The biggest spreader of political divisiveness and incendiary posts on Elon Musk’s revamped Twitter is turning out to be Musk himself.
In just the last two weeks on the platform — since rebranded X — the billionaire provocateur unloaded a string of posts that poured fuel on the fire of Britain’s worst anti-immigration riots in decades; shared a doctored video of Vice President Kamala Harris deeming herself the “ultimate diversity hire” for president; and claimed without evidence that the Biden-Harris administration is “importing vast numbers” of illegal aliens to swing the November election.
Musk’s latest flurry of innuendo, half-truths and lies online is making it increasingly clear that it is the tech mogul — and not just his platform — who poses the greatest challenge to governments struggling to rein in content that can incite extremist violence.
“Elon is weaponizing this in a way it hasn’t been weaponized before,” Democratic strategist Adam Parkhomenko said of Musk’s posts and hands-off approach to others’ content on X. “It just is sort of questionable why he’s allowed to do what he’s doing.”
X did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Angry officials are trying to find levers to pull to influence the world’s richest man.
Some British MPs said Tuesday they plan to haul Musk in for questioning in front of parliament over his posts amid the U.K. riots. Michigan’s secretary of state and North Carolina’s Board of Elections said this week they are launching investigations into potential misuses of personal data by a Super PAC created by Musk after they received complaints.
And on Monday, five state election officials sent a letter to Musk urging him to fix an AI tool on X that falsely suggested last month that Harris was ineligible to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said he recruited other officials, including his Republican counterpart in Pennsylvania, to sign on to the letter because the company had reacted with indifference to earlier complaints.
“It’s important to speak up loudly now because a similar mistake in the future, over the next 92 days, might be a higher-stakes situation,” said Simon, a Democrat. “Today, it’s about ballot access, but if left unchecked and unpoliced, what if next month, it’s about voter registration rules?”
But a strongly worded letter is still just … a strongly worded letter.
“The fact that we have secretaries of state begging a narcissistic billionaire to behave himself suggests to me that we as a society are highly endangered and unprotected by a lack of responsibility and hard decision making that should be made at the highest levels of government,” said Sarah T. Roberts, a former staff researcher at then-Twitter, now a professor at UCLA studying platforms.
And higher-stakes situations are already unfolding in the U.K. British authorities are mobilizing some 6,000 officers as far-right groups plan to target as many as 30 spots around the country following a fatal stabbing attack by a suspect falsely identified as a Muslim immigrant.
Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has doubled down. He initially declared that “civil war is inevitable” in the U.K., comments that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office said had “no justification.” Musk responded by smearing Starmer as “twotierkeir” — an apparent reference to claims that British police treat violence less harshly when the perpetrators are not white. U.K. Justice Minister Heidi Alexander has urged “everyone who has a platform” to exercise “their power responsibly.”
Musk also went on a broader battle footing. On Tuesday, X brought a federal antitrust lawsuit against advertisers who had paused their spending after Musk’s acquisition of the site. “We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” Musk said. “To put it simply, people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is undermined and some viewpoints are not funded over others as part of an illegal boycott,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote in an open letter.
