Musk’s Starlink Falsely Accused of Election Rigging
Plus: Bogus Abortion Clinic Bankruptcy Warning; NATO Didn’t Threaten to ‘Expel’ the U.S. Because of Trump; Liberal Pink Slime News Websites Third Largest Ad Spender on Facebook
Welcome to Reality Check, your inside look at how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it.
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Today:
Flight of fancy: Liberals falsely attribute Trump victory to Musk’s Starlink satellite
Democratic ‘sex strike’ stirs false claim of abortion clinic bankruptcy
Pro-Kremlin sources cite fake NATO quote attacking Trump to sow doubt in the alliance
Liberal ‘pink slime’ news websites were third largest ad spender on Meta platforms ahead of election, behind only Harris and Trump campaigns
And More …
Today’s newsletter was edited by Eric Effron and Sofia Rubinson.
1. Lost in Space: Liberals Baselessly Claim Musk’s Starlink Satellite Rigged Election for Trump
By Sam Howard
What happened: Left-wing social media users are baselessly claiming that Starlink, a satellite internet provider owned by billionaire Elon Musk, was used to rig the 2024 U.S. presidential election in favor of Republican Donald Trump.
A closer look: Liberals falsely claimed that voting machines were connected to Starlink, allowing Musk to hack the system and steal the election from Democrat Kamala Harris.
Anti-Trump X account @Lippyaddiction stated on Nov. 10: “Elon Musk’s Starlink internet tallied votes. #TrumpCheated.” The post garnered 181,500 views and 3,500 reposts in two days.
In a post with 3.3 million views, progressive user Michelle Baker, who NewsGuard found previously advanced false claims about Trump’s July 2024 assassination attempt, stated on X: “STOP F***ING SAYING THAT TRUMP WON THIS ELECTION! HE DIDN’T! … STARLINK WAS USED!”
Actually: Few U.S. voting machines connect to the internet, including via Starlink.
Officials in all swing states except Michigan say that voting machines in their states are not connected online. (In Michigan, voting equipment may go online to transmit results “only after counting has finished,” the Secretary of State’s website says.)
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a Nov. 6 statement that there was “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”
PolitiFact (NewsGuard Trust Score: 100/100) found evidence of election equipment using Starlink internet in just one jurisdiction: Tulare County, California, where officials use Starlink to confirm voters’ registration status.
By the numbers: Allegations of vote-rigging through Starlink peaked on Nov. 10, when there were 281,644 mentions of Starlink on X — which is also controlled by Musk — compared to a daily average of 40,100 mentions a day from Nov. 5 to Nov. 9, according to a social media monitoring tool used by NewsGuard.
Although the post by Michelle Baker described above was flagged by X’s Community Note fact-checking feature by the morning of Nov. 14, many others — including the post by @Lippyaddiction — were not.
Irony alert: If not for the social media platforms’ Section 230 liability exemption, 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.
Context: Over the past few months, Musk has become a trusted confidante and major donor to Trump. On Nov. 12, Trump named Musk to lead what Trump is calling the “Department of Government Efficiency.”
To learn more about this false narrative, read NewsGuard’s full report.
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2. No, Abortion Clinics Are Not Voicing Business Concerns Over Liberal ‘Sex Strike’
By Sarah Komar
What happened: Conservatives are falsely claiming that U.S. abortion clinics warned that they would go bankrupt if liberal women continued a purported “sex strike” staged to protest Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
A closer look: The claim emerged in a Nov. 10 article published by The People’s Voice (Trust Score: 0/100), which stated: “Multiple abortion clinics across the U.S. are reporting that they will go out of business if the sex strike by liberal women continues for much longer. According to staffers inside these clinics, the majority of business comes from promiscuous left-wing women.”
The article was reposted multiple times on social media, including by conservative commentator and self-avowed conspiracy theorist Liz Churchill, who received 2.9 million views in an X post calling the article the “Best thing you’ll read today.”
Actually: The claim is completely baseless. No credible news outlets have reported on the alleged warning from abortion clinics.
The People’s Voice, where the claim originated, has a history of publishing egregious falsehoods. Reality Check members can read NewsGuard’s Nutrition Label on the site here.
