In the spring of 2020, when President Donald J. Trump wrote messages on Twitter warning that increased reliance on mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” the platform ran a corrective, debunking his claims.
“Get the facts about mail-in voting,” a content label read. “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud,” the hyperlinked article declared.
This month, Elon Musk, who has since bought Twitter and rebranded it X, echoed several of Mr. Trump’s claims about the American voting system, putting forth distorted and false notions that American elections were wide open for fraud and illegal voting by noncitizens.
This time, there were no fact checks. And the X algorithm — under Mr. Musk’s direct control — helped the posts reach large audiences, in some cases drawing many millions of views.
Since taking control of the site, Mr. Musk has dismantled the platform’s system for flagging false election content, arguing it amounted to election interference.
Now, his early election-year attacks on a tried-and-true voting method are raising alarms among civil rights lawyers, election administrators and Democrats. They worry that his control over the large social media platform gives him an outsize ability to reignite the doubts about the American election system that were so prevalent in the lead-up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
As Mr. Trump’s victory in New Hampshire moved the race closer to general election grounds, the Biden campaign for the first time criticized Mr. Musk directly for his handling of election content on X: “It is profoundly irresponsible to spread false information and sow distrust about how our elections operate,” the Biden campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said this week in a statement to The New York Times.
“It’s even more dangerous coming from the owner of a social media platform,” she added.
What is angering the Biden campaign is delighting pro-Trump Republicans and others who depict the old Twitter as part of a government-controlled censorship regime that aided Mr. Biden in 2020. Under a system now in dispute at the Supreme Court, government officials alerted platforms to posts they deemed dangerous, though it was up to the companies to act or not.
“Oh, boo hoo,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, a lawyer whose firm represents Mr. Trump, said of the Democrats’ complaints. Ms. Dhillon has sued the company for suspending an election-denying client’s account after receiving a notice from the California election officials — the sort of government interplay Mr. Musk has repudiated. She noted the platform was now “a much better place for conservatives,” and said of Mr. Musk, “he’s great.”…