Lawyers representing Elon Musk and X, previously known as Twitter, have quietly begun sending subpoenas to a host of public interest groups, Mother Jones has learned. Most of the targeted organizations have signed open letters to X’s advertisers expressing concerns about the platform’s direction under Musk’s leadership.

The groups include the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the digital rights organization Access Now, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). The subpoenas represent a new chapter in the legal war Musk launched after advertisers fled X, and are part of a lawsuit Musk and X first filed about a year ago against Media Matters over a report it published documenting that ads appeared alongside extremist content. The subpoenas demand any correspondence the organizations have had with that progressive media watchdog group. Several targets told Mother Jones they’ve had no or limited interaction with Media Matters, and that the subpoenas feel, in the words of more than one person, like “a fishing expedition.”

“We were sent a subpoena,” confirms Jim Naureckas, the editor of FAIR, which has been documenting corporate media bias since 1986. In his 34 years there, Naureckas adds, this is their first subpoena.

While “it was very exciting,” he jokes, he says it is not something for which they can provide any responsive materials. “It’s a long convoluted subpoena looking for a bunch of stuff we don’t have. If we were enthusiastic Elon Musk fans who wanted to help him with his lawsuit against Media Matters, I don’t know what we’d give him.”

Representatives for the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Center for Countering Digital Hate also confirmed they had received subpoenas; other signatories on the open letters did not respond to requests for comment.

One of the letters was sent in May 2022 to express concern about Musk’s plan to take over Twitter, and was spearheaded by Media Matters alongside the big tech watchdog group Accountable Tech and the women’s rights nonprofit Ultraviolet. The other, from a coalition calling itself Stop Toxic Twitter, was sent to the platform’s top ad-buyers in November 2022; Media Matters was one of its lead signatories. Media Matters and their legal counsel declined to comment. Twitter, which no longer responds to requests for comment, could not be reached.

FAIR, for the record, had not signed either letter, but had written about X’s lawsuit targeting Media Matters, calling it an attack on free speech. “If a blog post is evidence of collaboration, that’s a stance that’s somewhat hostile to the First Amendment,” Naureckas dryly says.

With advertisers marching away from his site, Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” launched what he called a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters in November 2023 over its report warning that paid content from major companies like Apple and Oracle was being placed along bigoted material on X. Musk and X contend that Media Matters “manipulated” the algorithm to make the ads appear alongside such content.

The company filed in the Northern District of Texas, where it will appear before Judge Reed O’Connor, who holds $15,000 of stock in Tesla, Musk’s other company. (Earlier this week, Media Matters lost its bid to have O’Connor recuse himself.) Media Matters has also filed to dismiss the case, which O’Connor has not yet ruled on; in the meantime, he has ordered that Media Matters must comply with an expansive discovery request from X’s lawyers. Musk is also taking legal action against ad industry trade groups, accusing the organizations of engaging in an illegal group boycott against X. Seemingly in response to the suit, one of the groups, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, said it would discontinue its work. 

Similarly, the new subpoenas from X’s lawyers will have “a chilling effect on advocacy and on freedom of expression,” says Jessica González, a co-CEO of the media policy organization Free Press. “It’s really cynical, actually: Mr. Free Speech going after anyone who’s criticized him.”

While Free Press, despite being an original convenor of Stop Toxic Twitter, has not received a subpoena, González worries about the effects on organizations that have. Advocacy groups coming together to speak up for the rights of their communities, she says, “are what free speech is all about.”

“By going on a lawsuit spree and issuing subpoenas to a number of organizations who signed a letter,” she explains, “folks have to think twice about whether they’re going to speak up on behalf of their communities. It’s threatening to smaller organizations with smaller budgets.”

“There’s a grim rationality to his legal activities,” says Imran Ahmed, the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s founder and CEO, of Musk. “They’re the desperate actions of a man trying to avoid accountability for what he knows is atrocious behavior.” Ahmed believes Musk knows the behavior is bad, he added, because he himself said in 2022 that Twitter could not be allowed to become “a free-for-all hellscape,” which critics argue it has.

