WASHINGTON (THE WASHINGTON POST) – Elon Musk personally recommended that users follow accounts notorious for promoting lies, while false information about the rapidly changing war between Gaza Strip militants and Israel proliferated on the social media platform X over the weekend.
“For following the war in real-time, @WarMonitors & @sentdefender are good,” Musk posted on his platform formerly called Twitter on Sunday morning to 150 million follower accounts. That post was viewed 11 million times in three hours, drawing thanks from those two accounts, before Musk deleted it.
Both were among the most important early spreaders of a false claim in May that there had been an explosion near the White House. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index briefly dropped 85 points before that story was debunked.
Emerson T Brooking, a researcher at the Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab, posted that @sentdefender is an “absolutely poisonous account. regularly posting wrong and unverifiable things…inserting random editorialisation and trying to juice its paid subscriber count.”
The War Monitors account has argued with others over Israel and religion, posting a year ago that “the overwhelming majority of people in the media and banks are zionists” and telling a correspondent in June “go worship a jew lil bro.”
Information researchers said that the new conflict was an early test of how the revamped X conveys accurate data during a major crisis, and that the immediate impression was poor.
“Anecdotal evidence that X is failing this stress test is plentiful,” Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Centre for an Informed Public, told The Washington Post. “Go on the platform, do a search on Israel or Gaza – you don’t have to scroll very far to find dubious or debunked information.”
Musk left up his replies to the two accounts he had promoted, each of which have more than 600,000 followers, boosting their visibility. He also continued to fault “mainstream media,” telling users to trust X instead.
Other accounts on X drew engagement with photos or videos of unrelated attacks from years earlier and false claims that Iran or others had entered the conflict.
Spokespeople for the company did not return an email seeking comment.
X and other real-time sources of information are especially subject to rumours, false claims and propaganda during major events.
Researchers have said that X has gotten much less reliable since Musk took control nearly a year ago. He ended the practice of awarding “verified” checks to established media accounts, stopped labelling some accounts as government-affiliated, and began sending money to the accounts drawing heavy engagement, rewarding views instead of accuracy.
A recent study published by the European Commission concluded that Russian propaganda about its war in Ukraine was reached more people on X this year than last year.
“People who have paid for blue checks have a financial incentive to LARP (live action role-play) as war reporters by dredging up old stories or fake footage,” Brooking wrote. “Elon Musk enables this.”
Last week, Musk said he would change the way articles are shared to remove the headlines and promote only pictures, which experts said would decrease traffic to news sites.
Musk has also been contributing to a broader legal and political campaign that has succeeded in quieting some academics and research groups who track misinformation by accusing them of fostering unconstitutional censorship. He’s threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League over its reports showing a rise in antisemitic posts on X since Musk bought it last October.
Biden administration officials did not respond immediately to questions about whether it was working with social media companies to identify misinformation. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is among the government agencies being targeted by Musk and some Republicans, referred questions to the State Department, which monitors foreign disinformation. Officials there did not immediately respond to a query.
