Elon Musk has often touted that X is a place for news since acquiring the company then known as Twitter. Regardless of studies and reports showing misinformation on his social media platform are running rampant, Musk has repeatedly claimed that X is the best online destination for truth.
On Thursday, Musk seemingly fell for a photoshopped fake news headline from a far-right user on X — and shared it with his more than 293 million followers.
Musk’s tweet-and-delete post
“Detainment camps…” Musk posted alongside a quoted post from X user Ashlea Simon, who posted a fake image that was created to look like a headline from The Daily Telegraph‘s website. The fake headline read “Keir Starmer considering building ’emergency detainment camps’ on the Falkland Islands.”
Simon is one of the leaders of the far-right UK party known as Britain First. The fake headline was referencing the far-right’s anti-immigration riots that have been unfolding throughout the UK and appeared to claim that the UK Prime Minister and Labor Party leader was building “detainment camps” to hold the arrested rioters.
Mashable Light Speed
Musk appeared to have deleted his post roughly 30 minutes after publishing it. It received more than two million impressions on the platform before Musk removed it. Musk has yet to acknowledge its deletion or issue a correction for his followers who were deceived by the fake news.
As previously mentioned, Musk has pushed hard for X to be seen as a news media application — not just a social media platform. However, Musk and X have repeatedly posted fake news. In fact, at times, the platform itself has created fake news.
Earlier this year, the platform’s own AI chatbot Grok created a fake news story falsely claiming that Iran was striking Tel Aviv with missiles. X then promoted Grok’s story to users via the Explore feature on the website.
Just a few weeks ago, Musk shared a manipulated political campaign video featuring a deepfake, AI-generated voice impersonating U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. While the original poster of the video labeled the clip as a parody, Musk removed any reference to the video being a parody and shared it without any context to his hundreds of millions of followers.