Sowing Discord
In March, the US government accused the founder of Moscow-based company Social Design Agency of orchestrating a “persistent foreign malign influence campaign” on behalf of the Kremlin.
The propaganda operation, dubbed “Doppelganger,” involved spreading memes, deepfaked videos, and falsified documents online to alienate the West from Ukraine and its leadership following Russia’s 2022 invasion.
The company is overseen by a top aide to Russian president Vladimir Putin, and has attempted to discredit Ukraine’s military and political leadership by flooding social media with propaganda.
And as it turns out, infamously gullible billionaire and X-formerly-Twitter owner Elon Musk appears to have gotten duped by the campaign.
In October 2023, Musk shared a meme to his millions of followers showing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky straining his face, with the caption reading: “When it’s been 5 minutes and you haven’t asked for a billion dollars in aid.”
According to leaked documents obtained by a number of European media outlets, the meme — alongside a number of other posts that were not shared by Musk — was put together by none other than the Social Design Agency.
The incident highlights just how ubiquitous disinformation and propaganda have become on Musk’s social media platform. And it’s not just its users sowing chaos and spreading hate speech — the company’s owner is actively contributing to the trend himself.
Mr. Fake News
It’s far from the first time we’ve seen Musk actively sharing disinformation on X. Earlier this year, Musk shared a video on the platform that purported to show “armed communist Maduro gangs ‘Colectivos’ are now storming polling stations in Punta Cardón.”
As it later turned out, that was a complete lie.
“Those are thieves stealing air conditioners and a woman can be heard in the video saying so,” a community note appended to the post later read. “Voting in Venezuela is done on small computers that look nothing like what appears in this video.”
Then last month, Musk replied to an easily disproven story about UK prime minister Keir Starmer “considering building ’emergency detainment camps’ on the Falkland Islands.”
“Just Elon Musk quote tweeting the co-leader of far-right party, Britain First, who is sharing a fake Telegraph headline,” Politics.co.uk editor Josh Self tweeted at the time. “Utterly dystopian.”
In flagrant disregard for his own platform’s policies, Musk also shared an AI-generated video of vice president Kamala Harris in July.
It’s a sad state of affairs: a billionaire US contractor actively spread Russian propaganda. And chances are he won’t ever be held accountable — after all, X is his own echo chamber, and he does with it what he pleases.
More on gullible Musk: Gullible Elon Musk Falls for Fake News Again, Deletes Post