A post began circulating on social media showing a post from Elon Musk on X that promised to suspend any user critical of President Trump.
It seemed to good not to be true. Imagine Elon Musk, the owner of X, threatening to immediately suspend any users who criticize President Donald Trump and his administration.
After all, it was Musk who complained about the lack of freedom of speech before he bought the platform. And it is Musk — or at least his directives — that have apparently turned the former Twitter into a far more negative experience than it had been. Plenty of people have either left the platform or stopped using it.
It still boasts an incredible number of users. But those of us who’ve been on it for years can’t help but notice how low our reach fell before we either left or just decided to focus our efforts elsewhere.
What the post attributed to Elon Musk said didn’t seem like a stretch of the imagination. That should have been a clue.
Fake post seemed to be on point
The post — circulated on platforms other than X — appeared to come from Musk’s verified X account. The screen capture read as follows:
Anyone protesting the Trump Administration will be suspended from X.
All anti-Trump drama can go to a liberal echo chamber like Threads, Reddit, BlueSky, Instagram, and Facebook.
Given all the hostility on X, it seemed like the kind of thing one might expect. And given Musk’s own snark on a variety of occasions, it seemed even to be in character for what we’d grown accustomed to.
People shared it eagerly, as if to demonstrate the hypocrisy of X’s leader. Musk’s very first tweet after he purchased Twitter for $44 billion read, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.”
The irony of going from that sentiment to threatening anyone critical of his new “boss,” seemed too much to pass up for those critical of Trump or Musk.
You still have a responsibility before you click ‘Share’
If you really care about the misinformation problem we already have on social media, your goal should always be to not make it worse.
That means you need to verify. You need to make sure what you’re sharing actually holds up.
It’s easier than ever to make fake things that look at least legitimate enough to pass muster. That means it’s harder than ever to confirm that something that looks real actually is.
So you look for clues.
The first suspicious thing I noticed was that there was no timestamp on the post. A timestamp would have allowed anyone who shared it so eagerly to — dare I use the word? — factcheck by visiting Musk’s profile and verifying that the post was there.
Those of us who saw it and thought, Maybe I should make sure this is legit before I share it, made an attempt to do so before sharing anyway. Oddly enough — surprisingly enough — we couldn’t find such a post.
So it was either posted and then deleted or never posted to begin with.
The second suspicious thing was that the typeface used in the screen capture seemed just a bit off. Maybe it was the right typeface, but if it was, it appeared stretched somehow. If I held that post against an actual screen shot, it didn’t match. At the same time, the header showing the Elon Musk profile photo did match.
Either all of it should match or none of it should. If part did and part didn’t, that should be a clear indication that something was wrong.
Unfortunately, those two big clues weren’t enough to keep some — including a nontraditional but self-titled “news” outlet from being duped.
Just a thought: In a perfect world, if you’re not going to factcheck, maybe Freedom of Speech isn’t something you deserve to have a great deal of.
