Elon Musk’s misinformation megaphone has created a “huge problem” for election officials in key battleground states who told CNN they’re struggling to combat the wave of falsehoods coming from the tech billionaire and spreading wildly on his X platform.
Election officials in pivotal battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona have all tried – and largely failed – to fact-check Musk in real time. At least one has tried passing along personal notes asking he stop spreading baseless claims likely to mislead voters.
“I’ve had my friends hand-deliver stuff to him,” said Stephen Richer, a top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County, a Republican who has faced violent threats for saying the 2020 election was secure.
“We’ve pulled out more stops than most people have available to try to put accurate information in front of (Musk),” Richer added. “It has been unsuccessful.”
Ever since former President Donald Trump and his allies trumpeted bogus claims of election fraud to try to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, debunking election misinformation has become akin to a second full-time job for election officials, alongside administering actual elections. But Musk – with his ownership of the X platform, prominent backing of Trump and penchant for spreading false claims – has presented a unique challenge.
“The bottom line is it’s really disappointing that someone with as many resources and as big of a platform as he clearly has would use those resources and allow that platform to be misused to spread misinformation,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told CNN, “when he could help us restore and ensure people can have rightly placed faith in our election outcomes, whatever they may be.”
Benson has come the closest to matching Musk on social media. She pushed back on a claim he made about registered voters in the Wolverine State, accusing Musk of spreading misinformation. Her post, by the measurement posted on X, gained more than 33 million views.
It still failed to sway Musk, who accused Benson of “blatantly lying to the public.”
Such is the conundrum for officials in key battleground states six days before Election Day: They haven’t identified how to neuter the misinformation Musk has increasingly amplified to his 200 million followers and allowed to permeate on the X, formerly known as Twitter, platform with little intervention.