MSNBC Guest: Elon Musk Is ‘Abusing His Privileged Position to Sow Disinformation’

Wallace: “Imran, take us through what Elon Musk is doing and the theories as to what his motives are.”

AHMED: “Well, unfortunately, I can’t tell you what’s in the hearts of any individual, but I can tell you what our researchers have been studying with Mr. Musk’s own outpour on his platform X. We examined posts about the U.S. elections that he’d posted between January the 1st and July the 31st, identifying 50 posts that independent fact-checkers found to be false. Now, those 50 posts had accrued 1.2 billion views, and there were three main categories. There was an AI-generated fake video of the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris that had 100 million plus views. There were claims that Democrats are importing voters, the great replacement theory, a really, really dangerous lie that has led to bloodshed on American streets at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. It’s the same conspiracy theory that led to the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, and to the assassination of Jo Cox, a member of parliament in my home country, the United Kingdom, and 250 million views for claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud. None of the posts display the community note, which is odd, because Mr. Musk says that community notes, the sort of the self-regulation scheme for posting, is a way of ensuring that it’s an immediate way to refute anything false, are the exact words he said. None of them carried one of those community notes, and begs the question, is he suppressing notes on his own posts — [inaudible] his own users. But it does appear clear that he’s abusing his privileged position to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust in the electoral process. Precisely the kind of conspiracy theories that lead them to, you know, atrocious assaults on election workers and the kinds of things that the Secretary of State was just talking about.”