There’s no overstating how good election night was for Elon Musk. With Donald Trump’s victory, Musk—already the richest man in the world, thanks in part to lucrative federal contracts—has also made himself a major force in politics. During a Spaces conversation hosted on his X platform on Tuesday night, Musk said that America PAC, the newly formed pro-Trump super-PAC into which he poured millions of dollars, is “going to keep going after this election,” promising to begin preparing for 2026’s midterms, judicial contests, and other local races. Such commitments are another indication of how far-reaching and consequential he aims to make his new political ambitions.
As Trump put it, “A star is born: Elon.”
At this point, there’s no telling how big of a role Musk’s enthusiastic Trump boosterism actually played in the former president’s reelection. But Musk has already taken credit for improving Republicans’ ground game, despite America PAC’s having faced a widely publicized story by Wired that cast serious doubt on its effectiveness. Largely Black canvassers told reporter Jake Lahut that they were “tricked and threatened” into working for the PAC, and then were trundled into seatless UHauls, given unrealistic quotas, threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet them, and left stranded with no way home.
Despite the controversy, Trump gave Musk generous credit for his victory, singling him out during his Wednesday morning victory speech. “We have a new star,” he declared. “A star is born: Elon… He’s a character, he’s a special guy, he’s a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them.”
Musk and Trump both said during the campaign that Musk will head a “Department of Governmental Efficiency,” which they have floated could slash federal spending by as much as $2 trillion, a strategy that could throw the country into economic chaos. While there’s also no guarantee that DOGE—a jokey acronym referencing Musk’s favored cryptocurrency—would actually come to pass, such an arrangement would see Musk wielding power over agencies that are currently investigating his companies, including the SEC, which is probing his 2022 acquisition of Twitter.
Even in the face of Trump’s clear victory, Musk’s America PAC is still working to impute that pro-Harris election fraud took place on Tuesday. In a Wednesday tweet, America PAC called to impose new voter ID requirements, reposting a tweet from a user that claimed ”Kamala won all the states that don’t require voter ID.” (There are already 36 states that either require or request voters to show ID at the polls, and while Harris did win several states without strict voter ID laws, there’s no evidence it’s due to fraud. Instead, they tended to be liberal-leaning states where she was heavily favored.)
In the hours following the election, Musk has begun articulating a broader and more draconian vision. This was signaled in his Spaces conversation, when he said America PAC would weigh in on district attorney races to encourage tough-on-crime candidates. “We have to have DAs that protect the citizens of their cities,” and “put repeat violent offenders in prison,” Musk added, describing the agenda as “doing common sense stuff.”
Musk has continued to toggle between these two polls—a dark and paranoid vision of how America functions, and giddiness at a Trump victory, and his role within it—from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.
“I think there’s a sea change in the country,” Musk concluded, at the end of the Tuesday night Twitter space. “I hope I’m not wrong about that.”
There’s no overstating how good election night was for Elon Musk. With Donald Trump’s victory, Musk—already the richest man in the world, thanks in part to lucrative federal contracts—has also made himself a major force in politics. During a Spaces conversation hosted on his X platform on Tuesday night, Musk said that America PAC, the newly-formed pro-Trump super PAC into which he poured millions of dollars, is “going to keep going after this election,” promising to begin preparing for 2026’s midterms, judicial contests, and other local races. Such commitments are another indication of how far-reaching and consequential he aims to make his new political ambitions.
As Trump put it, “A star is born: Elon.”
At this point, there’s no telling how big of a role Musk’s enthusiastic Trump boosterism actually played in the former president’s reelection. But Musk has already taken credit for improving Republicans’ ground game, despite America PAC’s having faced a widely-publicized story by Wired that cast serious doubt on its effectiveness. Largely Black canvassers told reporter Jake Lahut that they were “tricked and threatened” into working for the PAC, and then were trundled into seatless UHauls, given unrealistic quotas, threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet them, and left stranded with no way home.
Despite the controversy, Trump gave Musk generous credit for his victory, singling him out during his Wednesday morning victory speech. “We have a new star,” he declared. “A star is born: Elon… He’s a character, he’s a special guy, he’s a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them.”
Musk and Trump both said during the campaign that Musk will head a “Department of Governmental Efficiency,” which they have floated could slash federal spending by as much as $2 trillion, a strategy that could throw the country into economic chaos. While there’s also no guarantee that DOGE—a jokey acronym referencing Musk’s favored cryptocurrency—would actually come to pass, such an arrangement would see Musk wielding power over agencies that are currently investigating his companies, including the SEC, which is probing his 2022 acquisition of Twitter.
Even in the face of Trump’s clear victory, Musk’s America PAC is still working to impute that pro-Harris election fraud took place on Tuesday. In a Wednesday tweet, America PAC called to impose new voter ID requirements, reposting a tweet from a user that claimed ”Kamala won all the states that don’t require voter ID.” (There are already 36 states that either require or request voters to show ID at the polls, and while Harris did win several states without strict voter ID laws, there’s no evidence it’s due to fraud. Instead, they tended to be liberal-leaning states where she was heavily favored.)
In the hours following the election, Musk has begun articulating a broader and more draconian vision. This was signaled in his Spaces conversation, when he said America PAC would weigh in on district attorney races to encourage tough-on-crime candidates. “We have to have DAs that protect the citizens of their cities,” and “put repeat violent offenders in prison,” Musk added, describing the agenda as “doing common sense stuff.”
Musk has continued to toggle between these two polls—a dark and paranoid vision of how America functions, and giddiness at a Trump victory, and his role within it—from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.
“I think there’s a sea change in the country,” Musk concluded, at the end of the Tuesday night Twitter space. “I hope I’m not wrong about that.”
Over the past few months, Elon Musk has seemingly done everything in his power to get former President Donald Trump reelected.
On Monday, he debuted another effort: X added a purported “Election Integrity Community”—a feed where users of the site can add instances “of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” America PAC—the political action committee Musk founded and reportedly sent $75 million—is behind the move. By Tuesday afternoon, the “Election Integrity Community” had 10,000 members.
The crowdsourced space appears meant to replace X’s actual team of people employed to ensure election integrity, which Musk said he disbanded last year. But the channel has already been filled with misinformation.
“Everyone needs to watch the movie 2000 Mules to understand what happened in 2020 and be better prepared for it,” one member posted Monday. The discredited film by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, 2,000 Mules, is the movie that Trump falsely claimed showed widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. It has since been recalled by its distributor.
Several posters in the X community also have shared a video from NBC Boston alleging ballot fraud—which, as the “community note” points out, is actually from a local election in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, last November, and led to two people being indicted on voter fraud charges.