In February, Musk lost a lawsuit that targeted the Center for Countering Digital Hate, when a federal judge in California ruled that the suit represented a clear effort to “punish” the group for criticizing Twitter. “He’s officially someone who’s tried to use strategic litigation to silence an organization, for all his First Amendment purity,” explains Ahmed.

Ahmed says his group’s lawyers have already raised that loss in pushing back against X’s latest subpoena, objecting that it is not only “vague, ambiguous and unintelligible,” but that it “clearly seeks information that X had sought to obtain in another, completely separate case that X brought against CCDH that has been dismissed with prejudice.”

“He’s revealing the extent to which this has never been about free speech,” says Ahmed. “It’s always been about protecting revenue.”

Elon Musk is not just the Trump-supporting owner of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. It turns out he is also one of the platform’s biggest peddlers of election-related disinformation, according to a new report published Thursday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The report from CCDH, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting civil liberties and holding social media companies accountable, found that 50 false or misleading posts shared by Musk on X between January 1 and July 31 of this year racked up a staggering 1.2 billion views. The group categorized the posts under three main themes: false claims that Democrats are “importing voters” through illegal immigration (the bulk of the content that researchers examined); false claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud; and a manipulated video, also known as a deepfake, of Vice President Kamala Harris.

According to the report, while independent fact-checkers found the content in all of those 50 posts shared by Musk to be false or misleading, none of the posts in question contained a “community note,” X’s user-generated fact-checking system that the company promise’s can contextualize “potentially misleading posts.” Just this week, Musk claimed in a post on X that community notes offer “a clear and immediate way to refute anything false in the replies,” adding, “the same is not true for legacy media who lie relentlessly, but there is no way to counter their propaganda.”

Imran Ahmed, CEO of the CCDH, said in a statement accompanying the report that Musk “is abusing his privileged position as owner of a small, but politically influential, social media platform to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust.”

X responded to a request for comment from Mother Jones with an automated message saying, “busy now, please check back later.” (The company may have retired its automated poop emoji.) Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president last month, after Trump nearly was assassinated.

As I reported recently, in addition to being false or misleading, at least some of this content appears to violate X’s own terms of service. On July 26, Musk shared a deepfake that falsely appeared to show Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire” and degrading President Biden. “This is amazing,” Musk wrote in his post sharing the video, accompanied by a laughing emoji. Musk’s post has received more than 135 million views, and it remains online—despite the fact that, as the CCDH report notes, X’s policy prohibits the sharing of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”

X says it only deletes such posts in cases of “high-severity violations of the policy, including misleading media that have a serious risk of harm to individuals or communities”—though it does not define how it measures “high-severity violations” or “serious risk of harm.”

And while Musk personally has massive reach, with more than 193 million followers on X, the problems are systemic, allowing other users who have significant reach also to spread political disinformation. One example: As I reported on Sunday, an account that reposts Donald Trump’s feed from Truth Social on X shared an obviously manipulated video of Harris that appeared to show her struggling to complete a sentence. Trump first posted the video to his Truth Social platform on Saturday, though it’s unclear who originally altered the video. When Mother Jones exposed its spread on X on Sunday, it had drawn more than 620,000 views, and bore no indication that it clearly was doctored footage.

When I inquired with the Trump campaign about the video, spokesperson Steven Cheung just asserted (profanely) that it was authentic. But by Monday, following my inquiry to X about the video, the post on X had been updated with a label calling it “manipulated media”—though the video remains up. (Cheung did not respond to a further request for comment.)

The CCDH report comes as the latest example of the growing scrutiny of X and its platforming of disinformation targeting Harris ahead of the November election. On Monday, five secretaries of state sent Musk a letter demanding he “immediately implement changes” to Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, after it falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states.

The scrutiny does not appear to concern Musk. This week, the X owner has continued attacking Harris on the platform he purchased in 2022, baselessly claiming Harris is “quite literally a Communist.” Expect more to come, especially given that Musk, according to Trump, is reportedly set to “interview” Trump on Monday. If that conversation occurs, it isn’t likely to focus on or stick to facts; as my colleague Mark Follman points out, Musk clearly is not a journalist.

