Remove Your Tinfoil Hats, Everyone; Social Media Mishaps Aren’t Always Billionaire Election Stealing Plots

Please. I beg of people: stop it. Stop it with the conspiracy theories. Stop it with the nonsense. If you can’t find something you want on social media, it’s not because a billionaire is trying to influence an election. It might just be because some antifraud system went haywire or something.

Last week we wrote about totally overreacting to the Kamala Harris campaign account on ExTwitter triggering some rate limiting efforts. It appeared to be fairly typical (if poorly implemented) tools to prevent spam accounts and such. But people insisted that it must be Elon putting his finger on the scale, with some even suggesting it must be “election interference.” It was not.

Of course, perhaps it’s no wonder that people thought this, because lots of people seem to want to believe that any anomalous thing they see that looks negative for the candidate they support must be “election interference.”

Even Elon.

You might think, being the super genius he supposedly is, that just days after he was falsely accused of engaging in election interference for just poorly implemented algorithmic stuff, he might be more prone to taking a breath before screaming the same thing about others. But nope. Not Elon “Confirmation Bias is my Middle Name” Musk.

Here’s Elon insisting that it must be election interference because on his personal Google search, he typed in “President Donald” and it didn’t show a search result for Donald Trump:

First of all, multiple people responded noting that they’re not getting those results. I checked the same search and did, in fact, see Trump recommended (actually, it recommended Trump as soon as I typed “President”):

But, more to the point, assuming Elon is actually seeing that, it’s almost certainly some weird temporary glitch, just like Elon’s site making it briefly harder to follow the Harris campaign. These things happen. You would think that Elon would recognize how unlikely and improbable it is that Google would be removing Donald Trump from Google’s autocomplete “predictions” system. And, even if they did, who in their right mind would think that would be a useful way to influence an election?

I mean, how stupid would that be? Who is not going to vote for Trump because autocomplete doesn’t name him that one time you did a search?

And you’d think that Elon would be even more thoughtful on this, given that not a day goes by without people overreacting and freaking out over things that they falsely believe he’s doing.

For example, this weekend, people flipped out claiming that former White House photographer Pete Souza had been banned by Elon for posting a recent AP photo and calling out that Trump’s ear no longer looked injured (which seems like a non-story in its own right; it was grazed, and grazes heal).

People were sending this to me and saying I should write it up. But it seemed pretty clear that Souza had shut down his own account, because it says “Something went wrong.” When an account is suspended, it says that the account had been suspended. And, sure enough, on Monday, Souza went to Instagram to note that he’d just gotten tired of harassment and had chosen to shut down the account.

And, then, of course, on Monday night, ExTwitter actually did suspend the “official” account for the “White Dudes for Harris” campaign, around the same time that group completed a fundraising Zoom that raised about $4 million for the campaign. Unlike the Souza account, you’ll notice it actually does say account suspended:

The account itself posted that the account was “locked” due to “unusual activity.”

And, uh, yeah? That’s not that surprising. Shouldn’t an account suddenly amassing a ton of followers with no clear official connection to the campaign and pushing people to donate maybe ring some internal alarm bells on any trust and safety team? It wouldn’t be a surprise if it tripped some guardwires and was locked and/or suspended briefly while the account was reviewed.

That’s how this stuff works.

Someone associated with the account separately shared that it was suspended for “violating our rules against evading suspension.”

Many people immediately cried foul and again insisted that Elon was deliberately trying to tip the scales. But again, there remains no evidence that that is the case. The message is a bit confusing, but that rule violation message shows up semi-frequently, often when multiple people are registering similar accounts. There were reports of other similarly named accounts being registered at the same time. And that could certainly lead to triggering some internal trust & safety alerts of either attempted fraud or setting up backup accounts, knowing that some accounts were planning to violate rules.

And, of course, soon after everyone lost their minds and insisted that this was Elon freaking out, the account came back online. Also, of course, it wasn’t the ExTwitter account that was raising the money. It was the Zoom call.

So, please, would everyone just chill out. These all seem like pretty typical things that happen all the time. No, these systems don’t always work perfectly, or the way that you want them to work. But stop with the conspiracy theories or the idea that there are evil billionaires behind everything not working exactly the way you want it to.

And no, none of this is “election interference.” Even when Elon Musk infringes on a photographer’s copyright to show a hashmoji of Donald Trump with a raised fist any time someone posted the #Trump2024 hashtag.

Nor is it election interference when Elon Musk shares a doctored video of Kamala Harris on his widely followed ExTwitter account. It’s in poor taste and an almost certain violation of Elon’s own rules for the platform, but he’s allowed to break those rules because he gets to make them.

The key point here is that some of this stuff just happens. It’s part of how algorithms work. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes you disagree with why they do things. And people need to stop overreacting to it all. Most of the examples discussed in this article were just normal things that happen all the time, but which got a ton of extra attention because everyone’s on edge and amped up.

That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be on the lookout for stuff, but don’t immediately jump to conclusions and assume malfeasance.

And that goes both ways for Elon: dude, you should fucking know better. And for everyone rushing to blame Musk, focus on the shit he actually does do, not the stuff you’re sure he must be doing without proof.