Musk at a symposium on antisemitism in Krakow, Poland, Jan. 22, 2024Beata Zawrzel/AP
Elon Musk has said he wants X, formerly known as Twitter, to be the “public square” of the internet, an essential place for discourse and democracy. But there’s a major problem: Disinformation is running rampant on X in the lead-up to the November election, including content targeting Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As Mother Jones reported on Sunday, that content includes deepfakes shared by Musk himself and by an account that reposts Donald Trump’s feed from Truth Social. Musk, who has owned X since fall 2022, has endorsed Trump for president.
Leading election officials have grown concerned about potential harm from X. On Monday, five secretaries of state—those from Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington, and New Mexico—sent Musk a letter demanding he “immediately implement changes” to Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, after it informed users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states. That is false.
About 24 hours after Mother Jones first inquired with the Trump campaign and X about the deepfake, X labeled it “manipulated media” but left it online.
The letter states that the false information was shared “repeatedly in multiple posts—reaching millions of people,” and continually disseminated by Grok until it was finally corrected, 10 days after Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris’s candidacy. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, who spearheaded the letter-writing initiative, told the Washington Post: “This is a case where the owner of the public square (the social media company itself) is the one who introduced and spread the bad information—and then delayed correcting its own mistake after it knew that the information was false.”
Simon and the other signatories represent five of the nine states that were the subject of the disinformation; the others include Indiana, Alabama, Ohio, and Texas. (A spokesperson for Simon said his office offered for all nine states to take part in the letter.) Four of the signatories to the letter are Democratic secretaries of state, apart from Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, a Republican.
The letter asks Musk to follow OpenAI’s lead by directing Grok users to CanIVote.org, a nonpartisan website focused on voter registration, when users ask about elections. But that seems unlikely, given that Musk previously described OpenAI’s ChatGPT as being “deeply ingrained” with what he calls the “woke mind virus.” And when X launched Grok last November, the company described it as being designed to “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”
Spokespeople for X and the Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones regarding the letter to Musk.
In recent days, two phony videos of Harris have circulated on X—thanks to Trump and Musk. As I detailed on Sunday, those videos have racked up tens of millions of views despite appearing to be in violation of X’s own terms of service, which prohibit the sharing of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”
The first, a doctored video known as a “deepfake,” was shared by Musk himself on July 26, and featured fake audio that depicted Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire” and degrading President Biden. The post remains up on Musk’s account—where he calls the video “amazing,” alongside a laughing emoji—and has drawn more than 134 million views.
The second deepfake features doctored video of Harris derived from remarks she made after the release on Friday of Americans wrongfully imprisoned by Russia. Trump shared the phony video on Truth Social on Saturday; it was soon reshared on X by an account that posts Trump’s Truth Social content verbatim. The video had received more than 764,000 views on X as of Tuesday.
It is unclear who doctored and first posted that phony video on Truth Social. In response to specific questions from Mother Jones on Sunday about the deepfake, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung replied, “your phone or computer must be fucked up because the audio/video matches up.”
But by Monday afternoon—about 24 hours after Mother Jones first inquired with the Trump campaign and X about the deepfake—X labeled it “manipulated media,” leaving it online. (The platform’s policy says it adds such labels when it does not remove content, a step it only takes in instances of “high-severity violations.”)
Cheung did not respond to a follow-up question about the “manipulated media” label.
As I also reported on Sunday, the doctored videos and the false election claims from Grok are not the first disinformation targeting Harris on X. They are unlikely to be the last, in light of Musk’s full-throated support for Trump and penchant for provocation. On Tuesday, Musk declared “war” on advertisers that X alleges illegally boycotted the platform over politics.
