Ahead of the US election, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, has used the platform as his personal political megaphone.
On July 26, Musk posted a video of Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in which a deepfake of her voice appears to make her say she is the “ultimate DEI hire” and a “deep state puppet.” The post now has a community note indicating it is a parody. But many claimed that, shared without proper context, the video It may have violated X’s policies on synthetic or AI-altered media..
This was the culmination of Musk’s recent political rhetoric. Over the past month, Musk, after officially endorsing former President Donald Trump, also pushed baseless conspiracies of a “coup” following Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and implied that the attempted assassination of Trump could have been the result of an intentional failure by the Secret Service. After backing Trump, Musk announced that he was Start a pro-Trump political action committee (PAC)and initially committed to donating $45 million a month, before backing off.
Former Twitter trust and security employees say Musk’s increasingly partisan behavior around the U.S. election and other major events is a sign he’s doing exactly what he accused former company leaders of doing: playing politics.
“It’s astonishing hypocrisy,” says one former Twitter employee. “Musk is smart enough to know that social media is a media outlet and a way to control the narrative.”
Three former employees, who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, expressed concern that Musk presents a new kind of actor: someone who actively seeks to use a platform to reshape politics both in the U.S. and abroad, and is willing to endure regulatory fines and declining advertising revenue to achieve this.
“He is consolidating his power and has systematically dismantled all indicators of credibility within the company,” the former employee said. “However, I think this takes on added significance when the person he is targeting is a presidential candidate.”
Officials seem to agree. Earlier this week, the secretaries of state of Minnesota, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Mexico sent a letter to X demanding changes to Grok, the platform’s generative AI search tool, after it returned false information claiming that Harris had missed the deadline to be on the presidential ballot in nine states.
Musk and X did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk has been preparing for this moment for years. When he bought Twitter in 2022, he promised free speech absolutism. Upon taking over, Musk immediately fired most of the company’s policy and trust and safety staff, who were responsible for keeping hateful and misinformation content off the platform. This included those responsible for shepherding the platform through a contentious election. As former employees noted, there is now no one at the company who can stand up to an onslaught of election-related misinformation, let alone the kind that Musk himself might spread.