Another video circulating in the community purports to show a poll worker destroying a ballot filled out for Trump—but as fact-checks from Reuters and Politifact explain, the video was made as a joke four years ago by someone who admitted they were not actually an election worker.
As Mother Jones has previously reported, Musk’s other moves have included making legally dubious payments to pro-Trump voters in swing states and sharing anti-Democrat disinformation on X, the platform he owns.
The new channel may sound harmless enough—righteous, even. The problem is that voter fraud is rare—and, as I reported yesterday, the right is using unjustified fears about undocumented immigrants and dead people voting to rile up their base to closely monitor polls in ways that could lead to violence on Election Day.
It’s unclear if Musk’s new initiative has any formal connections to the Republican National Committee’s so-called election integrity initiative, which has recruited 200,000 pro-Trump poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the election results should Trump lose, as the New Yorker recently reported. A GOP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones about whether the party was aware of or connected to Musk’s effort, and X no longer responds to journalists’ questions under Musk’s ownership.
One irony of the new “election integrity” channel is that research has shown Musk and his platform are massive purveyors of election-related disinformation. For example, Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states after President Biden dropped out, prompting five secretaries of state to demand Musk “immediately implement changes” to the tool.
The goal of the new community appears to be helping elect Trump—and reverse-engineering allegations of fraud. One member said the quiet part out loud in a post early Tuesday morning: “Congratulations in advance, Trump.”
Over the past few months, Elon Musk has seemingly done everything in his power to get former President Donald Trump reelected.
On Monday, he debuted another effort: X added a purported “Election Integrity Community”—a feed where users of the site can add instances “of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” America PAC—the political action committee Musk founded and reportedly sent $75 million—is behind the move. By Tuesday afternoon, the “Election Integrity Community” had 10,000 members.
The crowdsourced space appears meant to replace X’s actual team of people employed to ensure election integrity, which Musk said he disbanded last year. But the channel has already been filled with misinformation.
“Everyone needs to watch the movie 2000 Mules to understand what happened in 2020 and be better prepared for it,” one member posted Monday. The discredited film by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, 2,000 Mules, is the movie that Trump falsely claimed showed widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. It has since been recalled by its distributor.
Several posters in the X community also have shared a video from NBC Boston alleging ballot fraud—which, as the “community note” points out, is actually from a local election in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, last November, and led to two people being indicted on voter fraud charges.
Another video circulating in the community purports to show a poll worker destroying a ballot filled out for Trump—but as fact-checks from Reuters and Politifact explain, the video was made as a joke four years ago by someone who admitted they were not actually an election worker.
As Mother Jones has previously reported, Musk’s other moves have included making legally dubious payments to pro-Trump voters in swing states and sharing anti-Democrat disinformation on X, the platform he owns.
The new channel may sound harmless enough—righteous, even. The problem is that voter fraud is rare—and, as I reported yesterday, the right is using unjustified fears about undocumented immigrants and dead people voting to rile up their base to closely monitor polls in ways that could lead to violence on Election Day.
It’s unclear if Musk’s new initiative has any formal connections to the Republican National Committee’s so-called election integrity initiative, which has recruited 200,000 pro-Trump poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the election results should Trump lose, as the New Yorker recently reported. A GOP spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones about whether the party was aware of or connected to Musk’s effort, and X no longer responds to journalists’ questions under Musk’s ownership.
One irony of the new “election integrity” channel is that research has shown Musk and his platform are massive purveyors of election-related disinformation. For example, Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states after President Biden dropped out, prompting five secretaries of state to demand Musk “immediately implement changes” to the tool.
The goal of the new community appears to be helping elect Trump—and reverse-engineering allegations of fraud. One member said the quiet part out loud in a post early Tuesday morning: “Congratulations in advance, Trump.”
After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.
As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.
While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”
Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said officials were aware of the concerns but could not comment on whether they were investigating.)
WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024
Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”
Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.
This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.
Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.
Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with a response from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.
After Elon Musk unveiled a scheme to pay $100 to registered Pennsylvania voters who sign a pro-Trump petition, Democratic officials—and legal experts—are sounding the alarm.
As my colleague Arianna Coghill reported yesterday, Musk made the announcement to his 202 million X followers on Thursday, telling them the offer was valid through midnight on Monday. On top of that, Musk also says he is giving away $1 million a day, every day until the election, to petition signers in swing states. The funds appear to come from the billionaire’s America PAC, which he founded in support of Trump—and reportedly pumped with $75 million.
While the petition does not explicitly mention Trump, its support for his ticket over Vice President Kamala Harris is clear. It tells signatories they are signaling their “support of the Constitution, especially freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.”
Unsurprisingly, officials have concerns.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, “there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race,” adding, “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at.” (A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office said officials were aware of the concerns but could not comment on whether they were investigating.)
WATCH: Every day until Election Day, Elon Musk says he’ll give $1M to a voter who has signed his super PAC’s petition “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms.”@JoshShapiroPA: “That is deeply concerning. … It's something that law enforcement could take a look at." pic.twitter.com/2mZY1b5YaL
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 20, 2024
Meanwhile, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) told the New York Post in an interview that “Musk is a concern,” adding, “not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that.”
Legal experts went further. Rick Hasen, professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote that Musk’s promises are “clearly illegal,” citing federal election law that prohibits paying for voting or registering to vote, including via lottery. Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told ABC News that the giveaway’s requirement that petition signers be registered voters “violates the federal ban on paying people to register to vote.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment.) Musk does not appear to have publicly replied to the critiques, and X no longer responds to journalists under his ownership.
This is far from the first time that Musk has wielded his absurd levels of wealth and power to try to sway the election in Trump’s favor: As I have reported, research has found that Musk’s sharing of election disinformation racked up billions of views on X.
Update, Oct. 21: This post was updated with a response from the Department of Justice.
Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with a response from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.
Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, has gone “Deep MAGA.” The billionaire owner of X—the “everything app“—endorsed Donald Trump seconds after the former president was nearly assassinated in July, and within a few days was hatching plans to spend $45 million to get Trump elected. On Saturday, Musk joined the former president on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he did his signature hop (which is vaguely in the shape of an X), and predicted that if Kamala Harris is elected there will be no more elections in the United States.
Musk has a habit of making predictions that don’t amount to much. It is one of the defining facets of his personality, up there with scientific racism and being a guy with a signature hop. You can go online and watch a supercut of him promising fully autonomous self-driving cars every year since 2014. Musk promised to put a man on Mars “in 10 years” 13 years ago. He revised his prediction, in 2016, to say that he would send humans to Mars in 2024. Sometimes you have to set aside the net worth and remember you are talking about someone who believes that people have gotten smarter because C-sections make it easier for babies to have big heads.
Musk’s paid referral strategy has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data.
