When the shit hits the fan. How Elon Musk is looking for lies and spreading them through his account on X
Elon Musk, the owner of the X platform (Twitter), has turned his social media presence into a tool of influence far beyond business.
With over 219 million followers, his account is the most popular on the platform, and each of his posts quickly gains millions of views. According to the American media, to achieve such exorbitant figures, X engineers created a new algorithm that shows the tweets of their owner as widely as possible.
Now, it is Musk's account that has become a repeater of incredibly wild inventions and lies. Often, the billionaire retweets low-profile conspiracy theorists or propagandists, providing them with a vast audience.
We saw this pattern in the example of spreading lies about Texty.org.ua. We also looked at and analyzed two other typical examples.
Reposting false information about Texty.org.ua
On March 1, 2025, Iosephine Pascal, a Romanian blogger and supporter of the pro-Russian Romanian politician Kelin Georgescu, published a post in which she called Texty.org.ua a Ukrainian state group and accused our team of interfering in Romania's internal affairs, which is not true (read more here). Although Pascal herself had about 10 thousand followers on the X network at the time, and her other posts on the same day had a maximum of 20 thousand reaches, this post was seen by 2.6 million users.
The post gained such popularity because it was shared by American blogger Mario Naufal 11 minutes after it was published. He questioned the integrity of the upcoming Romanian elections, citing Pascal's statements.
Naufal calls himself an investor in cryptocurrencies. He has his own show, for which he interviewed Alexander Lukashenko and Sergey Lavrov and 2.1 million followers on the X network. He posts American and world political news on his profile and actively supports the policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Musk, in turn, often shares Naufal's posts. In particular, he shared a post about Texty.org.ua, which eventually gained 2.6 million views, 15,000 likes, and more than 6,500 reposts.
A few hours later, Russian propagandist Anatoly Shariy published a screenshot of this post and false statements about our editorial office on his Telegram channel, which was seen by another 1 million people. This was the next step in the spread of disinformation.
Quote post about "open" German borders
Another example is Musk's citation of a false post by an anonymous Radio Europe X-account, which had about 80 thousand followers at the time.
This profile publishes news under the slogan "Make Europe Great Again," admires Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and supports European right-wing parties. According to user X, Radio Europe is a former escort account that has only recently published 18+ content. The account name and theme were changed, and previous posts were deleted. Since January 27, 2025, it has been publishing political news.
On February 25, Radio Europe published a post with false information that 24 hours after the German parliamentary elections on February 23, German borders were "opened" to migrants, and 48 hours later, a flight with migrants from Afghanistan arrived in Berlin.
There have been no changes in the German border crossing rules since the election. The German media outlet DW published a fact-check (link to the article) of a Radio Europe post and another manipulative post in X on the same topic. It also emphasized that the new government headed by Friedrich Merz has not yet been formed, so the arrival of the plane was organized by the Olaf Scholz government, in particular as part of the federal reception program for Afghanistan, launched in 2022 after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in August 2021.
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Radio Europe's post reached more than 20.3 million users and gained 31 thousand likes and 6 thousand shares. As in the previous example, it gained such popularity because 8 minutes after the post was published, Musk quoted it with the comment, "Wow."
19.2 million people saw the post on Musk's page; another 60 thousand liked it, and 12 thousand shared it.
Subsequently, a post about this post appeared on the pro-Russian German telegram channel Danijel_Sheran17 (19 thousand subscribers), where another 52 thousand people saw it.
Texty.org.ua analyzed the narratives about Ukraine in this and other pro-Russian German telegram channels before the recent parliamentary elections (read more here).
Quote post with a narrative about a "rotten" Europe
The third example is Europe's lack of freedom of expression and religion.
It all started with a post by American researcher and English professor Rob Jenkins. Jenkins has right-wing views, actively speaks out against vaccines and the LGBTQ+ community, and does not believe in the dangers of climate change. He broadcasts his thoughts on his X account for 26 thousand subscribers.
On March 3, 2025, Jenkins published a sarcastic post: if Putin is not stopped, totalitarianism will prevail in Europe, people will be judged for posting on social media and praying at home, and child trafficking will spread, hinting that all this is already happening in Europe.
6.4 million people saw this post, liked by 149 thousand, and shared by almost 25 thousand. Still, it reached an even larger audience in the form of a screenshot published on the same day by the Wall Street Mav X account, which mostly posts entertaining content on economic topics, criticizes Democrats, and supports Trump.
Wall Street Mav published a screenshot of Jenkins' post an hour after it appeared and praised the author's trolling. The post received 22.7 million views, 31 thousand likes, and 5 thousand shares.
He was quoted by Elon Musk with the comment, "Imagine if this happened... Oh, it's already happened." His post was viewed by another 22.6 million people, liked by 237 thousand, and shared by 42 thousand X users.
These cases demonstrate how Elon Musk has become a super spreader of disinformation and fakes.
Here's a typical mechanism: first, a little-known or anonymous account publishes manipulative or false information, which is picked up by influential users and reposted by Musk to ensure its massive spread. Even the most absurd statements can go viral and later be perceived as facts.
Musk's behavior is part of a broader threat when opinion leaders with an audience of millions shape the information agenda without taking responsibility for the accuracy of the content.
Musk has already changed X by monetizing viral content and increasing the influence of paid subscription accounts, regardless of the quality of their posts. If this trend continues, X risks becoming a platform for uncontrolled disinformation, and Musk's influence is a key factor in its spread.
