Peter Jukes looks at the mounting evidence that Elon Musk is using his social media platform as a vector to attack Ukraine and support Putin’s murderous invasion
Peter Jukes
25 October 2024
Byline Times
Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on ‘what the papers don’t say’ – without fear or favour.
The revelation from the Wall Street Journal that Elon Musk has been in regular direct contact with President Vladimir Putin for the last two years during Russia’s disastrous and costly invasion of Ukraine is the final confirmation that the world’s richest man and owner of X is leading a second Russian front – in information warfare.
The ideological alliance has been apparent for some time. Though initially expressing support for the Ukrainian people as they faced invasion by Russia in the spring of 2022, Musk has since used his social media platform to mock Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, argue against any further US military support for Ukraine, and suggest a ‘peace plan’ which largely accords with Putin’s demands.
Musk’s personal opinions in favour of Putin’s war aims are expressed quite openly. Just as overt is his unbanning of pro-Russian influencers like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate, and his regular boosting of disinformation about the war – especially from Tenet Media, which was revealed in an FBI indictment in September to be funded by the Russian state broadcaster, RT, to the tune of $10m through a British-based shell company.
More covert is the way Musk has warped the algorithms and moderation of his social media platform – which he boasts is the major global source of news – in favour of Russia’s propaganda war.
In late 2022, Ukraine’s country code was deleted from Twitter’s database so that Ukrainians with 2-factor authentication could not access their accounts. In 2023, it was revealed that X’s algorithm had been deliberately engineered to downrate posts about Ukraine and that the ‘spaces’ function of X (where users can host talks) had flagged the subject ‘Ukraine Crisis’ as a safety violation, “leading to reduced visibility of the labelled entity”.
By the end of 2024, there was widespread analytic evidence that many prominent pro-Ukrainian accounts had been successfully muffled. X still regularly blocks access to news sites depicting civilian casualties and suspends accounts which detail Russian war crimes.
Blood Money
There are also hidden financial interests. The full list of investors in X, which Musk purchased for $44bn in 2022, was revealed in unsealed court filings in August. They included the venture capital firm 8VC which employs the children of Russian oligarchs Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich, both of whom are under sanctions for their ties to Russia and involvement in its war with Ukraine.
As well as his contact with Putin, a source told the Wall Street Journal that Musk was in regular conversations with other “high-level Russians,” including Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff.
Kiryenko was named in an FBI warrant as the Russian government official supervising various Russian social media firms in developing the Doppelganger network of pro-Russian bots and fake news sites which Byline Times first revealed in February this year.
However, Musk’s assistance to the Kremlin’s war efforts is not merely in the field of psych-ops or propaganda: his technology has been a crucial factor in the conflict itself. Putin is said to have requested Musk not to activate his Starlink satellite internet service in Taiwan.
Six months into the war Musk intervened to block the Ukrainian military using Starlink to guide sea drones to attack a Russian naval base in Crimea – the occupied peninsula which was the target of the first phase of Putin’s war against Ukraine in 2014. The recent higher efficiency of Russian drones – which are daily killing civilians in the major port city of Kherson – is credited to their access to Starlink.
When the war began nearly three years ago, the Observer investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Cambridge Analytica scandal, described Russia’s large-scale invasion as the culmination of the “first great information war”.
At the Byline Festival in 2023, she feared that the next year of elections would see a massive ramping of this attack on democracy using AI and social media as an “attack surface”.
Her fears have now been fully realised.
Developing the same techniques of data harvesting, bot networks and the boosting of fake news, the founder of Tesla and Space X has taken up the information warfare manual created by Cambridge Analytica and Yevgeny Prigozhin during the EU referendum and Presidential elections of 2016 and developed it rapidly and at scale.
In doing so, Musk has transformed one of the world’s largest social media sites and source of news into an attack platform to assist a hostile foreign power during the biggest and bloodiest war in Europe since World War Two.
Peter Jukes is the Co-Founder and Executive Editor of Byline Times