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Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation, but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gone (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 9 months ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

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Civil rights lawyers and Democrats are sounding alarms about Mr. Musk’s claims about voting. The Biden campaign called his posts “profoundly irresponsible.”

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.

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[-] autotldr 2 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The freer flow of false voting information is hardly the only perceived threat to elections building on social platforms, with the rise of artificial intelligence, increasingly realistic deep fakes and a growing acceptance of political violence.

While Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire, which includes Fox News, has exercised unrivaled influence over United States politics for decades, he has largely kept behind the scenes, generally leaving it to his editors, producers and hosts to determine the specifics of the coverage.

Exhibiting a distinctly 21st-century form of raw media power, X has also throttled and punished Mr. Musk’s perceived competitors and foes while reinstating accounts that were previously banned for content violations, some relating to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

As Mr. Trump and his allies ramped up their attacks on mail voting — a preferred method for Democrats during the coronavirus pandemic — Twitter expanded its policy to remove or label claims that “undermine faith” in elections.

Agreeing with critics who say the measures caused unfair and one-sided censorship, Mr. Musk said he cut the integrity team last fall because it was in fact “undermining election integrity.” He added, “They’re gone.” (His chief executive, Ms. Yaccarino, quickly disputed that characterization, saying the work would continue and even expand.)

This came as a surprise to me.” A couple of days earlier, Mr. Musk implied that Mr. Biden and the Democrats were being lax on immigration because “they are importing voters,” an echo of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump was sharing around the same time.

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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024

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