Elon Musk is not just the Trump-supporting owner of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. It turns out he is also one of the platform’s biggest peddlers of election-related disinformation, according to a new report published Thursday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The report from CCDH, a nonprofit organization focused on protecting civil liberties and holding social media companies accountable, found that 50 false or misleading posts shared by Musk on X between Jan. 1 and July 31 of this year racked up a staggering 1.2 billion views. The group categorized the posts under three main themes: false claims that Democrats are “importing voters” through illegal immigration (the bulk of the content that researchers examined); false claims that voting is vulnerable to fraud; and a manipulated video, also known as a deepfake, of Vice President Kamala Harris.

According to the report, while independent fact-checkers found the content in all of those 50 posts shared by Musk to be false or misleading, none of the posts in question contained a “community note,” X’s user-generated fact-checking system that the company promise’s can contextualize “potentially misleading posts.” Just this week, Musk claimed in a post on X that community notes offer “a clear and immediate way to refute anything false in the replies,” adding, “the same is not true for legacy media who lie relentlessly, but there is no way to counter their propaganda.”

Imran Ahmed, CEO of the CCDH, said in a statement accompanying the report that Musk “is abusing his privileged position as owner of a small, but politically influential, social media platform to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust.”

X responded to a request for comment from Mother Jones with an automated message saying, “busy now, please check back later.” (The company may have retired its automated poop emoji.) Musk endorsed Donald Trump for president last month, after Trump nearly was assassinated.

As I reported recently, in addition to being false or misleading, at least some of this content appears to violate X’s own terms of service. On July 26, Musk shared a deepfake that falsely appeared to show Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire” and degrading President Biden. “This is amazing,” Musk wrote in his post sharing the video, accompanied by a laughing emoji. Musk’s post has received more than 135 million views, and it remains online—despite the fact that, as the CCDH report notes, X’s policy prohibits the sharing of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”

X says it only deletes such posts in cases of “high-severity violations of the policy, including misleading media that have a serious risk of harm to individuals or communities”—though it does not define how it measures “high-severity violations” or “serious risk of harm.”

And while Musk personally has massive reach, with more than 193 million followers on X, the problems are systemic, allowing other users who have significant reach also to spread political disinformation. One example: As I reported on Sunday, an account that reposts Donald Trump’s feed from Truth Social on X shared an obviously manipulated video of Harris that appeared to show her struggling to complete a sentence. Trump first posted the video to his Truth Social platform on Saturday, though it’s unclear who originally altered the video. When Mother Jones exposed its spread on X on Sunday, it had drawn more than 620,000 views, and bore no indication that it clearly was doctored footage.

When I inquired with the Trump campaign about the video, spokesperson Steven Cheung just asserted (profanely) that it was authentic. But by Monday, following my inquiry to X about the video, the post on X had been updated with a label calling it “manipulated media”—though the video remains up. (Cheung did not respond to a further request for comment.)

The CCDH report comes as the latest example of the growing scrutiny of X and its platforming of disinformation targeting Harris ahead of the November election. On Monday, five secretaries of state sent Musk a letter demanding he “immediately implement changes” to Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, after it falsely told users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states.

The scrutiny does not appear to concern Musk. This week, the X owner has continued attacking Harris on the platform he purchased in 2022, baselessly claiming Harris is “quite literally a Communist.” Expect more to come, especially given that Musk, according to Trump, is reportedly set to “interview” Trump on Monday. If that conversation occurs, it isn’t likely to focus on or stick to facts; as my colleague Mark Follman points out, Musk clearly is not a journalist.

Elon Musk has said he wants X, formerly known as Twitter, to be the “public square” of the internet, an essential place for discourse and democracy. But there’s a major problem: Disinformation is running rampant on X in the lead-up to the November election, including content targeting Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As Mother Jones reported on Sunday, that content includes deepfakes shared by Musk himself and by an account that reposts Donald Trump’s feed from Truth Social. Musk, who has owned X since fall 2022, has endorsed Trump for president.