So, there’s a good chance he’s wrong about a President Kamala Harris ending democracy as we know it. But the money he and his allies are spending is real. America PAC, the super-PAC Musk launched over the summer with a promise to not be “hyper-partisan” and a goal of saving “meritocracy,” has spent more than $8 million this year on independent expenditures boosting Republican candidates, and tens of millions of dollars on paid organizers to support Trump’s campaign efforts.
It has not been entirely smooth—the New York Times recently reported that Musk’s PAC cut ties with the consulting it was using to run its field operations, and hired a new one. But on Sunday, he unveiled a secret weapon for the campaign, straight from the world of gym memberships: Refer a friend! Specifically, Musk is offering to pay $47 to anyone who successfully gets a registered voter in a swing state to sign a petition “to support the Constitution,” by which he means “The First and Second Amendments.” Per the fine print:
Each person may only sign this petition once. Eligible people may only list one eligible person as their referrer. Before payment is made, America PAC will verify the accuracy of all information of the referrer and referee.
This is a perfect Musk stunt for two reasons. One is that he seemingly chose this number as a gimmick because Trump would be the 47th president. (This is a guy who was once fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after tweeting that he could take Tesla private at $420 a share.) The other is the confidence with which Musk is attempting to invent the concept of “email lists.”
His end goal is fairly straightforward. America PAC wants to collect data on Trump supporters for the purposes of turning them out on or before Election Day. It is like any email asking you to wish Hillary Clinton a Happy Birthday or to sign this petition to urge Congress to stop adults from ordering off the kids menu. If you are anything like me, you are besieged with list-building petitions and surveys, and you try to tune them out. (Then again, I’ve never had anyone offer me money to get someone to sign one.)
Musk is essentially paying people to collect voter information—which is a standard thing campaigns and organizations do, only in this arrangement he’s paying his distributed organizers by the signature instead of by the hour. His PAC is banking on that cash incentive to juice the MAGA outreach effort, and hopefully identify some new Trump voters. It can then use the information to get out the vote.
This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.
It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. A Washington Post story from July on how Musk ended up endorsing Trump included the following anecdote:
Musk asked people in the room to tell their friends to vote for Trump, saying he had learned from his experience selling Teslas that word-of-mouth promotion was critical. Some people in the crowd shook their heads and winced.
After his appearance in Butler, according to Politico, Musk planned on making more campaign appearances in the state where he once lived while attending the University of Pennsylvania. (The Politico piece includes the immortal line: “In addition to the Steelers, he is also a Philadelphia Eagles fan.”) Republicans love his money, no doubt. But it’s sort of peak donor-brain to think that swing-state voters want to hear anything more from a union-buster with the emotional maturity of a seventh-grade gamer.
Part of being so rich is that no one ever really says “no” to you. You can use drugs and keep your security clearance. You can joke about someone assassinating the vice president and still keep your federal contracts. An employee can accuse you of offering them a horse in exchange for sex and it will not necessarily become the one thing everyone knows about you. (Musk has called that last allegation “utterly untrue.”)
This social immunity has largely redounded to Musk’s benefit, even if one would not necessarily read his missives and conclude that this is a man who is “doing well.” But Musk’s lack of accountability has often clouded his judgment.
The classic rich person’s delusion is to assume people want your wisdom when all they are really after is your money. Because not every billionaire’s idea is a billion-dollar idea. This one may result in a large number of people, who aren’t necessarily who they say they are, looking to make a few bucks. Come to think of it, that actually sounds a lot like Elon Musk’s X.
Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, has gone “Deep MAGA.” The billionaire owner of X—the “everything app“—endorsed Donald Trump seconds after the former president was nearly assassinated in July, and within a few days was hatching plans to spend $45 million to get Trump elected. On Saturday, Musk joined the former president on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he did his signature hop (which is vaguely in the shape of an X), and predicted that if Kamala Harris is elected there will be no more elections in the United States.
Musk has a habit of making predictions that don’t amount to much. It is one of the defining facets of his personality, up there with scientific racism and being a guy with a signature hop. You can go online and watch a supercut of him promising fully autonomous self-driving cars every year since 2014. Musk promised to put a man on Mars “in 10 years” 13 years ago. He revised his prediction, in 2016, to say that he would send humans to Mars in 2024. Sometimes you have to set aside the net worth and remember you are talking about someone who believes that people have gotten smarter because C-sections make it easier for babies to have big heads.
Musk’s paid referral strategy has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data.
So, there’s a good chance he’s wrong about a President Kamala Harris ending democracy as we know it. But the money he and his allies are spending is real. America PAC, the super-PAC Musk launched over the summer with a promise to not be “hyper-partisan” and a goal of saving “meritocracy,” has spent more than $8 million this year on independent expenditures boosting Republican candidates, and tens of millions of dollars on paid organizers to support Trump’s campaign efforts.
It has not been entirely smooth—the New York Times recently reported that Musk’s PAC cut ties with the consulting it was using to run its field operations, and hired a new one. But on Sunday, he unveiled a secret weapon for the campaign, straight from the world of gym memberships: Refer a friend! Specifically, Musk is offering to pay $47 to anyone who successfully gets a registered voter in a swing state to sign a petition “to support the Constitution,” by which he means “The First and Second Amendments.” Per the fine print:
Each person may only sign this petition once. Eligible people may only list one eligible person as their referrer. Before payment is made, America PAC will verify the accuracy of all information of the referrer and referee.
This is a perfect Musk stunt for two reasons. One is that he seemingly chose this number as a gimmick because Trump would be the 47th president. (This is a guy who was once fined $40 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after tweeting that he could take Tesla private at $420 a share.) The other is the confidence with which Musk is attempting to invent the concept of “email lists.”
His end goal is fairly straightforward. America PAC wants to collect data on Trump supporters for the purposes of turning them out on or before Election Day. It is like any email asking you to wish Hillary Clinton a Happy Birthday or to sign this petition to urge Congress to stop adults from ordering off the kids menu. If you are anything like me, you are besieged with list-building petitions and surveys, and you try to tune them out. (Then again, I’ve never had anyone offer me money to get someone to sign one.)
Musk is essentially paying people to collect voter information—which is a standard thing campaigns and organizations do, only in this arrangement he’s paying his distributed organizers by the signature instead of by the hour. His PAC is banking on that cash incentive to juice the MAGA outreach effort, and hopefully identify some new Trump voters. It can then use the information to get out the vote.
