The actions of Musk, who openly supports Donald Trump, on his own X platform have worried Democrats and technology policy experts.
A tech billionaire Elon Musk shrugged a week ago on Friday in his own messaging service X. Musk shared on his profile deepfake video of a presidential candidate, Vice President of the United States Terrible about Harris.
In the video, an AI-generated copy of Harris says things the vice president never actually said.
– I, Kamala Harris, am your Democratic presidential candidate because Joe Biden finally revealed his senility in the election debate, the voice produced by artificial intelligence says.
The deepfake video also claims that Harris got to her political position mainly because of her gender and ethnic background. The sense of authenticity is added to the video by the real clips from Harris’s campaign videos mixed in with the material produced by artificial intelligence.
The deeply faked video shared by Musk about the possible presidential candidate of the Democratic Party has caused a special controversy – X-vestipalvelu committed earlier this year to fight the misuse of artificial intelligence in the run-up to November’s presidential election.
In addition, according to X’s rules, misleading image and video material should be marked as manipulations. However, the owner of the platform himself did not follow this instruction in connection with the Harris deep counterfeiting.
Instead, in connection with his publication, Musk had only written a short accompanying text “This is amazing”. Musk’s publication has been viewed more than 130 million times on X since Friday.
Musk returned to the platform to comment on his intentions only on Sunday. He said that the publication was about satire, and acknowledged to those who questioned the legality of the distribution that “parody is legal in the United States”.
Suspended an account supporting Harris
Musk’s activities in X raised further questions from the beginning of the week, when the “White Dudes for Harris” account, which works on the messaging service and supports Harris – although it is separate from his campaign – hosted a virtual fundraising event on Monday evening.
The online event, which lasted more than three hours, featured, among others, Hollywood stars Mark Hamill, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Sean Astin and Josh Gad. According to the organizers of the event, the nearly 200,000 Harris supporters who came to the lines managed to collect more than 4 million dollars for the current vice president’s election campaign in a few hours.
However, shortly after the event ended, the account that hosted the online event was suspended by X. After several complaints to the platform, the account was reinstated on Tuesday.
Musk and messaging service X did not comment on the suspension to those who inquired about it For the Washington Post.
Although the exact reasons for the suspension of the Harris-supporting account are still unclear, there is concern among Democrats that the X-platform, which Musk bought in 2022, could be used to influence American voters in the coming months.
Musk announced in July that he would give his full support to the Republican presidential candidate For Donald Trump, shortly after Trump was the victim of an assassination attempt. In addition, the technology billionaire has also said that he founded the America PAC support association that supports Trump, and that he donated funds to the association.
A technology policy expert who commented on the matter for the Washington Post and also worked for the Democratic Party Gene Kimmelman describes the influence of Musk’s messaging service X on public opinion as “enormous”.
According to the expert, it is particularly worrying if the power offered by the platform is misused for the benefit of a certain political actor.
– If they favor one candidate who they believe is willing to offer them benefits, that is a huge danger to our democratic system, says Kimmelman in an interview with US media.