Elon Musk has violated his own platform’s rules by sharing a parody of Kamala Harris’ campaign ad on X without labelling it misleading.
The altered campaign video uses content from the vice president’s recent campaign, but a voiceover that sounds like Harris makes it seem like she is calling President Joe Biden “senile” and calling herself an incompetent candidate.
This is amazing 😂
pic.twitter.com/KpnBKGUUwn— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2024
In the original video, Harris narrates, telling viewers, “In this election, we each face a question: what kind of country do we want to live in?” before breaking into Beyonce’s song “Freedom.” The altered video reposted by Musk does not include Beyonce. Instead, a voice that sounds like Harris’ says, “I Kamala Harris am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate”.
The voiceover goes on to describe Harris as the “ultimate diversity hire” because she is a woman of colour. “So if you criticise anything I say you’re both sexist and racist”.
The video also accuses Harris of “trying to sound Black” and of doing a “Barack Obama impression” in her speeches.
Earlier this month, Musk formally endorsed former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Musk’s retweet of the video has been viewed 126.6 million times as of Monday at 10:15 am.
The video was originally posted to YouTube under an account called “Mr Reagan,” which labeled it a parody. Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s graduate campus in New York City, told NBC News that the content may be considered an AI-generated deep fake.
“In recent-ish elections in Argentina, India and elsewhere, we saw deepfakes being used primarily for this type of surface-level deception that’s more akin to trolling memes than to legitimate misinformation,” Mantzarlis said.
Musk’s retweet of the altered campaign did not include a label indicating that the video was, in fact, a parody or manipulated content—an act that may violate X’s own policy regarding misleading content.
In a post to X, Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar accused Musk of violating his company’s policy, saying that he could be unleashing an “entire election season of fake AI voice and image-altered content.”
If @elonmusk and X let this go and don’t label it as altered AI content, they will not only be violating X’s own rules, they’ll be unleashing an entire election season of fake AI voice and image-altered content with no limits, regardless of party. https://t.co/BJDU6VZr8w
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) July 28, 2024
The use of AI and altered content has been hotly debated over the last few months. On Australian soil last week, a video of The Liberal-National Party in Queensland came under fire after it posted a video to TikTok showing Queensland Premier Steven Miles dancing to a popular song.
@liberalnationalparty Wrong priorities. #stevenmiles #labor #lnp #queensland ♬ 오리지널 사운드 – 김모이 (Kim Moi)
The video, which was labelled with a disclaimer saying that it was created with AI, has led to calls for a crackdown on political advertising laws in Queensland to prevent misinformation or deception. Experts have said that although the video was labelled as AI, there was no guarantee that other fake content before the 26 October state election would do the same.
“No one benefits from a race to the bottom where fake content is used to ridicule political rivals,” director of the Australia Institute’s Democracy and Accountability program Bill Browne said.