This particular approach has drawbacks, for the same reason paying people to gather signatures often does: You’re incentivizing bad data, which is what you really don’t want in a get-out-the-vote operation. Paid petitioners get in trouble all the time because the signatures they collect don’t match real people, or were submitted without a voter’s knowledge. The PAC says it has some safeguards in place, and that you won’t get your $47 until both the referrer and referee are verified. But the money creates a reason for real people who don’t support Trump to sign up and take Musk’s cash. It’s a great way for Harris-backing undergrads at Arizona State to get beer money—it’s certainly easier than giving plasma.
It’s possible this is a genius move from a man with an evolutionarily advanced brain, in other words. But it’s also possible that Musk is simply doing the rich guy thing—and the classic rich tech guy thing—of walking into a new situation and assuming all of his ideas are important. A Washington Post story from July on how Musk ended up endorsing Trump included the following anecdote:
Musk asked people in the room to tell their friends to vote for Trump, saying he had learned from his experience selling Teslas that word-of-mouth promotion was critical. Some people in the crowd shook their heads and winced.
After his appearance in Butler, according to Politico, Musk planned on making more campaign appearances in the state where he once lived while attending the University of Pennsylvania. (The Politico piece includes the immortal line: “In addition to the Steelers, he is also a Philadelphia Eagles fan.”) Republicans love his money, no doubt. But it’s sort of peak donor-brain to think that swing-state voters want to hear anything more from a union-buster with the emotional maturity of a seventh-grade gamer.
Part of being so rich is that no one ever really says “no” to you. You can use drugs and keep your security clearance. You can joke about someone assassinating the vice president and still keep your federal contracts. An employee can accuse you of offering them a horse in exchange for sex and it will not necessarily become the one thing everyone knows about you. (Musk has called that last allegation “utterly untrue.”)
This social immunity has largely redounded to Musk’s benefit, even if one would not necessarily read his missives and conclude that this is a man who is “doing well.” But Musk’s lack of accountability has often clouded his judgment.
The classic rich person’s delusion is to assume people want your wisdom when all they are really after is your money. Because not every billionaire’s idea is a billion-dollar idea. This one may result in a large number of people, who aren’t necessarily who they say they are, looking to make a few bucks. Come to think of it, that actually sounds a lot like Elon Musk’s X.
On Saturday, Elon Musk furthered an ongoing effort in support of Donald Trump: He went onstage to sow misinformation about the integrity of American elections.
At the former president’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—in the same location where Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July—Musk awkwardly took to the stage in a Black MAGA hat and a t-shirt that said “OCCUPY MARS,” jumping up and down on his way to the podium. The right-wing owner of X then falsely told the crowd that “the other side” wants “to take away your right to vote, effectively.”
Musk offered no evidence to back up that claim. (The Republican Party has in fact worked for a long time to disenfranchise voters and rig the voting system in its favor.) He lambasted a new California law that bans local governments from requiring people to present identification to vote. “I still can’t believe that’s real,” Musk said of that law and other voter ID policies in more than a dozen other states. “How are you supposed to have a good, proper election if there’s no ID? It’s just meaningless,” he claimed.
That is highly misleading: As the National Conference of State Legislatures has made clear, states without voter ID laws use other methods, such as signatures on file, to verify voters’ identities. Meanwhile, research shows that strict ID laws do not impact voter fraud—which is very rare in US elections to begin with. What impact such laws do have is reducing turnout among minority voters and deterring them from voting.
This is far from the first time Musk has spread these kinds of falsehoods. As I reported back in August, research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Musk frequently spread false claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud and that Democrats are “importing voters” through illegal immigration—claims that, along with a deepfake of Vice President Kamala Harris that Musk re-posted, racked up a staggering 1.2 billion views.
Musk also repeated in a lengthy screed last week false claims about Democrats recruiting undocumented people to vote. But as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported:
Noncitizen voting is a non-issue, despite Republicans’ best efforts to make it one… a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.
Musk also repeated his baseless claims on Saturday that Democrats are censuring speech. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. And if people don’t know what’s going on, if they don’t know the truth, how can you make an informed vote?” he said. “You must have free speech in order to have democracy.”
Musk’s stated concerns about free speech and truth seem especially strange given that the CCDH report found that Musk’s own social media platform is an engine of disinformation. In August, five secretaries of state warned Musk about Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium X subscribers, after it disseminated false information about Harris being ineligible to appear on the ballots in multiple states.
This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
You wouldn’t expect to find the linchpin of the global microchip industry tucked away in a Blue Ridge Mountains town, but it’s there. Scattered across the outskirts of Spruce Pine, a series of mines has been extracting some of the purest quartz on Earth for decades. The resource is so essential that almost every advanced microchip produced today touches it during the manufacturing process.
Those mines are now closed indefinitely, after Hurricane Helene dumped 2 feet of water on Spruce Pine, devastating the area. And with this singular supply of ultra-pure quartz cut off for the foreseeable future, the world’s supply of chips hangs in the balance.
To be clear, Spruce Pine is not the only place on the planet with high-purity quartz. Quartz, which is mostly made of crystallized silicon, is the second-most abundant mineral in Earth’s crust. But what’s beneath Spruce Pine is special.
Spruce Pine lies along a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains that were formed when two paleocontinents collided to create a single landmass, Pangea, some 380 million years ago. The precise conditions around that collision meant few impurities mixed into the molten minerals that swirled miles beneath the surface. Now cooled and worn, the rocks around Spruce Pine has the look of a dirty snowball thanks to a combination of feldspar, mica, and quartz. When ground up, it just looks like white sand, but when isolated, the quartz is perhaps the purest in the world.
“It’s not like the silicon that comes out of the ground in North Carolina then becomes part of a silicon chip,” said Ed Conway, author of Material World. “But you can’t make a silicon chip without it.”
Because it needs minimal refining after being pulled from the ground, Spruce Pine quartz is also cheaper than the competition. That doesn’t mean it’s cheap. High-purity Spruce Pine quartz can sell for up to $20,000 per ton, and the waste materials from mining are pristine enough that they’re even used to fill the bunkers at the Augusta National Golf Course, home of the Master’s tournament.
“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon.”
The high-silicon, low-contaminant nature of Spruce Pine quartz makes it integral to advanced chip manufacturing, where even an atomic quantity of impurity can jam up the circuitry etched into a semiconductor. The chips themselves aren’t actually made of quartz. High-purity quartz crucibles are used to melt down polysilicon, the pure silicon needed to make computer chips and solar panels.
The crucibles only last a few weeks before they need to be replaced, and the need for advanced chips is increasing at a breakneck pace. A surge in AI-powered devices is expected to increase global demand for advanced chips by at least 30 percent by 2026, according to a recent Bain report that warned of an imminent shortage.
By some estimates, Spruce Pine accounted for 70 percent of the high-purity quartz needed to produce the pure silicon used to make most advanced chips, including those needed for AI. On top of that, a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, manufactures the majority of those chips. And now, the disaster in Spruce Pine is drawing attention to how fragile the global chip supply chain already is.
