Musk Demands AP Back Claims Or Retract Article Over ‘Unchecked’ Stolen Election Tweets

Elon Musk has told AP to put up or shut up – after the outlet published an article alleging that “false claims of a stolen election thrive unchecked on Twitter,” refuting Musk’s claims during a CNBC interview that such claims would be fact checked on the platform.

“Either back up your claims @AP with actual source data or retract your story,” Musk tweeted on Friday.

Either back up your claims @AP with actual source data or retract your story

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 19, 2023

The May 18 article written by Ali Swenson, who previously worked at a Magneto-funded fact checking nonprofit, the Center for Public Integrity, cites the CNBC interview in which Musk said that claims of stolen election on Twitter “will be corrected, 100 percent.”

Musk was responding to host David Faber, who asked about Twitter users claiming that the 2020 election was “rigged” or “stolen” and whether such tweets would be tagged with a community note or face other actions.

“To be clear, I don’t think it was a stolen election,” Musk replied, with the caveat that he believes there was some election fraud.

“By the same token, if somebody is going to say that there is never any election fraud anywhere, this is obviously false. If 100 million people vote, the probability that the fraud is zero—is zero,” he added, before noting that it’s important to strike a balance in discussions regarding election integrity.

🚨BREAKING: Elon Musk Does NOT Believe 2020 Election Was Stolen

In an interview with David Faber, Elon Musk, made a significant statement by expressing his belief that the 2020 election was not stolen.

This statement goes against the claims made by some who allege fraud in the… pic.twitter.com/SwN4uen115

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 16, 2023

Regardless, people in America are allowed to question the outcome of elections – like Democrats did in 2016 when Hillary Clinton kicked off her self-pity tour – so CNBC and AP and the rest of them can pound sand with that little purity test.

According to the Associated Press article, since former President Donald Trump held a CNN town hall in which he reiterated his claims that the 2020 election was stolen, such claims have spread on Twitter.

“Yet many such claims have thrived on Twitter in the week since former President Donald Trump spent much of a CNN town hall digging in on his lie that the 2020 election was ‘rigged’ against him,” reads Swenson’s article, which provides no evidence. “Twitter posts that amplified those false claims have thousands of shares with no visible enforcement, a review of posts on the platform shows.”

The article cites media intelligence from firm Zignal Labs, which claims without evidence to have identified the 10 most widely shared tweets promoting a “rigged election” narrative following the town hall.

“While Twitter has a system in place for users to add context to misleading tweets, the 10 posts, which collectively amassed more than 43,000 retweets, had no such notes attached,” AP claimed – again without evidence.

More via the Epoch Times,

In his town hall appearance on CNN, Trump reiterated his view that the 2020 election was stolen.

The former president said that he performed “fantastically” in 2020, doing “far better” than in 2016 with 12 million more votes.

“When you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happens,” Trump said before adding that he believes the election was “rigged.”

“That was a rigged election, and it’s a shame that we had to go through it. It’s very bad for our country. All over the world, they looked at it, and they saw exactly what everyone else saw,” Trump said.

Donald Trump reaffirms his position on the 2020 election being stolen 🗳️ pic.twitter.com/DF0Ne0j3KR

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 11, 2023

He pointed to the Twitter Files disclosures as an indication of apparent collusion between the FBI and Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the election, which Trump said, “made a big difference.”

The seventh installment of the Musk-endorsed Twitter Files claimed that there was an “organized effort” on the part of federal law enforcement to target social media companies that reported on the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story, which was first published by the New York Post.

Hunter Biden Laptop Story

In the run-up to the 2020 election, the New York Post published a story about a laptop abandoned at a computer repair shop that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden and contained emails suggesting that then-candidate Joe Biden had knowledge of, and was allegedly involved in, his son’s foreign business dealings.

The New York Post’s story titled “Smoking-gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad” was published on Oct. 14, 2020.

Twitter first prevented sharing of the story for 24 hours before reversing the decision. However, the story did not circulate on the platform for weeks because of a policy requiring the original poster to delete and repost the original tweet.

Polling has indicated that if the public had been aware of the suppressed story ahead of the election, it may have cost then presidential candidate Joe Biden several percentage points of voters—possibly enough to thwart his bid for the White House.

“In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published,” wrote author Michael Shellenberger, who released screenshots on Dec. 19, 2022, that appeared to show message exchanges between top Twitter officials and the FBI in October 2020.

The FBI told The Epoch Times in an earlier emailed statement that it had only offered general warnings to Twitter about foreign election interference and never pushed for the platform to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Former Twitter executives have conceded that they made a mistake by blocking the Hunter Biden laptop story but denied that they were pressured to suppress the story by law enforcement.

However, documents filed with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) show that the FBI warned Twitter explicitly of a “hack-and-leak operation involving Hunter Biden” ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter’s former head of site integrity Yoel Roth made the remarks in a signed declaration (pdf) attached to a Dec. 21, 2020 letter to the FEC’s Office of Complaints Examination and Legal Administration on behalf of Twitter.

Roth said in the attached declaration that he was told by the FBI at a series of meetings ahead of the 2020 election that the agency warned of the threat of hacked materials being distributed on social media platforms.

“I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter,” Roth stated in the declaration.

“I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden,” Roth added.

Roth said that Twitter’s Site Integrity Team determined that the New York Post’s articles about the laptop violated the platform’s policies on hacked materials and Twitter took action to suppress the distribution of posts sharing the articles.

He later acknowledged that it was a mistake for Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.