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    • Election workers are being overtaken by Elon Musk’s misinformation machine
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    Election workers are being overtaken by Elon Musk’s misinformation machine

    Caradoc Wyn Posted on



    CNN
    —

    Elon Musk’s misinformation megaphone has created a “huge problem” for election officials in key battleground states, who told CNN they are struggling to combat the wave of falsehoods emanating from the tech billionaire and spreading wildly on his X platform .

    Election officials in key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona have all tried — and largely failed — to vet Musk in real time. At least one has tried to share personal notes asking him to stop spreading baseless claims that could mislead voters.

    “My friends were hand-delivering things to him,” said Stephen Richer, a top election official in Maricopa County in Arizona, a Republican who has faced intense threats for saying the 2020 election was secure.

    “We pulled out more stops than most people have available to try to present (Musk) with accurate information,” Richer added. “It was unsuccessful.”

    Since former President Donald Trump and his allies pushed false claims of voter fraud to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, debunking election misinformation has become a second full-time job for election officials alongside managing the actual election. But Musk — with his ownership of the X Platform, his high-profile endorsement of Trump and his penchant for spreading false claims — posed a unique challenge.

    “The bottom line is that it’s really disappointing that someone with as many resources and as large a platform as him would obviously use those resources and allow that platform to be abused to spread misinformation,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told CNN. when he could help us restore and ensure that people have every right to have confidence in our election results, whatever they may be.”

    Benson is the closest thing to Musk on social media. She dismissed a claim he made about registered voters in the Wolverine State and accused Musk of spreading misinformation. Her post was viewed more than 33 million times, according to the measurement published on X.

    He still failed to convince Musk, who accused Benson of “blatantly lying to the public.”

    This is the conundrum for officials in key battleground states six days before Election Day: They haven’t figured out how to neutralize the misinformation that Musk has increasingly shared with his 200 million followers and spread on the X Platform, formerly known as Twitter has little intervention.

    A spokesman for

    CNN aired questions about election officials Concerns about an email address linked to Musk. CNN has also reached out to one of Musk’s lawyers for comment.

    Election officials say they are simply outnumbered by supporters of Musk and the X algorithm.

    “Election officials have a very tough job — their job is to be election officials, not to be tweeters,” said Renée DiResta, a disinformation expert and associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

    “If no algorithm improves your content in any way, but rather improves the content of prominent people who deeply distrust elections and tweet conspiracy theories, you are 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 managed by Musk’s America PAC, which supports Trump’s campaign. The feed contained some election claims that had already been debunked by state officials.

    “It’s just a stunning situation with him at the helm,” said Nina Jankowicz, CEO of the American Sunlight Project, which seeks to expose disinformation. “I don’t know if anything can verify his facts.”

    Personal and security risks

    Benson said her strategy of trying to verify Musk’s facts on X came with personal risk.

    “When he first attacked our voting system, I had to pause and realized that if I reacted like that, I would ultimately have to first check that my family was safe, and I had called I would inform my security team and letting it know to expect an increase in threats and everything else, 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 come out,” Benson added.

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

    Election officials in Pennsylvania are also trying to fact-check Musk’s false claims about

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

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

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

    In Georgia, election officials see little point in trying to engage with Musk directly and are instead resorting to the method they relied on in 2020 to push back on misinformation: regular news conferences with election officials sharing the latest Refute election falsehoods.

    The conservative backlash against social media companies that monitor platforms for misleading election-related information is having a chilling effect, making social media sites outside of X virtually unreachable.

    For experts like YesNFor Kowicz, who has faced criticism from Republicans and had to testify before Republican Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s so-called “Weaponization of Government” subcommittee, it is a dark irony that they have remained silent on Musk’s activism.

    “What Elon Musk is doing – the campaign he is running, the donations he is making, the way he has turned Twitter into a maelstrom of conservative disinformation – comes far closer to election interference than any of the allegations leveled against conservatives “Social media platforms from 2016 to 2022,” Jankowicz said.

    <p>CNN’s Danny Freeman investigates a viral, fake voter fraud conspiracy theory about nuns in Pennsylvania that was amplified by Elon Musk’s Super PAC.</p> <p>” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=”this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)” onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”1080″ width=”1920 “/></picture> </div> </div></div> </p></div> </div> <div class=

    ‘So wrong’: Pennsylvania nuns falsely accused of voter fraud

    There is concern among Democrats on Capitol Hill that social media platforms are woefully unprepared for the flood of misinformation about voting in the days before and after Election Day.

    “I don’t think I’ve had a full answer yet from the platforms themselves as to what they’re going to do to increase capacity both in the final days before the election and in the few days after the election,” Senator said Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the Intelligence Committee, told CNN.

    At a Warner Committee hearing on foreign election interference and social media companies on September 18, X was conspicuously absent.

    “Our invited witness was Nick Pickles, head of global affairs at X, who resigned on September 6,” an X spokesman said by email. The spokesperson did not respond to CNN’s question about why the company didn’t send someone to the hearing instead of Pickles.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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    Caradoc Wyn
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