“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon,” said Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University who studies solar cell supply chains.
We don’t yet know how bad the damage is at the Spruce Pine mining facilities. The two companies that own most of the quartz mines, Sibelco and the Quartz Corp, both halted production on September 26, as the storm was moving through western North Carolina. Images of Spruce Pine show the downtown completely flooded and buildings washed out near the rail lines that connect the mines to the rest of the world.
Sibelco said in a statement that it was “actively collaborating with government agencies and third-party rescue and recovery operations to mitigate the impact of this event and to resume operations as soon as possible.” The Quartz Corp is similarly assessing the situation at its three mines in the area as well as the infrastructure around them, and “its US plants are stopped for an unknown duration,” the company’s spokesperson May Kristin Haugen said in an email.
As for how much this will upend the global chip supply chain, well, we’ll have to wait and see.
Even with the Spruce Pine mines offline, chipmakers should have stockpiles of polysilicon or the ultra-pure quartz they need to make it available for some amount of time. And if they run out of the Spruce Pine quartz, there are other sources of quartz in places like China and India that are viable but not as high quality or cost effective.
And, perhaps anticipating some future disaster, the mining companies in Spruce Pine don’t keep all their high-purity quartz on site. “Between our own safety stocks, which are built in different locations, and the ones down in the value chain, we are not concerned about shortages in the short or medium term,” said Haugen, who cited the pandemic as a teaching moment in supply chain resiliency.
What we might expect, however, is prices of some electronics to rise. If there’s not enough Spruce Pine quartz to go around, especially in the long term, the industry will have to come up with alternative sources of high-purity quartz. The methods for refining those minerals elsewhere are more resource intensive and potentially carry a heavier carbon footprint because the quartz used as a raw material doesn’t start out as pure as the quartz from Spruce Pine. As one expert told Wired magazine, the climate-fueled flooding in western North Carolina could lead to more negative consequences for the climate, contributing to more disasters in the future.
To many casual technology users, this all comes as a surprise. After all, we’re used to thinking about chips being designed in Silicon Valley and then made in Taiwan. Of course these places aren’t safe from shocks—earthquakes and wildfires are a threat in Southern California and Taiwan is prone to earthquakes and landslides. We don’t often think about the many raw materials needed to fill the supply chain and the globalized economy’s habit of always seeking out the cheapest available option, even if it comes from a single small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains that happens to be prone to floods.
“We just don’t pay much attention, or as much attention as we should, to the underbelly of our economy,” said Conway. “And this is part of the underbelly.”
This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
You wouldn’t expect to find the linchpin of the global microchip industry tucked away in a Blue Ridge Mountains town, but it’s there. Scattered across the outskirts of Spruce Pine, a series of mines has been extracting some of the purest quartz on Earth for decades. The resource is so essential that almost every advanced microchip produced today touches it during the manufacturing process.
Those mines are now closed indefinitely, after Hurricane Helene dumped 2 feet of water on Spruce Pine, devastating the area. And with this singular supply of ultra-pure quartz cut off for the foreseeable future, the world’s supply of chips hangs in the balance.
To be clear, Spruce Pine is not the only place on the planet with high-purity quartz. Quartz, which is mostly made of crystallized silicon, is the second-most abundant mineral in Earth’s crust. But what’s beneath Spruce Pine is special.
Spruce Pine lies along a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains that were formed when two paleocontinents collided to create a single landmass, Pangea, some 380 million years ago. The precise conditions around that collision meant few impurities mixed into the molten minerals that swirled miles beneath the surface. Now cooled and worn, the rocks around Spruce Pine has the look of a dirty snowball thanks to a combination of feldspar, mica, and quartz. When ground up, it just looks like white sand, but when isolated, the quartz is perhaps the purest in the world.
“It’s not like the silicon that comes out of the ground in North Carolina then becomes part of a silicon chip,” said Ed Conway, author of Material World. “But you can’t make a silicon chip without it.”
Because it needs minimal refining after being pulled from the ground, Spruce Pine quartz is also cheaper than the competition. That doesn’t mean it’s cheap. High-purity Spruce Pine quartz can sell for up to $20,000 per ton, and the waste materials from mining are pristine enough that they’re even used to fill the bunkers at the Augusta National Golf Course, home of the Master’s tournament.
“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon.”
The high-silicon, low-contaminant nature of Spruce Pine quartz makes it integral to advanced chip manufacturing, where even an atomic quantity of impurity can jam up the circuitry etched into a semiconductor. The chips themselves aren’t actually made of quartz. High-purity quartz crucibles are used to melt down polysilicon, the pure silicon needed to make computer chips and solar panels.
The crucibles only last a few weeks before they need to be replaced, and the need for advanced chips is increasing at a breakneck pace. A surge in AI-powered devices is expected to increase global demand for advanced chips by at least 30 percent by 2026, according to a recent Bain report that warned of an imminent shortage.
By some estimates, Spruce Pine accounted for 70 percent of the high-purity quartz needed to produce the pure silicon used to make most advanced chips, including those needed for AI. On top of that, a single company in Taiwan, TSMC, manufactures the majority of those chips. And now, the disaster in Spruce Pine is drawing attention to how fragile the global chip supply chain already is.
“Maybe this event gets people to think about alternatives, different crucibles, different ways to make silicon,” said Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University who studies solar cell supply chains.
We don’t yet know how bad the damage is at the Spruce Pine mining facilities. The two companies that own most of the quartz mines, Sibelco and the Quartz Corp, both halted production on September 26, as the storm was moving through western North Carolina. Images of Spruce Pine show the downtown completely flooded and buildings washed out near the rail lines that connect the mines to the rest of the world.
Sibelco said in a statement that it was “actively collaborating with government agencies and third-party rescue and recovery operations to mitigate the impact of this event and to resume operations as soon as possible.” The Quartz Corp is similarly assessing the situation at its three mines in the area as well as the infrastructure around them, and “its US plants are stopped for an unknown duration,” the company’s spokesperson May Kristin Haugen said in an email.
As for how much this will upend the global chip supply chain, well, we’ll have to wait and see.
Even with the Spruce Pine mines offline, chipmakers should have stockpiles of polysilicon or the ultra-pure quartz they need to make it available for some amount of time. And if they run out of the Spruce Pine quartz, there are other sources of quartz in places like China and India that are viable but not as high quality or cost effective.
And, perhaps anticipating some future disaster, the mining companies in Spruce Pine don’t keep all their high-purity quartz on site. “Between our own safety stocks, which are built in different locations, and the ones down in the value chain, we are not concerned about shortages in the short or medium term,” said Haugen, who cited the pandemic as a teaching moment in supply chain resiliency.
