A week ago, the Network was filled with screenshots of a tweet from the head of Tesla, in which Musk sent three letters to the Ukrainian parliament. We checked whether the American billionaire made such a gesture.
At the beginning of October 2022, reports appeared that Elon Musk allegedly wrote the phrase “F**k you all” in response to a comment from the official English-language account of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, which stated that Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk are parts of Ukraine. Proof of the billionaire’s words was a screenshot of a tweet, according to which Musk published his replay on October 5.
The news was most widely spread on social networks. For example, in the “Bad News” public on VKontakte, a post about Musk’s tweet, published on October 6, received 254,000 views, 1050 likes and 700 reposts. There are other communities where posts have collected tens of thousands of views and hundreds of likes (here, here And here). The screenshot was shared on Twitter (here, here And here), as well as in Russian-language media, including “Federal News Agency", St. Petersburg edition "Constantinople" And other sites. Moreover, it is sometimes noted that Musk’s message no longer exists: it was allegedly deleted either by himself or by the platform’s moderators. On Telegram, not only major channels reported on Musk’s alleged tweet (here, here And here), but also the official channel of the TV presenter Ruslana Ostashko, which was later reposted by the channel Vladimir Solovyov (however, both soon deleted their posts, but archived copies remained). The earliest publication we found was appeared in the Telegram channel “Rokot Z” on October 5 at 18:55 Moscow time.
On October 3, on his Twitter, Musk made several statements that were controversially received by the audience about the conditions under which a Russian-Ukrainian peace treaty should be concluded. For example, he suggested hold new referendums in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, as well as in the self-proclaimed LPR and DPR under UN supervision, because, in his opinion, recent referendums have been questionable. At the same time, Musk believes that Crimea should be Russian. According to a poll conducted by Musk himself on Twitter, just over 59% of voters disagree with his ideas (while he mentioned bot attack). After some time, the billionaire arranged a new survey in which wrote: “Then let’s try this: the residents of Donbass and Crimea must decide of their own free will whether they will be part of Russia or Ukraine.” This time, just under 60% of voters chose the answer “Yes.” Official Twitter account of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine left Under this vote there is the following comment: “Crimea is Ukraine. Donetsk is Ukraine. Lugansk is Ukraine.” Thus, in the above screenshot, two of the three tweets shown are definitely real.
Now regarding Musk’s obscene phrase. According to numerous publications, the billionaire allegedly left her only after a couple of days, because the Ukrainians “pissed off" and brought "until white heat" But, as already mentioned, at the moment there is such an entry on the page of the founder of SpaceX No. About the absence of this message on October 5 stated even on the official RT in Russian accounts, calling the picture a fake. A refutation also appeared in Solovyov’s channel, where reposted an entry in which the picture also called fake and immediately found the culprits: “[This] Ukrainian TsIPsO send out proposals, so that later they can accuse us of spreading fakes. It takes less than a minute to open Twitter and make sure Musk didn’t write something like that.” However, in many publications (including “Constantinople") it was said that the tweet had already been deleted, therefore, now it should not be on the billionaire’s page.
But you can make sure that such a tweet did not actually exist using other signs. Firstly, absolutely all the posts and publications we found in the media and on other sites featured the same screenshot. On Twitter at the time of October 5, Musk, according to official data from the platform, it was about 108 million subscribers, and his message to Rada allegedly received almost 6,000 likes. Given these numbers, it's unlikely that no one would have taken a different screenshot if the tweet had actually happened. But we were unable to find another screenshot.
Secondly, not a single publication we found contained a link to Musk’s allegedly deleted tweet. A situation in which such a link cannot be found anywhere also seems unlikely. Accordingly, find a saved copy of the post in the Google cache or web archive Also it didn't work out.
Thirdly, in no relatively authoritative Russian-speaking and even more so English-speaking The media did not write about Musk's tweet. This once again seems unlikely, since previously many reputable resources reported about how Ukrainian diplomat Andrey Melnik used obscenities on October 3 in the same Twitter sent Musk himself.
And finally, fourthly, according to the distributed screenshot, users left 172 replays under Musk’s obscene tweet, but they doesn't show search by platform. In the advanced Twitter search, we set up the following filters to find all tweets written to Musk mentioning the Verkhovna Rada account in the period from October 4 to October 6, but nothing was found. This result can be due to several main reasons: either those 172 replays never happened, or all users deleted their replies, or all the accounts of those users are hidden, or some of the messages were deleted, and the rest were sent by hidden accounts. The first case seems most likely.
Thus, all the above arguments allow us to conclude that Musk did not write the phrase we are interested in, and the viral screenshot is indeed a fake.
Cover photo: collage “Checked” / Steve Jurvetson (flickr.com) / “Feed of the day”
Fake
- Was Elon Musk talking about LGBT and leftist agendas that "make Netflix unwatchable" and the "green-haired freak with the ban button"?
- Is it true that the former Japanese Defense Minister called on Ukraine not to bomb the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant so as not to repeat US crimes?
- Is it true that Arnold Schwarzenegger gave Greta Thunberg a Tesla 3?
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