Technology

Among the most-viewed misleading claims where X failed to add accurate notes were posts spreading lies that "welfare offices in 49 states are handing out voter registration applications to illegal aliens," the Democratic party is importing voters, most states don't require ID to vote, and both electronic and mail-in voting are "too risky."

This is just normal Republican lies. There's no particular reason to attribute it to foreign influence. In fact:

One false narrative—that Dems import voters—was amplified in a post from Elon Musk that got 51 million views. In the background, proposed notes sought to correct the disinformation by noting that "lawful permanent residents (green card holders)" cannot vote in US elections until they're granted citizenship after living in the US for five years. But even these seemingly straightforward citations to government resources did not pass muster for users politically motivated to hide the note.

This appears to be a common pattern on X, the CCDH suggested, and Musk is seemingly a multiplier. In July, the CCDH reported that Musk's misleading posts about the 2024 election in particular were viewed more than a billion times without any notes ever added.

It seems like some of it is nearly-openly lead by the platform owner, with judgements on veracity handed down from him to his fanboys.

The calls are coming from inside the house. You can't pin everything on foreigners, least of all things where you have no specific information on them being to blame.

"But bots!"

Even setting aside that the article doesn't attribute even most of what's happening to bots (hence its title), that's not an adequate counterclaim. Do you really, really think that among the mountain of Republican think tanks and other organizations, none of them are running a bot farm of even a few dozen accounts, like the 45 cited in the article? Granted, it could be Russia (logically, it probably isn't China, which Republicans are usually harder on), but there have also been domestic operations, haven't there?

Here's an easy example that does not directly "prove" the above case is not foreign interference (again, it's at an overlap point of the interest of different groups) but demonstrates that it clearly seems that there are domestic bot nets doing numbers and thus that such a possibility needs to be considered for other cases where a Republican bot net might have an interest.