Britta Pedersen/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Elon Musk received multiple fact-checks on his own social media platform Tuesday after he shared a report that was so overtly doctored that Community Notes got involved.
The X owner shared a tweet from a relatively small account that purported to be a screenshot from The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg. The fake story was headlined, “TRUMP IS LITERALLY HITLER” with a subheading that read, “Donald J. Trump is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.”
Musk commented, “They are literally foaming at the mouth.”
The false story read:
In 1958, Maximiani Julia Portas, a French-born Greek-Italian fascist, who went by the name Savitri Devi outlined a system of esoteric philosophy and history drawing on commonalities in Hindu, Norse, and Greco-Roman myth. In it, she detailed how the Aryans, today called Indo-Europeans, had a cyclic view of history that described the rise and fall of great personages and epochs of time…
One fact-check note on the fake news linked to The Atlantic‘s homepage and read,
Another fact-check linked to a tweet from the account that originally posted the screenshot in which the author wrote of Goldberg and The Atlantic, “It’s me satirizing them.”
A third Community Notes fact-check linked to Goldberg’s report, which was headlined, “TRUMP: ‘I NEED THE KIND OF GENERALS THAT HITLER HAD.”
Goldberg did drop a report on Tuesday in which multiple sources claimed Trump lamented U.S. military generals were not loyal like German generals were.
The article was accompanied by a subheading that read, “The Republican nominee’s preoccupation with dictators, and his disdain for the American military, is deepening.”
In his report, Goldberg claimed:
A desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution is one of the constant themes of Trump’s military-related discourse. Former officials have also cited other recurring themes: his denigration of military service, his ignorance of the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his admiration for brutality and anti-democratic norms of behavior, and his contempt for wounded veterans and for soldiers who fell in battle.[…]Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the
advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”