Elon Musk has been credited with plenty of issues: Tesla. SpaceX. Twitter’s rebrand to X.
However, on Fb, he has additionally been credited with some spectacular new innovations: a Tesla water engine. A $1,000 Tesla e-bike. Low-cost Tesla houses. A robot for surrogate pregnancies. A “UFO fighter jet that defies physics.”
If these appear pretend, it’s as a result of they’re. Musk didn’t launch or launch such creations. However Fb customers put up pictures that make these appear actual, and that make it appear as if Musk was behind all of them.
Musk is a widely known inventor, however since he joined President-elect Donald Trump on the marketing campaign path and in his incoming administration, Musk has grown politically distinguished. Trump tapped Musk to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernment entity.
PolitiFact examined a number of the pages that recurrently unfold content material touting Musk and his pretend innovations. Together with deceptive captions, these pages put up pictures that look like created utilizing synthetic intelligence and present Musk smiling alongside modern, futuristic noninventions.
We analyzed not less than 12 posts with these claims and the posters behind them. 4 pages we analyzed that lately shifted to Musk-related content material collectively had 148,200 followers as of Nov. 19. The posts mislead folks into pondering they’ll avail of cost-cutting options and gadgets, and that they’ve Musk to thank for making them accessible.
Some pages sharing this content material began out sharing innocuous posts unrelated to Musk earlier than immediately shifting to Musk invention claims earlier than Election Day.
Kai-Cheng Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern College’s Community Science Institute, stated there have been comparable campaigns to drive engagement utilizing AI-generated pictures, that includes matters comparable to architecture, cooking and natural disasters.
“Elon Musk is perhaps simply one of many themes however this style has turn out to be well-liked throughout this election due to the vital position he performed,” he stated. “The operators behind these pages and the scammers had been most likely simply looking for themes that might catch folks’s eyes, and Elon Musk is a superb alternative for them.”
Researchers imagine that Fb’s suggestion algorithm at instances serves AI-generated pictures to individuals who don’t comply with pages with such content material. The elevated curiosity in Musk, together with the supply of AI instruments to create eye-catching visuals, now appears to have shaped a method for web page homeowners searching for to revenue from the posts’ engagement and from clicks to web sites they need viewers to go to.
(Screenshots/Fb)
Claims attributing pretend innovations to Musk aren’t new. In August, we debunked a declare that Musk introduced his “first robot girlfriend.” In January, we rated False a declare that he invented a heater that might reduce energy prices to “principally $0. In December 2023, we discovered assertions that he invented an energy-saving gadget that might reduce electrical energy payments by 80% to benefit Pants on Fire scores.
However as Election Day neared — and even after the race was referred to as — posts of this nature surged because the pages that hosted them transformed to Musk-related content material. A web page referred to as “Beautiful Mansions,” created in December 2023, initially posted actual property pictures. One other web page titled “Easy Eats and Tips,” created Oct. 11, populated its feed with recipes and meals pictures. Plane, warships and different warfare crammed the feeds of two different pages, referred to as “The Jet Fighter” and “Earth Guardian.”
However every of those accounts began making a number of posts a day about Musk’s supposed innovations — “Earth Guardian” flipped on Oct. 13, “The Jet Fighter” on Oct. 23, “Stunning Mansions” on Nov. 7 and “Simple Eats and Suggestions” on Nov. 8.
“Stunning Mansions” and “Simple Eats and Suggestions” usually level readers to hyperlinks within the feedback, however these hyperlinks result in pages that embody no transparency about who runs the web sites or writes for them.
Their messages promise accessible, life-changing improvements. And Musk is the genius behind them — somebody who retains developing with options that can enhance lives.
Though some folks coming into contact with these posts name them out as being AI, others specific curiosity and even gratitude.
“At my age of 72 (years) previous I want I can have this superb Tesla motorcycle and take a experience for my day by day exercise,” one commenter wrote on a Nov. 10 Facebook post hyping Tesla’s “NEW CHEAPEST electrical motorcycle immediately!” for simply $499. (There’s no such bike.) “Hope that Mr. Elon Reeve Musk could make a Tesla cheaper bike like this for a Senior Citizen.”
(Screenshots/Fb)
Yang stated it’s seemingly that pages sharing this content material try to develop their followers to ultimately deploy a rip-off.
“My understanding is that many customers can not inform these pictures are AI-generated and genuinely imagine they’re actual and like them,” Yang stated. “There are additionally individuals who can inform the character of the pictures however interact with them nonetheless.”
PolitiFact encountered these pages as a result of a few of their Musk-related posts had been flagged as a part of Meta’s efforts to fight false information and misinformation on its Information Feed. (Learn extra about our partnership with Meta, which owns Fb and Instagram.)
Meta’s demotes fact-checked misinformation and it has a coverage of labeling content it detects was generated utilizing AI instruments. Nonetheless, the label didn’t seem on any of the posts we reviewed. Meta didn’t reply to PolitiFact’s questions on these pages and posts.
Though we are able to’t make sure of the motive behind these posts, the accounts that share them have traits that align with these described in a peer-reviewed paper revealed by the Harvard Kennedy College Shorenstein Middle on Media, Politics, and Public Coverage. In it, authors Renée DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein, who’re affiliated with Georgetown College, discovered that profit-motivated Fb web page homeowners used AI-generated pictures to spice up engagement and visitors on the ad-supported exterior websites they hyperlink to.
As with the Musk pages, many pages the Georgetown researchers studied immediately modified their names and/or web page topics, or they had been stolen or repurposed. Posts directed customers to web sites the researchers described as “closely ad-laden content material farm domains — a few of which themselves appeared to include primarily AI-composed textual content.”
The researchers wrote that in their analysis, they started encountering extra AI-generated pictures of their private feeds, despite the fact that they didn’t comply with or interact with the pages posting that content material. That led them to conclude that Fb’s algorithm could possibly be in charge.
“The Fb Feed at instances recommends unlabeled AI-generated pictures to customers who don’t explicitly comply with the Web page posting the content material,” DiResta and Goldstein wrote. “We suspect these excessive ranges of engagement are partially pushed by the Fb suggestion algorithm.”
Of their report, Meta informed the researchers that it regarded into the websites they’d reviewed and “demoted the clickbait websites beneath our Content material Distribution Pointers.” Fb defines clickbait links as posts that “lure folks into clicking on an included hyperlink by creating deceptive expectations concerning the put up or article’s content material.”
In its own story concerning the onslaught of AI-generated Musk content material that appeared on Fb earlier than the election, 404 Media, a digital media firm, famous that one Indian YouTube vlogger appeared to determine this strategy as a manner for content material mills exterior of the U.S. to develop “USA Channels.”
Because the election, “Stunning Mansions,” “Earth Guardian,” “Simple Eats and Suggestions” and “The Jet Fighter” have continued to put up claims about Musk.
One Nov. 13 put up by “The Jet Fighter” stated, “Elon Musk declared SR-72 Darkstar is lastly able to fly.” The plane would supposedly “revolutionize aerial warfare and international surveillance.” SR-72 is an plane being developed by Lockheed Martin as of 2016; Darkstar was a fictional plane with real capabilities constructed for the film “Prime Gun: Maverick.”
Musk has no recorded connection to such an plane. Nonetheless, one remark stated, “This man doesn’t fiddle. No surprise Trump put him to work. How can we lose?”
This reality verify was initially published by PolitiFact, which is a part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this reality verify here.
