According to a large-scale Bloomberg analysis, the billionaire owner has been spreading debunked theories of undocumented voters swaying the US election and growing his influence in the process, making him the biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracies on the social media platform he owns. I want to bring in Bloomberg's Sarah Frier, who's the editor that leads our coverage of big tech. And this was a team effort of journalists and data experts. But I think the best place to start, Sarah, is what's the top line of the story? What is it that we report through that dense body of data? Well, it was really interesting finding, actually, that we have seen us on the campaign trail with Trump talk about these anti-immigrant theories he has. He's been promoting the idea that Democrats are shipping in immigrants to vote for them. So this idea of math, election fraud that he's been talking about on the campaign trail, and, you know, that

seems like sort of a fringe thing until we looked into the data, and it showed that immigration and election fraud and voter fraud is his top policy topic on X. He actually gets more engagement on that topic than anything else that he talks about. And it has become this driver of his speech, something that he talks about ever more frequently over the past year, ever since he visited the border and got more involved in the state of Texas. And he has really become enmeshed with this idea of immigration leading to fraud, and what experts have told us is this narrative in the way that Musk is really laundering it for the masses, is going to help Trump dispute the result of the election should he not win, though. This is a very serious finding, in my opinion, and the findings are serious in the nature in which you got them. You ran a machine learning model, basically on posts, to identify the subjects he was

most often citing and talking about 1300 of Musk posts in 2024 really revolving around this issue. And I just want to get to the facts, therefore, Sarah, of what actually happens, because the facts are that non-citizen voting is incredibly rare. It's incredibly rare. Non-citizens cannot vote for president, but that is not a thing. There is a very difficult path to citizenship in the US. So this idea that he has been talking about is just not based in reality or any history that we know of. And this is something that we didn't just talk about in terms of the data. Our reporters went on the ground to overall Colorado. Julia Leff was in Aurora, Colorado, talking to immigrants who feel like their lives are unsafe now because Musk and Trump have talked publicly about the danger of those immigrants. They went to Butler, Pennsylvania, during a rally where Trump and Musk were

speaking together and talked to a different kind of victim, those who believe the misinformation that they are being told. So, so this is this is something that isn't just happening on the Internet. It isn't just happening on X. It is happening in the daily lives of Americans right now with the election just a few days away. This is data journalism, and the team does a great job in explaining the methodology and also chronology of what happened. But I have to ask, Sarah, if have we heard from Elon Musk or X actually about our reporting and how they feel about it? We haven't heard from Elon Musk, but we did hear from the Trump campaign, and they doubled down. They said you are Musk is not wrong. You know, they repeated some of the misinformation that has endorsed on them. One more thing I'd point out from the data. Often it's not Musk himself saying these things. He will often, quote, tweet or or just

put a little emoji response to something. But with his following that, upwards of 200 million strong, he has incredible influence. He's actually the top influencer on the platform that he owns and has a lot of influence over the algorithm there. We also found that often his posts do not get back-checked on the system that actually used to fact-check. So, very interesting findings here from our data investigation.

Elon Musk's Online Rhetoric on Immigration, Voter Fraud

Welcome to the Bloomberg Technology YouTube channel. Subscribe for original series and mini-docs on game-changing technologies, profiles on innovators, live conversations with experts, and breaking technology news & analysis from Bloomberg TV.

Elon Musk's Online Rhetoric on Immigration, Voter Fraud

Scripts