Elon Musk’s X says it found a China-backed, anti-AI plot — on Elon Musk’s X. Did it actually influence Americans?

Some tech types believe that China has duped Americans into hating AI data centers.

Now those voices believe they have proof: A report from Elon Musk’s X, posted Thursday night, that said it found 200 accounts “posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”

The posts X flagged look a lot like posts OpenAI found earlier this summer, which it says were created by ChatGPT accounts “likely originating from China.”

As I’ve noted before, it is certainly plausible that China has tried to use social media to convince Americans to hate data centers. China, Iran, and Russia have all used social media platforms for American persuasion campaigns in the past.

But “China tried to exploit opposition to data centers” is different from “China created that opposition” — or even from “China meaningfully amplified it.”

The bigger picture is that a report like this seems unlikely to turn people who don’t like data centers into people who like data centers. More likely, it will just end up preaching to the choir.

Calling people victims of a “psyop” may make you feel better. I’m not sure it does anything else.

And when it comes to Thursday’s report from X, there are several red flags you should consider before accepting it at face value.

For instance:

• X says it found 200 accounts spreading anti-data center posts. But it doesn’t provide any other detail, like what period those accounts were posting that stuff, or — crucially — what kind of reach those posts got. Did millions of X users see them? Or dozens? And what kind of X users saw them — people who live near proposed data center projects? Americans? Randos?
• The screenshots of the posts X says it found have been cropped in a way that cuts off any audience information: You can’t see how many retweets, likes, or impressions they generated, in the way you normally can for any post on the service. Maybe the posts X flagged were super-popular, and the fact that we can’t see that for ourselves is just an unfortunate happenstance. But in at least some of the examples of anti-data center posts OpenAI flagged earlier, the audience data we can see makes it look like those posts achieved somewhere between a little and practically zero reach.

Or you can zoom out and note that OpenAI flagged the existence of anti-AI posts likely made by Chinese users back on June 10. Did it take X close to 3 months to track down evidence of dubious accounts on its own platform? Or is this something the company just recently started looking at — perhaps as calls to fight back against anti-data center voices got louder?

You might also ask why Meta and Google’s YouTube have yet to flag any evidence of this behavior on their platforms. (I asked both companies about this last week and have asked again Friday.)

Or you can keep going, and note that X owner Elon Musk — someone who has a very vested interest in data centers — has not always been a reliable source of information when it comes to his site or the way he runs it. That’s a trait that goes all the way back to 2022, when Musk said he was going to buy what was then called Twitter to rid it of bots — and then tried backing out of the deal by saying he didn’t know Twitter had so many bots.

That doesn’t mean that things Musk says about his platform are necessarily false — and in this case, it’s worth noting that as of Friday morning, Musk has yet to even acknowledge the report from his Global Government Affairs account. Perhaps he’s totally unaware that one of his companies says it’s been used against data centers his other companies need.

Back to the main point: It is possible that China is trying to make Americans more suspicious of data centers. It is also possible that Americans have plenty of reasons to be suspicious of data centers all by themselves. Telling them — or yourself — that their concerns are ginned up by shadowy foreigners isn’t likely to change anything.