Ever since he bought Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has been titillating his fans with wild conspiracy theories from supposedly secret files. Now that Donald Trump is back in office—and has granted the world’s wealthiest private citizen free rein to dismantle federal agencies—Musk’s conspiratorial musings are no longer just entertainment for the extremely online. Internet fantasies have become a sufficient pretext for crippling the government.
“There are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk recently posted on the platform now called X, alongside a screenshot suggesting that millions of people in the program’s database are over 120 years old. In reality, the undead were an artifact of the Social Security Administration’s archaic records system. They weren’t getting checks. But the argument that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had uncovered massive fraud captivated his fans, and the claim went viral.
Even though the Social Security administrator quickly got to explaining the facts, highlighting data from a 2023 public audit, Trump picked up the idea and falsely claimed in his speech to Congress earlier this month that Social Security abuse is rampant. As Trump and Congress consider whether to shrink a popular part of the safety net to accommodate tax cuts, fraud claims make a convenient excuse.
In recent weeks, Musk and his online allies have flooded X with similarly dubious allegations of corruption and incompetence at USAID and other agencies. (No, USAID didn’t “fund celebrity trips to Ukraine,” but Musk circulated a fabricated video making that claim.) Viral claims rile up the MAGA base, who demand accountability.
Since Trump’s reinauguration, the extremely online MAGA right has developed a passion for long-standing, easily accessible internet databases of government spending. Intrepid online sleuths boast about unearthing a budget line or a government contract whose existence had previously eluded them: The agency is hiding something. A piece of data, selectively disclosed and stripped of its broader context, is breathlessly promoted on X as proof of malfeasance: This is what they don’t want you to see. Viral outrage becomes the distribution strategy, and anyone questioning the ominous claim is in on the conspiracy: The media are covering up the truth. The outrage needs to last only long enough for Musk or Trump to boldly reveal the next step in their rapid unscheduled disassembly of government—a contract canceled, a program gutted, civil servants fired, Social Security benefits potentially interrupted. Then the cycle resets: That was just the beginning.
At this point, the process is self-perpetuating. Musk himself has become a credulous amplifier of even the wildest claims. On March 2, two days after Donald Trump excoriated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Musk helped spread a rumor that Ukraine was somehow exploiting Social Security. Initially, an account called DataRepublican had posted screenshots from a government database showing payments to recipients in that country. Musk responded, “That’s weird.”
His attention algorithmically boosted the original post. It also prompted the influencer Mario Nawfal to amp up the outrage factor: “🚨🇺🇦U.S. SOCIAL SECURITY PAYMENTS SENT TO UKRAINE—WHY?” he posted. The Social Security Administration, Nawfal continued, “needs to explain how Ukraine became a recipient of U.S. retirement funds while Americans struggle.” As the X posts gained traction, some commenters in the replies tried to explain that a small number of American retirees are expatriates; some may even live in Ukraine—a plausible explanation that seemed not to have occurred to Musk or Nawfal.
Musk’s interventions in public policy are governed by the same logic he used in 2022 when publicizing the so-called Twitter Files. His handpicked authors wrote serialized installments, in the form of winding Twitter threads and Substack posts, that drew on leaked internal documents from the social-media platform. Musk hyped them as evidence that tech executives had colluded with powerful institutions to suppress conservative speech and manipulate the national discourse. “Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public,” Musk insisted, a claim later refuted by his own corporate lawyers.
These were soap operas for conspiracy buffs. The leaks of internal emails, Slack chats, and other documents transformed mundane corporate processes and communications into sinister conspiracies, elevating routine policy debates into moments of high drama. The Twitter Files writers, I should note, gave this treatment to projects my former team at the Stanford Internet Observatory had worked on jointly with Twitter; at one point, the writers advanced the theory that I was a secret CIA plant.
The Twitter Files sought to find evidence to support the preexisting right-wing belief that the government was secretly in cahoots with Big Tech. Ironically, Big Tech has now quite demonstrably gotten into bed with the government. Last year, Musk became the largest donor to the Trump campaign, buying his way into political power like no tech CEO had before him. After Trump won, he put Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, whose acronym refers to an internet-famous meme of a Shiba Inu dog. The acronym was an unmistakable sign that the extremely online right was now in power.
