Elon Musk is the loudest voice at But apparently he just can’t help it.
It happened quickly: a news article confirms your own opinion and you share it on social media – without checking its intention or authenticity. What is already annoying for normal citizens quickly becomes a real problem for Elon Musk. After all, his posts reach millions of users. Malicious actors appear to be deliberately taking advantage of this.
A current evaluation by “NBC” shows how successful they are. At the beginning of September, it became known through an indictment that a group of right-wing influencers and media sites – specifically directed by Russia – had spread false reports. Elon Musk also helped the group controlled by “Russia Today” to gain significantly more reach. And that was obviously no coincidence.
Elon Musk as a megaphone
The group called Tenet Media specifically sought Musk’s attention. The X owner was tagged in network posts more than 50 times, according to NBC. With success: Musk shared content from the site several times – giving it a significant boost.
While even the network’s most successful posts otherwise only reach a few hundred thousand users at most, one video post suddenly achieved more than 28.5 million views. The clip, which defended Donald Trump’s statement that American Christians would soon no longer have to vote, differed from the network’s other content in one point in particular: Elon Musk had forwarded it. However, his fans could not expect a classification. Musk captioned his repost with just three letters: “Hmm.” A complete success for the operation.
Easy target
The fact that Musk can serve as a digital megaphone is primarily due to three factors: On the one hand, with 198 million followers, he is the X user with by far the largest audience. This is reinforced by the algorithm. This even flushes Musk into the timeline of accounts that don’t even follow him, as became known shortly after the takeover.
On the other hand, it’s also down to Musk himself. Although he always praises that X is the fastest and most reliable information medium, reliability and factual accuracy seem to be surprisingly unimportant to him. Musk repeatedly shares content that primarily plays into his view of things – without first checking it for accuracy or even plausibility.
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And: Apparently Musk, who actually has a lot of time managing several companies, seems to regularly look at the so-called mentions, which users can use to mark other accounts and thus attract their attention. Anyone who wants to spread their content has surprisingly good chances if Musk is mentioned.
Direct line
Word of this seems to have spread quickly, especially in right-wing circles. The X boss is now being personally tagged in an increasing number of posts. Just like Tenet tried again and again. The strategy has already been successful in Germany. When Thuringia’s right-wing extremist AfD leader Björn Höcke was accused of using an SA slogan in the summer, Musk was also made aware of it – and promptly intervened in the debate. Since then, mentions have increased even further.
Musk repeatedly shows how uncritically he treats the posts he shares. Just a few weeks ago, he forwarded an interview by Tucker Carlson as “worth watching” – in which a self-proclaimed history expert portrayed the Holocaust as an unfortunate failure of planning. Musk subsequently deleted the post. There were similar cases again and again.
Musk against the media
The X boss himself still doesn’t take the problem seriously even when he is confronted with it. After the allegations against Tenet became known, he simply turned them around: The network, which is close to Putin, actually wanted to encourage the election of Trump’s opponent Kamala Harris, claimed David Sacks, who founded Paypal with Musk, in a post that Musk promptly shared .
The real propaganda comes from the traditional media anyway, Musk had already claimed in a discussion in August. “It’s much worse in Europe, where people really still believe the media,” he said indignantly. His interlocutor: Lauren Southern – an employee of Tenet.
Sources: NBC, X, Fortune, Indictment, Süddeutsche Zeitung