What we might expect, however, is prices of some electronics to rise. If there’s not enough Spruce Pine quartz to go around, especially in the long term, the industry will have to come up with alternative sources of high-purity quartz. The methods for refining those minerals elsewhere are more resource intensive and potentially carry a heavier carbon footprint because the quartz used as a raw material doesn’t start out as pure as the quartz from Spruce Pine. As one expert told Wired magazine, the climate-fueled flooding in western North Carolina could lead to more negative consequences for the climate, contributing to more disasters in the future.
To many casual technology users, this all comes as a surprise. After all, we’re used to thinking about chips being designed in Silicon Valley and then made in Taiwan. Of course these places aren’t safe from shocks—earthquakes and wildfires are a threat in Southern California and Taiwan is prone to earthquakes and landslides. We don’t often think about the many raw materials needed to fill the supply chain and the globalized economy’s habit of always seeking out the cheapest available option, even if it comes from a single small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains that happens to be prone to floods.
“We just don’t pay much attention, or as much attention as we should, to the underbelly of our economy,” said Conway. “And this is part of the underbelly.”
This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
For five years, reactor one at Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania has lain dormant. Now, thanks to a deal with Microsoft, the reactor will start running again in 2028—this time to exclusively supply the tech firm with oodles of low-carbon electricity.
It’s all part of an ongoing flirtation between Big Tech and nuclear power. In March, Amazon Web Services agreed to buy a data center powered by Susquehanna nuclear power station in Pennsylvania. At an event at Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned small modular nuclear reactors as one potential source of energy for data centers. The links don’t stop there either: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chairs the boards of nuclear startups Oklo and Helion Energy.
The AI boom has left technology companies scrambling for low-carbon sources of energy to power their data centers. The International Energy Agency estimates that electricity demand from AI, data centers, and crypto could more than double by 2026. Even its lowball estimates say that the added demand will be equivalent to all the electricity used in Sweden or—in the high-usage case—Germany.
This surge in energy demand is music to the ears of the nuclear power industry. Electricity demand in the US has been fairly flat for decades, but the sheer scale and intensity of the AI boom is changing that dynamic. One December 2023 report from a power industry consultancy declared the era of flat power demand over, thanks to growing demand from data centers and industrial facilities. The report forecasts that peak electricity demand in the US will grow by 38 gigawatts by 2028, roughly equivalent to 46 times the output of reactor one at Three Mile Island.
“[AI] is really taking off, and it’s garnering a lot of attention in the energy industry,” says John Kotek, senior vice president for policy development and public affairs at nuclear industry trade association the Nuclear Energy Institute. Kotek says there’s also a national security angle. “People legitimately see AI as a field of competition between the US and our global competitors.” The US falling behind in the AI race because it doesn’t have enough power “is something that’s really causing people to focus attention,” he says.
Nuclear power is attractive to tech companies because it provides low-carbon electricity round-the-clock, unlike solar and wind, which run intermittently unless coupled with a form of energy storage. Reactivating reactor one will provide Microsoft with 835 megawatts of low-carbon energy over the 20 years that the deal will run for. Since Microsoft has pledged to be carbon negative by 2030, spiraling electricity demand from AI poses a major threat to the firm’s climate plans unless it can find sources of low-carbon power. In 2023, Microsoft’s emissions increased by 29 percent compared with 2020, primarily driven by the construction of new data centers.
Three Mile Island nuclear power station has two reactors. The second reactor was infamously the site of a partial meltdown in 1979 and it has remained out of action ever since. But reactor one kept on chugging away without incident until 2019, when it was taken offline for financial reasons—mainly due to competition from gas- and wind-powered electricity. Kotek says there are relatively few idle reactors that could also be brought back online fairly quickly, but that a lot of power plant owners are interested in extending their operating licenses of their existing plants to try and ride the AI power wave.
“For some, the prospect of the site of the US’s most notorious nuclear disaster being used to power the AI revolution might sit uneasily. “
Part of the enthusiasm from power plant operators is due to government incentives to keep low-carbon power online. The Inflation Reduction Act includes tax credits tied to electricity production at existing nuclear power plants, but Kotek says that the industry will also have to get busy building new reactors if it wants to capture that projected energy demand. The number of operating nuclear reactors in the US peaked at 112 in 1990 and declined to 92 by 2022, and the most recently built reactors in the US—at Vogtle power plant in Georgia—took more than 14 years to build and came in at more than double the expected budget.
“The US showed at Vogtle that we’re not very good at building plants,” says Todd Allen, chair of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at University of Michigan. But Allen points out that China seems to build nuclear power plants much more quickly than the US, so speeding up is possible, and that if energy demand from data centers continues to grow, then building entirely new plants will increasingly look like an attractive option.
These potentially lengthy timescales are part of the reason why Microsoft is interested in small modular reactors, which should be quicker and cheaper to build. But tech firms have tended to emphasize searching for new sources of energy rather than improving the efficiency of their artificial intelligence operations, says Sasha Luccioni, AI and climate leader at Hugging Face, a company that develops tools for building applications using machine learning. “Regulation could be one way to incentivize [great efficiency], starting with mandatory reporting and transparency for companies providing AI tools and services,” she says.
At the Carnegie Mellon University event, Pichai said that work on improving the consumption side of AI’s energy usage was still in its “early phases.” “We are all inefficiently pretraining these models, absolutely,” he said, but added that inference—actually asking an AI model to perform a task—could become “dramatically more efficient over time.”
Google’s emissions in 2023 were 48 percent higher than their 2019 baseline, primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions, putting Google’s goal to reach net zero emissions by 2030 increasingly under threat. “The energy demands of AI are rising right now,” says Luccioni, but the renewable or low-carbon energy to fuel AI isn’t keeping pace quickly enough.
For some, the prospect of the site of the US’s most notorious nuclear disaster being used to power the AI revolution might sit uneasily. But Allen points out that reactor one did not shut down because of operational issues. Restarting the reactor, he says, will mostly be a question of making sure it is still in good operating condition and that there are enough trained staff to run it smoothly.
If Project 2025 becomes a reality under a second Trump term, there are several ways it plans to further restrict and surveil abortion access nationwide, including criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills and forcing states to turn over abortion data to the federal government.
Many of these proposals have received wide media coverage thanks in part to Democrats’ aggressive campaigning on Project 2025. But there has been far less attention on how major technology companies—which have increasingly helped people access abortions across state lines in light of bans nationwide—could play a role. In fact, some warn that tech would be key to implementing Project 2025’s anti-abortion goals.
