Election officials are outmatched by Elon Musk’s misinformation machine

CNN
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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.

A spokesperson for X did not address Musk’s activities but said X is enforcing its policies related to election interference and misleading content.

CNN has sent questions about election officials’ concerns to an email address associated with Musk. CNN has also requested comment from one of Musk’s attorneys.

Election officials say they are simply outmatched up against Musk’s followers and the X algorithm.

“Election officials, they have a very hard job – their job is to be election officials not to be Tweeters,” said Renée DiResta, an expert in disinformation and an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

“If no algorithm is going to boost your content in any way but it is boosting the contents of prominent people who are deeply suspicious of elections and tweeting conspiracy theories, you’re at a structural disadvantage,” DiResta added.

This week Musk directed his followers to report election irregularities to an “Election Integrity Community” on X. The feed is administered by Musk’s America PAC, which is bolstering Trump’s campaign. The feed included some election claims that had already been debunked by state officials.

“It’s just a staggering situation with him at the helm,” said Nina Jankowicz, CEO of the American Sunlight Project, which aims to expose disinformation. “I don’t know if anything can fact-check him.”

Personal and security risks

Benson said her strategy of trying to fact-check Musk on X comes with a personal risk.

“The first time he attacked our election system, I had to take a beat and realize that if I were to respond as I did, ultimately, I’d have to check to make sure my family was safe first, and I’d called my security team and let them know to expect an uptick in threats and all the rest, and that’s very real,” she told CNN.

“But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try consistently, with the truth on our side, to make sure the facts get out there,” Benson added.

Benson also said her team has attempted to find unique ways to get accurate information about the election out to voters in Michigan by empowering trusted messengers to share it. This week, her office gathered business and labor leaders to brief them on how the state ensures every valid vote is tabulated on election night and beyond.

Election officials in Pennsylvania are similarly attempting to fact-check Musk’s false claims on X but acknowledge those efforts are unlikely to stymie the spread of election lies.

“Elon Musk is a huge problem,” one Pennsylvania election official said. The official told CNN the strategy at this point is more about “creating a paper trail” that various claims have been debunked should they appear in any post-election legal challenges as they did in 2020.

Musk is also making headlines in Pennsylvania as he is trying to move a lawsuit over his $1 million giveaway to voters into federal court, potentially averting a hearing Thursday in Philadelphia state court that he was required to attend. At the center of the legal battle is a daily $1 million sweepstakes that Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, called America PAC, is offering to registered voters in battleground states.

His lawyers filed a “motion of removal” in federal court late Wednesday night. This typically pauses the state case and puts the matter in the hands of a federal judge – unless and until that judge decides to send the case back to state courts.

In Georgia, election officials see little point in trying to engage with Musk directly, instead turning to the method they relied on in 2020 to beat back misinformation: Regular press conferences with election officials rebutting the latest election falsehoods.

The conservative backlash against social media companies monitoring platforms for misleading information around elections has had a chilling effect on social media sites beyond X. But an official in one battleground state said they at least have a point of contact for companies like Meta, whereas executives at X are effectively unreachable.

For experts like Jankowicz, who has been criticized by Republicans and was called to testify before Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s so-called weaponization of government subcommittee, it’s a dark irony that they’ve been silent on Musk’s activism.

“What Elon Musk is doing – the campaigning that he’s doing, the donations that he is making, the way he has engineered Twitter to be a maelstrom of conservative disinformation – is far closer to election interference than any of the allegations that conservatives have made against social media platforms from 2016 to 2022,”Jankowicz said.

Among Democrats on Capitol Hill, there is concern that social media platforms are wholly unprepared for the deluge of misinformation about voting in the days before and after Election Day.

“I don’t feel I’ve got a full answer yet from the platforms themselves of what they’re going to do to surge capabilities both those last few days pre-election and the few days post-election,” Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the intelligence committee, told CNN.

At a September 18 hearing Warner’s committee held on foreign election influence and social media firms, X was conspicuously absent.

“Our invited witness was X’s Head of Global Affairs, Nick Pickles, who resigned on September 6,” an X spokesperson said via email. The spokesperson did not reply when CNN asked why the company did not send someone to the hearing in Pickles’ place.

This story has been updated with additional developments.