Leading election officials have grown concerned about potential harm from X. On Monday, five secretaries of state—those from Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington, and New Mexico—sent Musk a letter demanding he “immediately implement changes” to Grok, the AI-powered search assistant available to premium subscribers on X, after it informed users that Harris declared her candidacy too late to appear on ballots in nine states. That is false.

The letter states that the false information was shared “repeatedly in multiple posts—reaching millions of people,” and continually disseminated by Grok until it was finally corrected, 10 days after Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris’s candidacy. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, who spearheaded the letter-writing initiative, told the Washington Post: “This is a case where the owner of the public square (the social media company itself) is the one who introduced and spread the bad information—and then delayed correcting its own mistake after it knew that the information was false.”

Simon and the other signatories represent five of the nine states that were the subject of the disinformation; the others include Indiana, Alabama, Ohio, and Texas. (A spokesperson for Simon said his office offered for all nine states to take part in the letter.) Four of the signatories to the letter are Democratic secretaries of state, apart from Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, a Republican.

The letter asks Musk to follow OpenAI’s lead by directing Grok users to CanIVote.org, a nonpartisan website focused on voter registration, when users ask about elections. But that seems unlikely, given that Musk previously described OpenAI’s ChatGPT as being “deeply ingrained” with what he calls the “woke mind virus.” And when X launched Grok last November, the company described it as being designed to “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

Spokespeople for X and the Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones regarding the letter to Musk.

In recent days, two phony videos of Harris have circulated on X—thanks to Trump and Musk. As I detailed on Sunday, those videos have racked up tens of millions of views despite appearing to be in violation of X’s own terms of service, which prohibit the sharing of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”

The first, a doctored video known as a “deepfake,” was shared by Musk himself on July 26, and featured fake audio that depicted Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire” and degrading President Biden. The post remains up on Musk’s account—where he calls the video “amazing,” alongside a laughing emoji—and has drawn more than 134 million views.

The second deepfake features doctored video of Harris derived from remarks she made after the release on Friday of Americans wrongfully imprisoned by Russia. Trump shared the phony video on Truth Social on Saturday; it was soon reshared on X by an account that posts Trump’s Truth Social content verbatim. The video had received more than 764,000 views on X as of Tuesday.

It is unclear who doctored and first posted that phony video on Truth Social. In response to specific questions from Mother Jones on Sunday about the deepfake, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung replied, “your phone or computer must be fucked up because the audio/video matches up.”

But by Monday afternoon—about 24 hours after Mother Jones first inquired with the Trump campaign and X about the deepfake—X labeled it “manipulated media,” leaving it online. (The platform’s policy says it adds such labels when it does not remove content, a step it only takes in instances of “high-severity violations.”)

Cheung did not respond to a follow-up question about the “manipulated media” label.

As I also reported on Sunday, the doctored videos and the false election claims from Grok are not the first disinformation targeting Harris on X. They are unlikely to be the last, in light of Musk’s full-throated support for Trump and penchant for provocation. On Tuesday, Musk declared “war” on advertisers that X alleges illegally boycotted the platform over politics.

Enlarge (credit: Alistair Berg)

Misinformation is not a new problem, but there are plenty of indications that the advent of social media has made things worse. Academic researchers have responded by trying to understand the scope of the problem, identifying the most misinformation-filled social media networks, organized government efforts to spread false information, and even prominent individuals who are the sources of misinformation.

All of that's potentially valuable data. But it skips over another major contribution: average individuals who, for one reason or another, seem inspired to spread misinformation. A study released today looks at a large panel of Twitter accounts that are associated with US-based voters (the work was done back when X was still Twitter). It identifies a small group of misinformation superspreaders, which represent just 0.3 percent of the accounts but are responsible for sharing 80 percent of the links to fake news sites.

While you might expect these to be young, Internet-savvy individuals who automate their sharing, it turns out this population tends to be older, female, and very, very prone to clicking the "retweet" button.

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