The world's richest man buys one of the most popular social media platforms and uses it as a propaganda and disinformation machine in support of a presidential candidate. What could go wrong?

A review by the nonprofit that tracks misinformation, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, showed that Elon Musk posted at least 87 claims this year about the U.S. election on X that fact-checkers rated as false or misleading.

Those fake and deceitful posts have racked up over 2 billion views, and that is not for the fact that Musk is a strong influencer alone. There have also been reports about how Musk tweaks X's algorithms such that all the posts reach everyone on the site because perhaps 203 million followers simply are not good enough for him.

CNN first broke the CCDH's story, noting how Musk has given more than $118 million to a super PAC supporting former president Donald Trump's reelection; Musk is the largest donor to Trump's campaign. That PAC has led an advertising campaign impersonating Democrats and targeting registered Republicans with unpopular policies that are not supported by VP Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. They're cartoonishly "woke," with headlines like "Help make our schools as trans-friendly as possible," and "A national, mandatory buy-back program means fewer guns & fewer tragedies. Kamala Harris gets it!\
\
""

A 404 Media report found that in the last two weeks, the PAC increased its Facebook ad spend by 1,000%. Meta waited until the end of last week to ban ads about social issues, elections, or politics.

On X, political ads continue to pump alongside Musk's megaphone. Any X account holder can attest to the political messaging barrages from Musk-mostly in favor of Trump and far-right political narratives. The CCDH determined that Musk's political posts have generated more than 17.1 billion views since the billionaire executive formally endorsed Trump in July. That's twice as many views as all political ads on the platform combined in the period, which works out to about the equivalent of spending $24 million on campaign ads, according to the CCDH.

According to researchers, they managed to identify 746 posts from Musk between July 13 and October 25 containing words related to the U.S. election, including Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, voting, and ballots. The study is based on publicly available data by X about Musk's posts and political campaign spending in support of ads on the platform.

Some of the false or misleading claims by Musk on X are: "Triple-digit increases of illegals in swing states over the past 4 years. Voter importation at an unprecedented scale!" It gathered 21 million views.

The other one said that: "If the Democratic Party big government machine wins this election, they will ban voter ID nationwide, not just in California." It got 11.9 million views.

The study found that as many as 1.3 billion people had already seen Musk's claims regarding Democrats "importing voters."

The analysis also showed how Musk had promoted other vote-related narratives, such as the one about faulty voting systems, which had attracted 532 million views.

There is little or nothing to substantiate this theory that illegal voters are imported from other states to assist given political parties. For any case of voter frauds in the U.S. is not rampant because a rigid verification measure is adopted within the states and federal authorities. Experts said that in making mail ballots, this voting system is verified whenever this is requested by the particular voter, and re verification is observed when bringing it back with the respective votes.

Like any organization that has criticized Musk, CCDH has become a target for the billionaire, who recently called the group a "criminal organization." Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech advocate, tried to sue the CCDH last year but the case was tossed by a federal judge who said the litigation was aimed at "punishing" the organization for criticizing X.

Imran Ahmed, the CEO of CCDH said in a statement that X has "devolved into a hellscape of hate and disinformation" after Musk removed many guardrails on the site that could prevent false information. However, Musk has claimed Community Notes feature on X allows fact-checking by community members, but Ahmed says "it's little more than a bandaid.".

"Elon Musk has shown through personal action his disdain for factuality – is it any surprise that his response to the disinformation crisis on X was so feeble?" Ahmed said.
Ahmed spoke onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week about how generative AI is being used to drive the marginal cost to produce and distribute some piece of disinformation to nearly zero.

So theoretically, you have the perfect loop system in which generative AI is producing, it's distributing, and then it's assessing the performance — A/B testing and improving," he said. "You've got a perpetual bulls-t machine. That's quite worrying.".