudes for Harris” account’s being suspended? The Washington Post reported it was taken down for hours “because of ‘a user report’ for ‘violating [X’s] rules against evading suspension.” It’s not unthinkable that an unofficial account with no direct link to the Harris campaign’s blowing up that quickly — and asking people for money — tripped an internal alarm to ward off potential fraud.
It’s a morass of high-stakes chaos and confusion, and it’s bringing up memories of Trump’s time in office for me. From the beginning of his administration, his increasingly sycophantic staffers transformed his whims into policy — and the results were frantic and volatile. But especially in the early days, it was often valid for an observer to stop and wonder how much of what we were seeing was normal government activity tinged through the lens of Trumpism versus actual departures from the norm. In those moments, it was likewise usually up in the air how much of the stress test of the system was the result of incompetence or deliberately plotted extremism.
What I came to realize then, though, is that the answer to “is this incompetence or malice” all too often is “it doesn’t matter.”
Intention was, and is, less important than the real-world effects of what we’re seeing. Whether due to malevolence or being terrible at his job, Musk has made X into a cesspool for anyone hoping to find the truth. And the reality is that as Musk has become more openly revanchist in his worldview, X has become a platform that is all too willing to let right-wing misinformation spread. It’s a forgoing of responsibility that is having deadly impact in the United Kingdom — and could have similarly disastrous effects if left unchecked during the U.S. election.
