Artikkel i Wash Post om Musk og hans angrep på Reuters:
"Musk accused Reuters of ‘social deception.’ The deception was his."
"Trump’s DOGE chief mischaracterizes a contract as he marshals “deep state” conspiracy theories to justify cuts to federal agencies."
Avslørende artikkel der Musk angriper Reuters med konspirasjonsteorier og løgner.
Musk er blitt en bølle og misbruker X til å spre angrep på demokratiet.
HELE artikkelen nederst under Kilde.
Skudeneshavn 16. februar 2025
Jan Marton Jensen
Kilde:
15. februar 2025
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/02/15/musk-doge-deception-reuters/
HELE artikkelen i Washington Post 15. april 2025
Musk accused Reuters of ‘social deception.’ The deception was his.
Trump’s DOGE chief mischaracterizes a contract as he marshals “deep state” conspiracy theories to justify cuts to federal agencies.
Elon Musk in Washington on Thursday. (Nathan Howard/Reuters)
The actor and director Ron Howard posted Wednesday on X an article by the news agency Reuters headlined, “Musk’s DOGE cuts based more on political ideology than real cost savings so far.”
An hour later, Elon Musk posted a reply: “I wonder how much money Reuters is getting from the government? Let’s find out.” Before the night’s end, the billionaire leading the Trump administration’s radical cost-cutting campaign was touting what he portrayed as a smoking gun: a screenshot of a U.S. government webpage showing a contract between the Defense Department and Thomson Reuters Special Services for “Active Social Engineering Defense” and “Large Scale Social Deception.”
“Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception,’” Musk proclaimed in an X post that has racked up more than 76,000 shares and 35 million views. “They’re a total scam. Just wow.”
The contract was real, but the Orwellian phrase Musk seized on to suggest a shadowy conspiracy wasn’t what it seems. A slightly closer look would have revealed that the contract, signed during President Donald Trump’s first term, was for help defending against cyberattacks — that is, combating deception, not fueling it. And it went to a separate division of the company, not the news agency.
Musk’s misinterpretation went viral, amplified by Trump as proof of corrupt ties between the “radical left” media and the “deep state.”
The Reuters brouhaha was the latest example of what is quickly becoming a familiar playbook as Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sweeps through federal agencies for evidence of waste, fraud and corruption. However endemic federal misspending is, Musk has repeatedly misrepresented facts on X to bolster unfounded claims of wrongdoing. Like the U.S. Agency for International Development, Politico and others before it, Reuters has been cast as a villain in a narrative spun by Musk in which nefarious left-wing schemes lurk behind programs he targets for cuts — and those who stand in the way.
The world’s richest man was tapped to lead the project on the premise that he would bring his private-sector business acumen to bear on bloated government budgets. But as the owner and most followed user of X, he has also wielded a social media bully pulpit and marshaled a crowd of online loyalists to disparage and discredit each agency, program and funding recipient he targets for cuts. In some cases, the truth has been collateral damage.
When his DOGE employees moved this month to wrest control of USAID, Musk took to X to call the organization “evil,” “criminal” and “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” Instead of drawing on a long history of bipartisan concerns about misspending at the agency, Musk popularized false claims that USAID and other agencies were spending millions of dollars to fund the news outlet Politico, promising that the gravy train would be “deleted.” (In fact, the agencies were paying far smaller sums for subscriptions to the outlet’s “Pro” products, which provide specialized policy news to businesses and governments.)
After helping to spread false claims that USAID had directed $50 million in condoms to the Gaza Strip, Musk acknowledged this week that “some of the things I say will be incorrect.”
As legal experts and Democratic leaders have questioned the legality of DOGE’s takeover of sensitive government data, Musk has used X to hint that the data has turned up evidence of crimes and fraud within the agencies and programs.
This month, for instance, Musk called the National Endowment for Democracy a “scam,” adding, “They won’t get away with their crimes.” But as in other cases, he has not said what the alleged crimes were. The endowment, founded under the Reagan administration to counter communism abroad, has long enjoyed strong Republican support but has been demonized by the Chinese government — as Politico reported a few days before Musk turned his ire on that outlet, which is canceling contracts after losing its access to allocated federal funds.
Alleging corruption in one agency after the next has helped the DOGE chief deflect questions about his own potential conflicts of interest as the owner or chief executive of major companies that have much to gain or lose from federal regulators.
His electric-vehicle company Tesla stands to gain ground on rivals from the Trump administration’s elimination of subsidies for electric vehicles and charging stations. In gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, DOGE is dismantling an agency that presented a likely obstacle to Musk’s plans to turn X into an “everything app” that handles payments alongside social media posts.
Responding to concerns raised over DOGE’s access to the personal data of millions of Americans, Musk posted on X on Feb. 9, “What’s actually scary is that the government has your personal info! How much do you trust the deep state?”
Musk’s designation as a “special government employee” exempts him from some rules, including those regarding financial and conflict of interest disclosures. Responding to questions about possible conflicts in the Oval Office early this week, Musk said, “Transparency is what builds trust.” Trump said he would prevent Musk from playing a role in any area of government business that intersects with one of his companies. “If we thought that, we would not let him do that,” Trump said.
Musk has long criticized Reuters for its coverage of him and his companies, including an award-winning investigation last year into the “Musk Industrial Complex.” In March, he called the news agency “the most deceptive news organization on Earth.”
But Musk’s viral description of the “Large Scale Social Deception” contract, and his insinuation that it proved the Biden administration had paid Reuters to lie, was misleading. The contract, awarded in 2018, focused on researching “automated defense against social engineering attacks” — an industry term for the manipulative tactics cyberattackers use to gain access to secure networks. The aim was to simulate an adversarial attack to help the Defense Department improve its cyber defenses.
The $9 million multiyear contract was won by the Thomson Reuters conglomerate’s information-technology division, Thomson Reuters Special Services, which operates separately from the Reuters newsroom and has worked on federal projects for decades.
While Musk’s post claimed the spending was uncovered as part of a “DOGE investigation,” the contracting records had been publicly visible online for years; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had promoted the project on its website.
Yet Trump followed Musk’s original claim with a Truth Social post urging the “Radical Left Reuters” to “GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!” Late Thursday, hours after the claim had been debunked, Musk doubled down, saying “Reuters was literally paid by the federal government for ‘Large Scale Social Deception.’ That’s literally what it says on the official government documents!!”
In an emailed statement, Thomson Reuters Special Services CEO Steve Rubley said “recent public discourse has conflated” his company with Reuters News, when it is in fact a separate legal entity with its own board of directors. He said its commercial agreements “have no influence over or impact on Reuters editorial coverage.”
A Defense Department spokesperson, Chelsea Dietlin, said in a statement that Thomson Reuters Special Services won a competitive bidding process to test defensive tools the military was developing to guard against phishing and other social engineering attacks. She noted that the contractor is separate from Reuters’ news service and has customers in intelligence, law enforcement and defense.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk has touted X as “the best source of truth on the internet,” thanks to its crowdsourced fact-checking program, Community Notes, which lets users debunk or add context to one another’s posts. But analyses by The Washington Post and others have found that most viral false claims about politics on X never get a fact-check approved by the Community Notes system. Musk’s post about Reuters had nine notes proposed as of Friday but none approved to be shown to the public.
Alexander B. Howard, an author and open government advocate, says it’s an example of “weaponized transparency” — the strategic disclosure of information to intimidate or sow division, rather than to advance public understanding.
With Musk using the social media platform he owns as a propaganda organ to promote his work for the Trump administration, Howard said, “We’re seeing the emergence of state social media in the USA.”
