US Secretaries of State Call on X to Address Election Misinformation

Elon Musk’s aversion to moderation is raising more concerns as we head closer to the U.S. Presidential Election, with X’s Grok AI chatbot coming under scrutiny over its capacity to spread election-related misinformation.

Today, five U.S. Secretaries of State have submitted an open letter to Musk and X, calling on them to fix erroneous information being communicated by Grok, with particular concern around advice on voting processes.

As per the letter:

“Within hours of President Joe Biden stepping away from his presidential candidacy on July 21, 2024, false information on ballot deadlines produced by Grok was shared on multiple social media platforms. The post from Grok said, “The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election. Some of these states include: 1. Alabama 2. Indiana 3. Michigan 4. Minnesota 5. New Mexico 6. Ohio 7. Pennsylvania 8. Texas 9. Washington.” This is false. In all nine states the opposite is true: The ballots are not closed, and upcoming ballot deadlines would allow for changes to candidates listed on the ballot for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States.”

The letter notes that while Grok is only currently available to paying X Premium members, the information generated by the bot is also being shared beyond that group, exacerbating the potential impacts of misinformation.

“Furthermore, Grok continued to repeat this false information for more than a week until it was corrected on July 31, 2024.”

The Secretaries of State note that while inaccuracies are not uncommon in AI chatbots, accuracy in voting information is critical, and therefore, X should be looking to ensure that such queries are not generating false reports.

“OpenAI partnered with the National Association of Secretaries of State to ensure voters would have access to accurate, up-to-date elections information when using AI tools. ChatGPT has been programmed to direct users to CanIVote.org – a nonpartisan resource from professional election administrators of both major parties.”

It’ll be interesting to see how Musk and X respond to the letter, as Musk has long criticized previous Twitter management for exactly this type of engagement with political bodies, which had requested improvements to its moderation systems.

A key focus of X’s “Twitter Files” expose, published shortly after Musk took over, and based on internal communications from the Twitter team, was the fact that Twitter’s Trust and Safety group had received requests from U.S. Government authorities to suppress certain comments and profiles which had criticized COVID mitigation measures.

Former Twitter staff have maintained that they were under no obligation to act on such requests, and in the majority, they didn’t censor content at the behest of Government officials. But Musk and Co. have framed this as evidence of a “censorship regime”, and a key reason why Musk felt that he had to take over Twitter, to ensure the principles of freedom of speech are upheld.

Those requests, as noted, look very similar to this suggestion from the Secretaries of State.

So will Musk see this as Government overreach, and allow Grok to continue to spread misinformation, or will this be actioned by the X team, effectively (based on Musk’s previous interpretation at least) facilitating censorship in his “non-woke” AI bot?

Really, we’ve already learned the lessons of letting election misinformation go unchecked, which led to a raft of reforms at social platforms following the 2016 Presidential Election. But Elon seems largely opposed to those revisions, which could see a repeat of many of the most damaging elements of that campaign repeated, on X at least.

At the same time, Musk has clearly chosen his side in the campaign, and as such, there also seems to be less motivation for X to act on concerns which could benefit the Republican campaign.

It’s the first of many questions that will be raised about X’s new “free speech” policies as we move deeper into the campaign, and another concern that could lead to regulatory action against X at some stage.