Civil rights lawyers and Democrats are sounding alarms about Mr. Musk’s claims about voting. The Biden campaign called his posts “profoundly irresponsible.”

In the spring of 2020, when President Donald J. Trump wrote messages on Twitter warning that increased reliance on mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” the platform ran a corrective, debunking his claims.

“Get the facts about mail-in voting,” a content label read. “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud,” the hyperlinked article declared.

This month, Elon Musk, who has since bought Twitter and rebranded it X, echoed several of Mr. Trump’s claims about the American voting system, putting forth distorted and false notions that American elections were wide open for fraud and illegal voting by noncitizens.

This time, there were no fact checks. And the X algorithm — under Mr. Musk’s direct control — helped the posts reach large audiences, in some cases drawing many millions of views.

Since taking control of the site, Mr. Musk has dismantled the platform’s system for flagging false election content, arguing it amounted to election interference.

Archive

  • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
    34·
    10 months ago

    Democracy already lost to capitalism. Authoritarianism is the natural progression of allowing a minority to control most of humanity’s wealth/power/resources — a return to the mean that applied for 99% of recorded history.

      • Sodis@feddit.de
        1·
        10 months ago

        There is no full democracy, that can’t be attacked by fascists, if they get elected. There are enough examples for this in the world. Democracy needs the support of the citizens or it will not work. It is not a self-sufficient system.

    • Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world
      13·
      10 months ago

      Isn’t authoritarianism the default type of government humans gravitate towards because there’s always some dumbass who wants to be king or emperor and they somehow pull it off?

      • ME5SENGER_24@lemmy.world
        7·
        10 months ago

        Because the rich promise to lift a specific subset of people out of the muck, in exchange for that specific subset allowing them to rule and to keep the rest of the population far from their golden thrones. Capitalism has always been the fault, greed has always been the motivating factor.

        People need to stop thinking that their life is any more important than their neighbor’s and start thinking that we’re all in it together and we should all enjoy the time we’ve got as best as we all possibly can. From king to peasant, from president to street rat we are all the same and should all be treated equally. How we can have billionaires and millionaires when someone will die homeless from hypothermia is beyond me. It’s not an individual responsibility either, that should be the goal of a good government; that all its citizens have in abundance and it should also be the goal of world leadership that nations work collectively to make sure that every citizen of every nation has in abundance.

        Instead we have dragons laying atop golden mountains

        • Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world
          2·
          10 months ago

          I read a while ago that capitalism is cancer but industrialization isn’t. I think I see what you mean. Being driven by profit caused our well being to diminish to critical levels