Context: Some women did say on social media that they would stop having sex with men to protest Trump’s win, and according to Google Trends, searches for the 4B movement — which launched in South Korea as a way for women protest misogyny and abuse in Korean society by avoiding sex and marriage — increased fiftyfold in the two days following the election.
As for the implication that abortions are most common among liberals, in the U.S., women of all political affiliations get abortions at similar rates, according to a 2024 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The foundation found in 2024 that 14 percent of all reproductive-aged women in the U.S. reported having had an abortion — including 14 percent of Democrats, 12 percent of Republicans, and 15 percent of independents.
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
3. Fighting Words: Pro-Kremlin Sources Attribute Fake Anti-U.S. Quote to NATO Chief
By Eva Maitland
What happened: Pro-Kremlin sources are circulating a fabricated quote attributed to the head of NATO threatening to remove the U.S. from the Western military alliance if President-elect Donald Trump gives the green light for Russia to control Ukraine.
A closer look: “If Trump surrenders Ukraine to Putin, I will personally expel the United States from the alliance,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Ruffe was falsely quoted as saying.
The fake quote was published in the pro-Kremlin Pravda network (Trust Score: 7.5/100) and Russian-language news sources including RuNews24.ru and Tsargrad, a pro-Kremlin TV station owned by Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.
The claim spread widely across social media, gaining nearly 10,000 mentions on X on Nov. 11, according to a social media monitoring tool used by NewsGuard. Multiple X posts advancing the claim gained more than 1 million views.
Pro-Russian sources are spreading the fabricated quote in an apparent attempt to foment anti-NATO sentiment in the U.S., particularly among Trump supporters.
Actually: Rutte did not make such a statement.
In fact, in a Nov. 6 X post, Rutte said that he had spoken with Trump and congratulated him on his victory, stating, “His leadership will again be key to keeping our Alliance strong. I look forward to working with him again to advance peace through strength through #NATO.”
Context: During his first presidency, Trump threatened multiple times to withdraw from the NATO alliance if member countries did not meet their military spending requirements, according to The New York Times (Trust Score: 87.5/100).
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If you see or hear something that you think may be provably false, please alert NewsGuard via realitycheck@newsguardtech.com and we'll do our best to get to the bottom of it. Note: Tips should not include content that you simply disagree with, however strongly.
4. One More Thing … Liberal Dark Money News Outlets Rivals Harris, Trump Campaign in Ad Dollars on Facebook and Instagram
What happened: The Courier Newsroom network of liberal “pink slime” news websites was the third highest spender on Facebook and Instagram ads in the runup to the presidential election during the month of October, behind only the Harris and Trump campaigns, the Columbia Journalism Review (Trust Score: 87.5/100) reported.
Context: Courier Newsroom is a U.S.-based liberal network of 12 secretly partisan sites presented as independent local news outlets with names like The Keystone in Pennsylvania, Cardinal & Pine in North Carolina, and The ’Gander in Michigan.
The term “pink slime” refers to websites that deceive readers by not disclosing their partisan backers, a nod to the unlabeled meat filler added to ground beef products. In June 2024, NewsGuard found that the number of pink slime websites in the U.S. surpassed the number of real local news websites.
Since the beginning of the year, Courier Newsroom has spent nearly $8.5 million on hyper partisan social media ads masked to appear as news articles, as reported in last week’s Reality Check.
A closer look: In October alone, Courier Newsroom spent $6.6 million on Facebook and Instagram ads that targeted swing state voters. The only entities that outspent Courier on Facebook and Instagram that month were the Harris and Trump campaigns, which spent $39.1 million and $9.1 million on ads, respectively, according to data analyzed by the CJR.
Ads run by Courier promoted liberal candidates for offices while sharply criticizing Republicans in key battleground states.
Final push: The pink slime network spent nearly $1.9 million on Facebook and Instagram ads in the week leading up to the election, NewsGuard’s analysis of Meta’s Ad Library data found.
AI Content Farm Tracker: 1,121 Sites and Counting
AI content farms are taking over the internet, and NewsGuard analysts track their spread. Read more about AI content farms, and how they are proliferating:
Reality Check is produced by Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
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