Elon Musk Isn’t Just Enabling Misinformation About the Israel-Hamas War—He’s Fueling It Himself

Doctored news segments designed to smear a war correspondent. Bogus warnings of Russian threats. Video game footage masquerading as breaking news.

These are some of the examples of the misinformation, disinformation, and unchecked reports that have spread on social media since hostilities between Hamas and Israel grew far deadlier over the weekend. And unsurprisingly, Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has been one of their chief culprits.

One account on the platform circulated a fake White House document claiming that Joe Biden had agreed to provide an $8 billion aid package to Israel. Another account pretending to be The Jerusalem Post falsely reported that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been hospitalized over the weekend. And a third, attaching false English subtitles to old remarks from Vladimir Putin, claimed that the Russian president had threatened to throw his support behind Palestine. (The actual video is from January and showed Putin discussing the threat of nuclear war.)

Musk has personally played a part in spreading sham news items. He authored a post on Sunday advising his 150 million followers to get their war news from a pair of accounts with reported track records of sharing false information. (He later deleted that post.) On Wednesday, he also reacted with a laughing emoji to a video of CNN’s Clarissa Ward that included doctored audio portraying her as an actor. The video is real; Ward was filmed crouching in a ditch near the Gaza-Israel border amid a rocket salvo. But the audio track, as a CNN spokesperson later explained, “is fabricated, inaccurate, and irresponsibly distorts the reality of the moment that was covered live on CNN, which people should watch in full for themselves on a trusted platform.” (A disclaimer on the post, written by users of X, now reads, “The video is clearly intended as a parody but people who don’t follow the account could misinterpret it as genuine given the seriousness and persistence of the events.”)