CBS News reports:

Elon Musk has used the social media platform he owns to amass nearly 3.3 billion views on X by fueling doubts about election security issues since January this year — making the tech mogul one of the most viral voices on elections during the 2024 campaign, a CBS News investigation has found.

Musk has frequently shared conspiratorial narratives that have been vexing to public officials who are trying to maintain Americans’ confidence in the election in the face of a barrage of misinformation and disinformation.

At his first solo appearance at a pro-Trump rally in Philadelphia last week, Musk claimed, “Statistically there are some very strange things that happen that are statistically incredibly unlikely.” He then repeated debunked claims about the validity of vote tallies produced by Dominion voting machines. But even before he took the stage, Musk had already emerged as a prolific conduit for election misinformation on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“The goal all along has been to import as many illegal voters as possible,” Musk posted in July, echoing the conspiracy that Democrats are purposefully letting immigrants enter the country illegally to vote in the upcoming presidential election. The post gained 45.8 million views.

The CBS News Confirmed team fact-checked Musk’s posts on election security and found that 55% contain misleading or false statements, or amplify posts that do. Further analysis of these posts showed that 40 of the accounts Musk replied to or reposted were accounts researchers have identified as promoters of voter fraud claims.

Musk did not respond to CBS News’ request for comment.

CBS News collected more than 48,000 of Musk’s posts over the past four years, with support from the International Center for Journalists Disarming Disinformation program and the research group Convocation Research+Design. The analysis focused on X posts on the topic of election administration, security and operation.

An analysis of nearly 17,000 of Musk’s posts from this year, as well as thousands more he replied to or reposted, found 361 posts specifically on the topic of potential election fraud in U.S. elections. Although these election posts represent a small fraction of the dozens of posts Musk publishes each day, each one had an average of 9.3 million views as Musk continues to be the most followed profile on X.

Experts are concerned that such high audience engagement on posts amplifying election fraud conspiracies could set the stage for possible post-election chaos.

“On election night, if Trump believes he’s losing, he is likely to spread massive amounts of disinformation about the existence of fraud,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center of Election Innovation and Research.

“I think we can say with near certainty, Elon Musk is going to take those comments and spread them out to hundreds of millions of people to be consumed immediately, while election officials are busy counting ballots,” Becker said. [Continue reading…]