Elon Musk was criticized on Sunday after posting a baseless conspiracy theory about the assault of Paul Pelosi to Twitter – the social media giant he took over several days ago with a promise to impose fewer restrictions on its content.
Paul Pelosi, husband of US House speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked with a hammer at their California home on Friday. The attacker, identified by authorities as David DePape, allegedly said “Where is Nancy?” during the attack; Joe Biden said that she appeared to be the intended target.
Musk’s sharing of the conspiracy theory stemmed from a tweet by Hillary Clinton on Saturday. The Democratic former senator shared a Los Angeles Times story about DePape’s apparent far-right leanings.
“The Republican party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories,” Clinton said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result. As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.”
Musk responded by tweeting that “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” and shared a link to a post that presented an unfounded conspiracy theory on the hammer attack, the Times reported. This conspiracy post was in the Santa Monica Observer, which the Times described as being “notorious for publishing false news”.
Dan Moynihan, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, said in the wake of Musk’s tweet: “A big problem in contemporary American politics is that one party has become obsessed with conspiracy theories, encouraging radical responses including anti-democratic actions and violence. Musk will just make the problem worse.”
Musk deleted the response by early Sunday afternoon, according to NBC News. Prior to its deletion, however, it had received in excess of 24,000 retweets and 86,000 likes.
“The latest conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi’s attack is frankly too disgusting to print,” said NBC News reporter Ben Collins, in response to Musk’s retweet.
The world’s richest man’s apparent sharing of this post comes amid concern that hate-speech and harassment will run rampant under his leadership. Musk has tried to ease concerns about an increase in harmful posts under his ownership, such as his announcement that there would be a new content moderation counsel.
Musk suggested that a better approach would be to divide Twitter into various strands. This approach would see users applying content ratings on their posts, and engaging in online disputes, within a special space on the platform.
The Guardian has reached out to Twitter for comment.
