X proprietor and Trump supporter Elon Musk reposted a message on Election Day claiming Google helps Harris voters discover polling locations, whereas not doing the identical for Trump voters, however the search big is doing no such factor.
At about 3 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Musk reposted a conspiracy idea on X, the social media web site he owns, that falsely claims Google is giving Kamala Harris an unfair benefit.
Sharing a message from X consumer DogeDesigner to his 203 million followers, Musk wrote, “Are others seeing this too?” In accordance with DogeDesigner, “Google reveals a ‘The place to Vote’ part with a map for Kamala Harris, however not for Donald Trump.
Google is the most important company donor to the Democratic Occasion.”
The issue is DogeDesigner is method off — Google’s “The place to Vote” part consists of voting info for counties, not candidates. Presumably unbeknownst to each DogeDesigner and Musk, there’s a Harris County in each Texas and Georgia.
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Beneath DogeDesigner’s publish was a Neighborhood Observe with extra context offered: “The search question works as a result of Harris is a county in Texas.”
Readers added that surname-sounding counties like Clark, Clinton, Eden, Franklin, Floyd, Leon, and Marcy are all searchable on Google’s “The place to Vote” characteristic.
Moreover, the NewsFromGoogle X account tweeted an analogous message:
Placated by Google’s rationalization, Musk reposted their message at about 4 p.m. EST, writing, “Thanks for the clarification,” although his authentic repost on the topic stays on his account.
Misinformation has been rife in the course of the 2024 election. Lies, conspiracy theories, and political deepfakes have circulated on main social media platforms, making it troublesome for folks to know what’s actual and what’s not. Simply days earlier than the election, for instance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning, urging voters to hunt dependable info from trusted sources, together with their native election workplace.
You’ll find your native workplace through the use of this search instrument from the U.S. authorities. By way of its #TrustedInfo2024 marketing campaign, the Nationwide Affiliation of Secretaries of State additionally supplies a roundup of official hyperlinks to incessantly requested questions on each state and territory’s election course of. By way of these hyperlinks, you possibly can be taught fundamental, correct details about the election, resembling the place to vote and the way votes are counted, subjects that could be topic to last-minute rumors and misinformation.
To vet suspicious claims in actual time, you may additionally contemplate consulting trusted fact-checking and misinformation-detecting shops, together with Truth.verify.org, Politifact, The Washington Publish’s Truth Checker, Snopes, and NewsGuard’s Election Misinformation Monitoring Heart.
