Brooks: Elon Musk’s company sues for the right to deepfake voters of Minnesota

The last time Elon Musk tried to win an election, he threw millions of dollars at a Wisconsin Supreme Court race and lost anyway.

Maybe he’ll have better luck with lies and fakes and AI-generated slop.

Musk’s X Corp. (parent company of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) is suing Minnesota over a new state law that prohibits the use of technology to manipulate the outcome of elections.

Grab your popcorn. The richest man on the planet is suing the greatest state in the union.

This marks yet another attempt by Musk to threaten Minnesota into being Minnesota Nice to him. Previously, Mr. “Comedy is now legal on Twitter” threatened to sue Gov. Tim Walz for accurately describing that straight-armed Nazi salute Musk threw on stage as a Nazi salute.

This is what Musk’s “my heart goes out to you” gesture used to look like.

During the 2024 election, AI generators like X’s Grok-2 spewed out a tedious stream of election deepfakes. There were manipulated images and video of Kamala Harris wearing lingerie or smooching Donald Trump. New Hampshire voters got robocalls that sounded just like President Joe Biden was urging them not to vote. At one point, candidate Trump graciously accepted a phony Taylor Swift endorsement.

Minnesota now makes it a crime to maliciously circulate deepfakes within 90 days of an election. The law targets content designed to harm a candidate’s reputation or influence the result of an election.

The X Corp. lawsuit raises interesting First Amendment questions in the most hilariously hypocritical way possible.

“This system will inevitably result in the censorship of wide swaths of valuable political speech and commentary,” the company claimed in its complaint.

This from Elon Musk, the “free speech absolutist” who bought his own social media company and used it to suspend the social media accounts of journalists who wrote things he didn’t like. (Don’t threaten me, @stribrooks, with a good time.)

Yes, the billionaire with his own fake branch of government and a mission to purge the government and the public discourse of words he doesn’t like is concerned about censorship. Words like “women,” “measles,” “Gulf of Mexico” and “safe drinking water.”

PEN America keeps a running tally of the words being scrubbed from government websites and documents on Musk’s watch. These include but are not limited to:

“climate science”

“peanut allergies”

“Black”

“elderly”

“disabilities”

“historically”

“gay”

“pronoun”

“rural water”

“water conservation”

“sediment”

“political”

“low-income housing”

“soil pollution”

“solar energy”

“vaccines”

“violence”

“ultraprocessed foods”

“disadvantaged”

“discrimination”

“evidence-based”

“fluoride”

“pollution remediation”

“mental health”

“ethanol.”

The DOGE guy has some thoughts about censorship. Let that sink in.