Falsehoods swirling on X and other platforms undermine trust and create potential for violence, critics warn
Donald Trump and top allies such as the multibillionaire Elon Musk have created a blizzard of false voting misinformation portraying Democrats as bent on stealing the election, undermining trust in the voting process and leading to potential violence, voting experts and ex-federal prosecutors say.
To sow doubt about the integrity of the election and reprising his 2020 playbook of claiming that Democrats were trying to steal the election before he lost to Joe Biden and cried fraud, Trump has flatly and without evidence declared that Democrats are a “bunch of cheats”.
Similarly, Trump has baselessly charged that Kamala Harris could only win “if it was a corrupt election”.
The social media platform X, owned by Musk, who has donated over $120m to a Super Pac backing Trump with get-out-the-vote efforts in Pennsylvania and other swing states, has become a leading purveyor of falsehoods and conspiracies to his 200 million followers, say critics.
Musk, the world’s richest man with a fortune close to $260bn, has asserted without evidence that Trump’s campaign is heading for a “crushing victory” over Harris, and been chastised by key election officials in Arizona and Georgia for allowing X to disseminate false claims of election cheating by Democrats and phoney voting problems.
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