Advocates are now working to preemptively thwart such cooperation. Last week, 15 civil liberties groups sent a letter to the CEOs of eight of the biggest tech companies—including Meta, Apple, TikTok, and Google, among others—demanding they explain how they would protect users’ data and privacy, as well as combat abortion-related misinformation on their platforms if Project 2025’s anti-abortion recommendations were set in motion. “As written, Project 2025 would rely heavily on your companies to further its extreme agenda,” states the letter, which Mother Jones is the first to report. The signatories—which include Accountable Tech, GLAAD, and The Tech Oversight Project—warn that Project 2025’s anti-abortion policies would lead to “heightened surveillance and an increase in the trend of law enforcement using criminal subpoenas to weaponize the consumer data your companies collect and store.”
Many of these concerns have already been realized. Last year, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison after Meta gave law enforcement the Facebook messages in which she and her pregnant teenage daughter—who was reportedly past the state’s then-20-week gestational limit (that has since been further restricted to 12 weeks)—discussed obtaining abortion pills and disposing of “the evidence.” Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) office in February accused a data broker of allegedly tracking visits to almost 600 Planned Parenthood locations nationwide and then selling that information to anti-abortion advertisers. Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates say tech platforms have censored their initiatives.
All this, advocates say, makes it critical that tech companies prepare for how they could be deputized to criminalize abortion-seekers if Trump is reelected in November. “These companies are already mechanized to be the stewards of a nightmarish plan like Project 2025,” Daly Barnett, a staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group focused on digital rights, told me.
I spoke with Barnett over Zoom this week to discuss how abortion rights advocates can better protect themselves and their privacy online and how tech platforms could protect users in another Trump era.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.
What kind of failures or inadequacies have you seen from some of these tech platforms in terms of protecting users’ privacy and data relating to abortion?
There are a lot of passive surveillance technologies, like ad tracking technologies that collect browsing data on people that can be combined with other personally identifiable information and used against people. We have examples of commercial platforms like Google Search and Facebook Messenger used to actually criminalize women in different cases, either for their own pregnancy outcomes or, in the case of Facebook Messenger logs, a woman helping her daughter navigate self-managed abortion.
So these communication platforms or these messaging features on social media apps that aren’t employing good privacy and security practices are suddenly dangerous to people, and I think the tech industry at large has yet to realize how culpable they are.
We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday.
Can you say more about what sort of digital threats or barriers abortion seekers are facing now, even without Project 2025 being in place?
I tend to break it down into three distinct threat models that people need to be aware of: people navigating healthcare and trying to seek abortion; their allies and advocates; and healthcare workers.
There’s digital evidence being used in abortion-related cases, so these [social media companies] that don’t think of themselves as culpable in abortion access can still be used against people when they have bad privacy. I also think of doxxing. Healthcare workers, especially, those whose information is subject to public records requests and FOIA, information could be used against them if they’re in reproductive healthcare. There are data brokers—which is an unregulated, vampiric nightmare industry that needs to be curtailed yesterday—that are constantly being weaponized against people. It contributes so much to the amount of data that can be collated and collected and used against people to create these vastly sophisticated portraits of who you are, what you’re doing online.
One example I think of with data brokers is [Sen. Wyden’s investigation]. That’s just an example of what happens when you have this unregulated industry that every tech company contributes to because it generates profit for them.
If there were a federal ban on abortion and abortion medications were suddenly outlawed, the surveillance of the mail service or of services that distribute medications like that would be under a newly focused threat of surveillance. Basically every aspect of our lives could potentially be used against us, depending on where we are in the abortion access struggle.
Tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it—including law enforcement.
If Project 2025 were implemented under another Trump term, what would it actually look like in practice for some of these platforms to be involved with carrying out some of its anti-abortion aims?
As long as these tech companies have piss poor privacy and security policies—specifically privacy policies—around user data, ad tracking and collection, behavioral tracking of users’ data, they are already mechanized for some really dystopic consequences—Project 2025 or not. We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday.
In the meantime, users have to fight for themselves to keep their information and their dignity and safety intact.
As long as communication platforms and messaging features on social media apps— as long as the status quo is not to have good data retention or to not have end-to-end encryption—all of those records are subject to law enforcement requests to enter subpoena, and that will impact users’ safety. We already have examples of this, quite literally, in criminal evidence, so it will only increase in that potential landscape.
What are some of the concrete ways that tech companies can and should bolster privacy and data protection for abortion seekers now and under another potential Trump administration?
I’m glad you asked this; this is the most important thing. I think tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it, including law enforcement.
Everyone needs to take their position seriously in the tech industry. That can start with better data retention policies. You need to have solid encryption at rest so that when law enforcement comes knocking, if you do have anything to hand over, you can be compliant without actually handing over anything that’s useful to the criminal investigations. But also, you can just delete old data. Having good encryption is great, but if you have really good deleting policies, deleting anything that isn’t absolutely essential to operations, that keeps you safe from both law enforcement requests and subpoena, but also data breaches—that’s huge.
Another big thing: stop tracking users on web and mobile platforms. The ad industry is corrupt, and users are wisening up to it. People are already more likely to choose platforms that respect their privacy now, because the overall understanding of privacy is normalized, thankfully, and now that we have a better understanding of how dangerous the data broker industry is, it’s imperative that tech companies do better for people.
Lastly, I would say all of these policies—data retention, not ad tracking, users, etc.—[companies have to] make these things transparent. You need to make it known that you’re a privacy-first alternative to the otherwise dangerous status quo,
How can abortion seekers protect their data and privacy online now, particularly if they are living in states with abortion bans?
Step one is definitely threat modeling. You have to take a serious point of view about what activities you’re up to, who you are in the space, and the risky behaviors or communications or aspects of your life that need to be compartmentalized away from other things. From there, you can begin to take some more meaningful approaches—like compartmentalizing that data, so maybe having multiple browsers and saving a privacy-forward browser like Tor, or maybe Brave, or Firefox with some settings turned up on it, as opposed to a more privacy-invasive one like Chrome.
Knowing when to compartmentalize sensitive communications to a more privacy focused platform [is also important]—so moving off of social media chat applications and onto end-to-end encrypted ones. Knowing how to attend protests safely; knowing what to look for if you’re on the ground and you’re escorting people to and from clinics; getting to know automatic license plate readers; getting to know how your device might be tracked. There’s a litany of measures people can take to protect themselves. Go learn more at Surveillance Self-Defense, where we have a bunch of different educational resources for people to look at.
If Project 2025 becomes a reality under a second Trump term, there are several ways it plans to further restrict and surveil abortion access nationwide, including criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills and forcing states to turn over abortion data to the federal government.
