Sowing discord
In March, the US government accused the founder of the Moscow-based Social Design Agency, who organized a “sustained campaign of foreign malign influence” on behalf of the Kremlin.
The propaganda campaign, dubbed “Doppelganger,” involved spreading memes, deepfaked videos and forged documents online to alienate the West from Ukraine and its leaders after Russia’s invasion in 2022.
The company is under the supervision of a top advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin and has attempted to discredit Ukraine’s military and political leaders by flooding social media with propaganda.
And as it turns out, notoriously gullible Billionaire and former Twitter owner Elon Musk appears to have been fooled by the campaign.
In October 2023, Musk a meme shared for his millions of followers, showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky straining his face, with the caption: “When 5 minutes have passed and you still haven’t asked for a billion dollars in aid.”
According to leaked documents obtained by a number of European mediaThe meme — along with a number of other posts not shared by Musk — was put together by none other than the Social Design Agency.
The incident highlights how pervasive misinformation and propaganda have become on Musk’s social media platform. And it’s not just users who are sowing chaos and spreading hate speech — the company’s owner himself is actively contributing to the trend.
Mr. Fake News
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Musk actively share disinformation about X. Earlier this year, Musk shared a video on the platform that reportedly showed “armed communist Maduro gangs ‘Colectivos’ now storming polling stations in Punta Cardón.”
As it turned out, that was a complete lie.
“These are thieves stealing air conditioners and a woman can be heard in the video saying that,” a community note added to the post later said. “Voting in Venezuela is done on small computers that look nothing like the one in this video.”
Last month, Musk responded to a easy to refute story about British Prime Minister Keir Starmer “considering building ’emergency detention camps’ on the Falkland Islands.”
“Only Elon Musk quotes the tweet of the co-leader of the far-right party Britain First, who shared a fake message Telegraph head,” Politics.co.uk editor Josh Self tweeted at the time. “Totally dystopian.”
Musk ignored his own platform’s policies and also shared an AI-generated video of Vice President Kamala Harris in July.
It’s a sad state of affairs: a billionaire American contractor actively spreading Russian propaganda. And chances are he’ll never be held accountable — after all, X is his own echo chamber and he does with it what he wants.
More about the gullible Musk: Gullible Elon Musk falls for fake news again and deletes his post