Despite Claims by Left-wing Social Media, Musk’s Starlink Did Not Rig the Election for Trump
By Sam Howard
Left-wing social media users are baselessly claiming that Starlink, the satellite network co-owned by Elon Musk, rigged the U.S. presidential election in Trump’s favor.
A social media monitoring tool used by NewsGuard showed that the trend peaked on Nov. 10, 2024, with 281,644 mentions of Starlink on X, the social-media platform co-owned by Musk. That compares to a daily average of 40,100 mentions a day from Nov. 5 to Nov. 9, 2024.
For example, a Nov. 10, 2024, X post from user Michelle Baker, who NewsGuard found previously advanced false or misleading information about the July 2024 assassination attempt on Trump, stated: “STOP F***ING SAYING THAT TRUMP WON THIS ELECTION! HE DIDN'T! … STARLINK WAS USED!” At the time of this article’s publication, the post had attracted 3.7 million views and recorded 16,000 reposts over three days.
Obscure accounts that share little personal information about themselves contributed to the spike, too. For example, a Nov. 10, 2024, X post from anti-Trump account @Lippyaddiction stated, “Elon Musk's Starlink internet tallied votes. #TrumpCheated.” The post received 183,000 views and 3,500 reposts within four days.
A Community Note, a fact-checking feature on X, states under the Baker post that Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris conceded the election and the Democratic National Committee has not challenged the results. However, as of the morning of Nov. 14, 2024, NewsGuard had found no other examples of Community Notes for such posts on X.
NewsGuard also identified the false claim on social media platforms Reddit, Facebook, and Threads.
In fact, the U.S. agency tasked with election security has said there is no evidence of vote-rigging in the 2024 election. Moreover, elections officials in key swing states have stated that their voting machines do not connect to the internet, meaning this equipment would not be susceptible to a cyberattack through Starlink.
Websites for the secretaries of state in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, as well as the site for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, say that voting machines in their states are not connected online, making it impossible to hack this equipment through an internet provider such as Starlink. (See NewsGuard’s related Misinformation Fingerprint here.)
PolitiFact said it found evidence of election equipment using Starlink internet in just one jurisdiction: Tulare County, California, where officials use Starlink to confirm voters’ registration status.
“I want to emphasize that this connection is strictly for voter check-in purposes only and in no way a part of our voting system,” Stephanie Hill, a systems and procedures analyst for the Tulare County Registrar of Voters, told NewsGuard in an email. “In California it is illegal for any part of the voting system to be connected to the internet. As such, our voting system operates within a fully air-gapped environment, meaning it is completely isolated from the internet and any other network.”
Ironically, if not for the social media platforms' Section 230 liability exemption in the U.S., Musk's Starlink could sue Musk's X for spreading this defamatory story the way election machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic sued Fox News and others for spreading false claims about them relating to the 2020 election.
Starlink did not respond to a November 2024 email from NewsGuard sent to parent company SpaceX’s media team. Musk also co-owns SpaceX.
(Editing by Elizabeth Owen and Eric Effron)