Many of these proposals have received wide media coverage thanks in part to Democrats’ aggressive campaigning on Project 2025. But there has been far less attention on how major technology companies—which have increasingly helped people access abortions across state lines in light of bans nationwide—could play a role. In fact, some warn that tech would be key to implementing Project 2025’s anti-abortion goals.
Advocates are now working to preemptively thwart such cooperation. Last week, 15 civil liberties groups sent a letter to the CEOs of eight of the biggest tech companies—including Meta, Apple, TikTok, and Google, among others—demanding they explain how they would protect users’ data and privacy, as well as combat abortion-related misinformation on their platforms if Project 2025’s anti-abortion recommendations were set in motion. “As written, Project 2025 would rely heavily on your companies to further its extreme agenda,” states the letter, which Mother Jones is the first to report. The signatories—which include Accountable Tech, GLAAD, and The Tech Oversight Project—warn that Project 2025’s anti-abortion policies would lead to “heightened surveillance and an increase in the trend of law enforcement using criminal subpoenas to weaponize the consumer data your companies collect and store.”
Many of these concerns have already been realized. Last year, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison after Meta gave law enforcement the Facebook messages in which she and her pregnant teenage daughter—who was reportedly past the state’s then-20-week gestational limit (that has since been further restricted to 12 weeks)—discussed obtaining abortion pills and disposing of “the evidence.” Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) office in February accused a data broker of allegedly tracking visits to almost 600 Planned Parenthood locations nationwide and then selling that information to anti-abortion advertisers. Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates say tech platforms have censored their initiatives.
All this, advocates say, makes it critical that tech companies prepare for how they could be deputized to criminalize abortion-seekers if Trump is reelected in November. “These companies are already mechanized to be the stewards of a nightmarish plan like Project 2025,” Daly Barnett, a staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group focused on digital rights, told me.
I spoke with Barnett over Zoom this week to discuss how abortion rights advocates can better protect themselves and their privacy online and how tech platforms could protect users in another Trump era.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.
What kind of failures or inadequacies have you seen from some of these tech platforms in terms of protecting users’ privacy and data relating to abortion?
There are a lot of passive surveillance technologies, like ad tracking technologies that collect browsing data on people that can be combined with other personally identifiable information and used against people. We have examples of commercial platforms like Google Search and Facebook Messenger used to actually criminalize women in different cases, either for their own pregnancy outcomes or, in the case of Facebook Messenger logs, a woman helping her daughter navigate self-managed abortion.
So these communication platforms or these messaging features on social media apps that aren’t employing good privacy and security practices are suddenly dangerous to people, and I think the tech industry at large has yet to realize how culpable they are.
We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday.
Can you say more about what sort of digital threats or barriers abortion seekers are facing now, even without Project 2025 being in place?
I tend to break it down into three distinct threat models that people need to be aware of: people navigating healthcare and trying to seek abortion; their allies and advocates; and healthcare workers.
There’s digital evidence being used in abortion-related cases, so these [social media companies] that don’t think of themselves as culpable in abortion access can still be used against people when they have bad privacy. I also think of doxxing. Healthcare workers, especially, those whose information is subject to public records requests and FOIA, information could be used against them if they’re in reproductive healthcare. There are data brokers—which is an unregulated, vampiric nightmare industry that needs to be curtailed yesterday—that are constantly being weaponized against people. It contributes so much to the amount of data that can be collated and collected and used against people to create these vastly sophisticated portraits of who you are, what you’re doing online.
One example I think of with data brokers is [Sen. Wyden’s investigation]. That’s just an example of what happens when you have this unregulated industry that every tech company contributes to because it generates profit for them.
If there were a federal ban on abortion and abortion medications were suddenly outlawed, the surveillance of the mail service or of services that distribute medications like that would be under a newly focused threat of surveillance. Basically every aspect of our lives could potentially be used against us, depending on where we are in the abortion access struggle.
Tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it—including law enforcement.
If Project 2025 were implemented under another Trump term, what would it actually look like in practice for some of these platforms to be involved with carrying out some of its anti-abortion aims?
As long as these tech companies have piss poor privacy and security policies—specifically privacy policies—around user data, ad tracking and collection, behavioral tracking of users’ data, they are already mechanized for some really dystopic consequences—Project 2025 or not. We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday.
In the meantime, users have to fight for themselves to keep their information and their dignity and safety intact.
As long as communication platforms and messaging features on social media apps— as long as the status quo is not to have good data retention or to not have end-to-end encryption—all of those records are subject to law enforcement requests to enter subpoena, and that will impact users’ safety. We already have examples of this, quite literally, in criminal evidence, so it will only increase in that potential landscape.
What are some of the concrete ways that tech companies can and should bolster privacy and data protection for abortion seekers now and under another potential Trump administration?
I’m glad you asked this; this is the most important thing. I think tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it, including law enforcement.
Everyone needs to take their position seriously in the tech industry. That can start with better data retention policies. You need to have solid encryption at rest so that when law enforcement comes knocking, if you do have anything to hand over, you can be compliant without actually handing over anything that’s useful to the criminal investigations. But also, you can just delete old data. Having good encryption is great, but if you have really good deleting policies, deleting anything that isn’t absolutely essential to operations, that keeps you safe from both law enforcement requests and subpoena, but also data breaches—that’s huge.
Another big thing: stop tracking users on web and mobile platforms. The ad industry is corrupt, and users are wisening up to it. People are already more likely to choose platforms that respect their privacy now, because the overall understanding of privacy is normalized, thankfully, and now that we have a better understanding of how dangerous the data broker industry is, it’s imperative that tech companies do better for people.
Lastly, I would say all of these policies—data retention, not ad tracking, users, etc.—[companies have to] make these things transparent. You need to make it known that you’re a privacy-first alternative to the otherwise dangerous status quo,
How can abortion seekers protect their data and privacy online now, particularly if they are living in states with abortion bans?
Step one is definitely threat modeling. You have to take a serious point of view about what activities you’re up to, who you are in the space, and the risky behaviors or communications or aspects of your life that need to be compartmentalized away from other things. From there, you can begin to take some more meaningful approaches—like compartmentalizing that data, so maybe having multiple browsers and saving a privacy-forward browser like Tor, or maybe Brave, or Firefox with some settings turned up on it, as opposed to a more privacy-invasive one like Chrome.
Knowing when to compartmentalize sensitive communications to a more privacy focused platform [is also important]—so moving off of social media chat applications and onto end-to-end encrypted ones. Knowing how to attend protests safely; knowing what to look for if you’re on the ground and you’re escorting people to and from clinics; getting to know automatic license plate readers; getting to know how your device might be tracked. There’s a litany of measures people can take to protect themselves. Go learn more at Surveillance Self-Defense, where we have a bunch of different educational resources for people to look at.
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