Despite years of screeching that it was “election inference” to hold conservatives accountable for violations of social media standards, the Media Research Center had no problem with Elon Musk — through Twitter/X and on his own — engaging in actual election interference. As we’ve noted, X artificially boosts Musk’s tweets (as well as those of other right-wing activists) so that most users are forced to see them whether they want to or not — and as his tweets increasingly became blatant Trump boosterism, they became interference that deliberately drowned out opposing voices.
Musk’s biggest act of election interference is censoring the story of the release of a dossier that was used by the Trump campaign in vetting J.D. Vance as a vice presidential candidate. X suspended the account of journalist Ken Klippenstein shortly after he posted it, and other X users who linked to it saw their accounts locked as well. Despite the clear parallel to how social media responded to the Hunter Biden laptop story — and how the MRC howled “election interference!” when social media website initially blocked access to the original New York Post story on it, which it then built into a conspiracy theory that this brief blocking of the story cost Donald Trump the election — the MRC said nothing. Soon after, it was discovered that X worked with Trump’s campaign to make sure links to the dossier were suppressed. Again, the MRC stayed silent, even though this went much further than it ever proved about social media and Hunter’s laptop. Indeed, X’s censorship appears nowhere in the MRC’s CensorTrack database. which tells us the MRC is in on the censorship here.
But that’s only the most egregious example of Musk’s election interference. There’s much more:
- Musk posted disinformation about non-citizens voting in the election — which gained huge audiences because Musk has rigged X to give his posts greater exposure than other accounts, which is arguably also election interference — and readers are apparently blocked from appending “Community Notes” to fact-check his bogus claims.
- Musk ran a dark-money campaign to smear a Texas prosecutor as being purportedly too close to George Soros, in a campaign so repulsive that even the prosecutor’s opponent who was primed to benefit from the campaign denounced it.
- After a reported planned assassination attempt on Trump, Musk complained in an X post that “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” The reaction against it was so universal that, in a rarity, Musk was shamed into deleting the post, grumbling in response that “jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context.” Actually, no, that’s not how jokes (or implicit death threats) work — and we assume the chat he later had with the Secret Service over his nasty tweet more fully made that clear. Or perhaps not; Trump made jokes about assassinating Harris at a Trump rally a few weeks later.
- Musk was among the right-wingers who promoted an anonymous claim that ABC fed Harris questions before her debate with Donald Trump. The claim was never verified and quickly exposed as an obvious fraud, though it appears Musk as never corrected the record. In a similar vein, Musk hyped unverified reports of a bomb found near a Trump rally site, which also wan’t true.
- In another example of election interference (by the MRC’s definition), Musk blocked the account of a reporter for the right-wing Washington Examiner for contacting him via DM to correct a false claim he had made about illegal immigrants, even though he had been willing to engage via DM in the past.
- Election interference became a family thing when Musk’s mother urged Trump voters to commit election fraud.
- A Musk-funded PAC created a fraudulent website purporting to be Harris’ response to Project 2025, complete with text messages — at least some of which appears to be illegal.
- Musk also started giving $1 million to allegedly random people for registering to vote, which may also be illegal.
- Grok, the AI engine attached to X, began spewing voter-fraud conspiracy theories and personal smears of Harris.
- In another sign of election interference if it was happening elsewhere, top Democratic political accounts on X were seeing declining attention and exposure, while Republican-leaning accounts saw huge boosts in exposure.
- The amount of disinformation on X was so out of control that a Republican election official asked all social media operations, including X, to delete a fake video claiming that Haitians were voting for Harris.
- Canvassers for a Musk-funded get-out-the-vote effort in Michigan said they had been tricked and threatened into taking part — as well as being hauled around in seatless U-Haul vans — then abruptly fired and left stranded without pay after reports of their mistreatment came out.
The MRC and its Free Speech America operation has told its readers about none of this. Can’t let facts overrule the narrative, after all.