It's been just two days since Elon Musk officially bought Twitter. Already, the billionaire businessman is using the platform to spread misinformation to his 112 million followers — about the biggest U.S. news of the weekend.
Driving the news: Early on Sunday, Musk cited a widely discredited website that implied the brutal attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul, wasn't carried out by an unhinged far-right blogger — but rather was linked to an anti-LGTBQ "theory" about a skirmish at a local bar.
- “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk said in response to a tweet from Hillary Clinton.
- Clinton tweeted a Los Angeles Times article about the suspect, David DePape, 42, who spread QAnon and other far-right conspiracies: “The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories. It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result.”
- Later on Sunday, it appeared as though Musk had deleted the tweet.
Why it matters: Musk linked to an article from the Santa Monica Observer, a website known for years for publishing false stories.
- The site "is anything but trustworthy," according to an executive at NewsGuard, a company that uses trained journalists to rate news and information sites.
- The site has a trust score of 44.5 out of 100 points on NewsGuard’s rating scale for trustworthiness, due to repeatedly publishing numerous conspiracy theories and false claims about politics, the pandemic and more.
- The site gets a red-rating and a warning for readers that says: "Proceed with caution: This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards."
What to watch: Musk’s tweets have influence. The Observer's website went down early Sunday morning shortly after the tweet was published, apparently due to an influx of traffic from Musk’s tweet.
- An error page read that the site’s web server, Cloudflare, was "returning an unknown error."
The big picture: Musk has said he plans to roll back content moderation on the platform in favor of “free speech, but has also tried to assure advertisers that "Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape.”
Editor's note: This version updates the headline for precision and notes that Musk's tweet has been removed.
