Musk used satellites to ‘steal’ US election

Left-wing conspiracy theorists claim Elon Musk used satellites to ‘steal’ US election


Social media used to spread false accusations that Starlink helped manipulate result

Left-wing conspiracy theorists have claimed the 2024 US presidential election was “stolen”, as posts falsely alleging Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network was used to manipulate the result spread on social media.

Claims that 20m votes in the election have “disappeared” or that Starlink was used to interfere with vote-counting machines have been shared by thousands of people across X, Threads and TikTok.

A nine-minute video claiming states had used “Starlink in order to tally up or count ballots” had more than 100,000 likes, 55,000 shares and had been viewed almost 900,000 times on TikTok. The video falsely claimed: “This is why the numbers don’t make sense.”

Similar claims that Mr Musk, a Trump ally, may have used Starlink to tamper with the election have spread widely across Threads, the social network owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, as well as on X, which is owned by Mr Musk and was previously known as Twitter.

On Threads, one post with more than 42,000 views and 840 shares claimed Mr Musk “knew who won four hours earlier than we did”.

It alleged Starlink had been “exploding” communications satellites, with Mr Musk “destroying the evidence”. Another lengthy post with more than 370,000 views and 6,300 shares claimed that voting had been hacked “at the tabulation level”.

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