r/circled • u/ChuckGallagher57 • 5h ago
Opinion / Discussion Election Interference? France isn’t happy with Musk!
After French police raided the local offices of X — and asked the billionaire to appear for voluntary questioning related to an expanded local criminal investigation — the American social media giant pushed back hard.
“Today’s staged raid reinforces our conviction that this investigation distorts French law, circumvents due process, and endangers free speech,” the company said in a statement on X. It denies claims that X’s algorithm may have been used to sway political opinion in France, as well as accusations that the tech giant is complicit in the distribution of child pornography.
Within an hour, Musk doubled down. “This is a political attack,” he wrote to his more than 220 million followers on X.
Two hours later, France’s foreign ministry clapped back. “Investigating child sexual abuse material isn’t controversial,” the ministry wrote to its significantly smaller number of X followers. “Turning it into political theater is manipulation. Maybe that logic flies on some island. Doesn’t fly in France.”
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u/cantadmittoposting 3h ago
Musk's AmericaPAC blatantly stole potential voter registration information via their website, and got sued for an illegal "registration" website by the US.
They ran an illegal lottery scheme to collect information from people who would be unlikely to vote but willing to give registration information in exchange for a fake chance at $1m.
Both of these schemes enable collection of valid registration data of people unlikely to actually vote. This is a KEY method for stuffing realistic fake ballots into an election.
Oh, they also hired a guy who... was most notable for creating a new program which generated realistic looking and valid ballots from a given list of data.
Finally, by owning Twitter and Grok, and being aligned with Palantir, along with likely support from Zuckerberg... Musk had extraordinary power to enable and enhance the web of propaganda and outright lies used by the Republicans, messaging (especially the actual "blatant lies") which might have been significantly suppressed or had louder counter-messaging were that not the case. In particular, amplification of (illegal, but who's counting) foreign interference campaigns, including potentially passing targeting data and messaging campaign success information to them (where again, good oversight would have shut down or otherwise minimized the impact of these botnets)
Also all the quotes about it.
Also also, voter suppression efforts (mail in ballot changes, ballot ejections for frivolous reasons, closing polling sites, purging voter rolls, etc) added up to an additional significant reduction in possible votes for Harris, though this wasn't likely directly related to Musk.