On a recent Sunday night in Virginia, Henrico County recorder Mark Coakley was waiting for kickoff of the Cowboys-Steelers NFL game, which was delayed due to inclement weather.
Coakley was scanning X, formerly known as Twitter, when he came across a message from the platform’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk. A voice for Trump. Musk retweeted a 2023 tweet saying that “Virginia election integrity leaders” had discovered fraudulent ballots in Henrico County from the 2020 election.
“Is this accurate @CommunityNotes?” Musk posted along with the tweet, appealing to X’s Community Notes feature that allows users to verify a tweet themselves.
Coakley, the county’s chief elections official, declined to respond. On Monday morning, Henrico County’s Account X debunked the premise of Musk’s posts in a five-post thread.
“They were uninformed tweets,” Coakley recalled in an interview with ABC News. “The media were calling, friends were calling me.”
Coakley’s challenge: While Musk’s initial post has garnered 27.7 million views, Coakley’s response has received less than 100,000. It’s a contemporary of the old adage that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth still wears its shoes.
As Musk has continued to promote false and misleading election information X, election officials have increasingly faced on its platform. But their reach typically pales in comparison to Musk’s 200 million followers.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X, looks on during the Milken Conference 2024 Global Conference Sessions at the Beverly Hilton on May 6, 2024 in Beverly Hills, California.
David Swanson/Reuters/FILE
“It’s not a fair fight,” said Larry Norden, a polling expert at the nonprofit think tank Brennan Center for Justice.
In Philadelphia, Musk retweeted a tweet suggesting 5,200 voters had registered with the same address. “This is crazy,” Musk commented.
Seth Bluestein, the Philadelphia County Commissioner, responded a few hours later, “The post you shared is spreading misinformation.”
But while Musk’s initial tweet garnered nearly 10 million views, Bluestein’s response garnered fewer than 10,000.
Although some Republican officials have resisted Musk, X. Stephen Richer, the GOP recorder for Maricopa County, Arizona, has regularly clashed with Musk over alleged election misinformation aimed at the state online — and has even offered to connect with Musk in person.
“In all of your previous posts about the Arizona election (they’ve all been wrong, but you’ve never corrected a single one), I’ve offered my office as a resource to anyone (and everyone) who wants real answers to those questions,” Richer told Musk in a September message. in one
Sam Woolley, a disinformation researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, said Musk has treated X as his “bully pulpit” to support Trump and undermine the electoral system since he took control of the company in 2022.
“This is definitely a case of a very powerful person who not only owns the platform, but also uses the ability to control broad participation on the platform for his own benefit and the benefit of his political allies,” Woolley said.
The disinformation narratives promoted by Musk are “corrosive to democracy,” Norden said, but the time and energy required to refute them can undermine the ability of election officials to carry out other election-related work.
“It’s distracting,” Norden said. “We’re putting a huge burden on election officials, and on top of that, if they have to respond to a guy who’s pushing his content on his network to spread lies, it’s distracting from the essential work they’re supposed to be doing. . . . That’s troubling.”
Musk did not respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Despite the vast online reach of the world’s richest man, at least one election official has matched it: Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
After Musk suggested to X that there are more eligible voters in the state than voters, Benson pushed back.
“Let’s be clear: @elonmusk is spreading dangerous misinformation,” Benson wrote. “Here are the facts: There are no more voters than citizens in Michigan. There are 7.2 million active registered voters and 7.9 million of voting age in our state.”
Musk’s initial retweet received about 32 million views.
But Benson’s response soared, garnering 33.5 million.