The demand for what might be called the “Government Files” became apparent quickly. Some Musk fans clamored for the declassification of federal files on the politically connected sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal case; Trump played to the same crowd on Tuesday when he released files on the John F. Kennedy assassination—files that so far have proved anticlimactic. Others hoped for Files projects that would reveal the inner workings of the supposed “deep state.” As Musk’s team got to work, he and the Trump White House began to amplify stories of things his DOGE investigators were finding—such as $50 million in spending by USAID, supposedly on condoms in Gaza.
In some cases, as with the Ukrainian Social Security payments and various USAID contracts, much of the information that is purportedly being exposed was already public, present in reports or databases that most people simply hadn’t bothered to look at. The act of surfacing information lends an air of revelation. Extremely online crowds are not passive audiences; they eagerly seize the chance to play detective and uncover forbidden secrets. Individual participants’ outraged social-media posts take off almost at random, and they may be rewarded with a reply or quote-tweet from Elon Musk and other influencers—catapulting the authors to momentary virality or even, potentially, monetizable clout.
The problem, however, is that many of the supposed finds are misinterpretations. The line item widely described as “$50 million in condoms for Hamas” actually referred to an initiative to stop HIV in Africa. Another day’s viral post showed a screenshot of a 2023 expenditure and proclaimed, “🚨#BREAKING: Jeffrey Epstein was being paid by USAID as a Director.” The red siren was unwarranted: The infamous sex trafficker had died four years earlier.
Mistakes like this have real consequences. As online mobs demand vengeance for things that never happened, agencies or individuals named in made-up scandals go silent. Careers are upended, initiatives derailed, and important work is cast aside. Nuanced issues that could have been the subjects of practical reform are instead prosecuted as culture-war grievances.
In recent weeks, some of the very same people behind the Twitter Files allegations have become prominent voices in spreading wild theories about entities targeted by DOGE. “Both USAID and the CIA Were Behind the Impeachment of Trump in 2019,” the writer Michael Shellenberger proclaimed recently on his Substack. The agencies, he declared on X, were supposedly part of “an illegal regime change effort at home”—a truly incendiary, and utterly baseless, allegation. The same commentators who misread Twitter’s emails are suddenly experts in the complexities of federal procurement, international development, and interagency coordination, and their follower counts have continued to surge upward.
The incessant Files-style drama of the second Trump administration isn’t just misleading; it’s also incoherent. Every unpublicized grant or procurement line item is treated as proof that the system is both incompetent and omnipotent, hopelessly bureaucratic yet somehow pulling off sprawling conspiracies. Will distrustful Americans eventually realize that most of these “scandals” don’t amount to anything? Or will the absence of evidence be reframed as the evidence of wrongdoing? Someone from the deep state got there first and destroyed all the proof!
Musk and his scribes wanted the Twitter Files to produce earth-shattering revelations of censorship. What the documents mostly showed was that platform executives had to make tough calls in real time—and that some of those calls were wrong in hindsight. The true lesson wasn’t about systemic corruption; it was that running an online platform is complicated.
What started as misinterpretations of content-moderation policies has escalated into misinterpretations of Social Security payments, foreign aid, procurement, economic policy, and the fundamental functions that keep the country running. There will always be some silly grant or unnecessary bureaucracy in government. The application of technology can help fix those problems. But that’s not what Musk is doing. The goal of the Twitter Files—and now the Government Files—was never to provide authentic transparency or deliver reform; it was to discredit organizations and their leaders.
Musk and his fans have a saying: “We are the media now.” Born in the alternate reality of QAnon, it became a rallying cry for trusting alternative sources of information. But the stakes have moved beyond delegitimizing media or content-moderation policies. Musk and his allies are the government now. They are making decisions that affect lives, livelihoods, and national security. And if their reality continues to be dictated by misleading Files fantasies and misdirected outrage, Americans will face a problem far worse than bureaucratic inefficiency: government incapacity—the deliberate dismantling of the ability to govern at all.
