Aircraft, food, real estate pages become all about Musk Claims attributing fake inventions to Musk are not new. In August, we debunked a claim that Musk announced his "first robot girlfriend." In January, we rated False a claim that he invented a heater that would cut power costs to "basically $0. In December 2023, we found assertions that he invented an energy-saving device that would cut electricity bills by 80% to merit Pants on Fire ratings. But as Election Day neared — and even after the race was called — posts of this nature surged as the pages that hosted them converted to Musk-related content. A page called "Beautiful Mansions," created in December 2023, originally posted real estate photos. Another page titled "Easy Eats and Tips," created Oct. 11, populated its feed with recipes and food photos. Aircraft, warships and other warfare filled the feeds of two other pages, called "The Jet Fighter" and "Earth Guardian." But each of these accounts started making multiple posts a day about Musk’s supposed inventions — "Earth Guardian" flipped on Oct. 13, "The Jet Fighter" on Oct. 23, "Beautiful Mansions" on Nov. 7 and "Easy Eats and Tips" on Nov. 8. "Beautiful Mansions" and "Easy Eats and Tips" often point readers to links in the comments, but those links lead to pages that include no transparency about who runs the websites or writes for them. (Screen recording from Facebook) Their messages promise accessible, life-changing innovations. And Musk is the genius behind them — someone who keeps coming up with solutions that will improve lives. Although some people coming into contact with these posts call them out as being AI, others express interest and even gratitude. "At my age of 72 (years) old I wish I can have this amazing Tesla motorbike and take a ride for my daily activity," one commenter wrote on a Nov. 10 Facebook post hyping Tesla’s "NEW CHEAPEST electric motorbike today!" for just $499. (There’s no such bike.) "Hope that Mr. Elon Reeve Musk can make a Tesla cheaper bike like this for a Senior Citizen." (Screenshots from Facebook) Yang said it’s likely that pages sharing this content are trying to grow their followers to eventually deploy a scam. "My understanding is that many users cannot tell these images are AI-generated and genuinely believe they are real and like them," Yang said. "There are also people who can tell the nature of the images but engage with them nevertheless." Pages likely violate Facebook guidelines, but still go viral anyway PolitiFact encountered these pages because some of their Musk-related posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.) Meta’s demotes fact-checked misinformation and it has a policy of labeling content it detects was generated using AI tools. However, the label did not appear on any of the posts we reviewed. Meta did not respond to PolitiFact’s questions about these pages and posts. Although we can’t be sure of the motive behind these posts, the accounts that share them have characteristics that align with those described in a peer-reviewed paper published by the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. In it, authors Renée DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein, who are affiliated with Georgetown University, found that profit-motivated Facebook page owners used AI-generated images to boost engagement and traffic on the ad-supported external sites they link to. As with the Musk pages, many pages the Georgetown researchers studied suddenly changed their names and/or page subjects, or they were stolen or repurposed. Posts directed users to websites the researchers described as "heavily ad-laden content​ farm domains — some of which themselves appeared to consist of primarily AI-composed text." The researchers wrote that during their research, they began encountering more AI-generated images in their personal feeds, even though they did not follow or engage with the pages posting that content. That led them to conclude that Facebook’s algorithm could be to blame. "The Facebook Feed at times recommends unlabeled AI-generated images to users who do not explicitly follow the Page posting the content," DiResta and Goldstein wrote. "We suspect these high levels of engagement are partially driven by the Facebook recommendation algorithm." In their report, Meta told the researchers that it looked into the sites they had reviewed and "demoted the clickbait sites under our Content Distribution Guidelines." Facebook defines clickbait links as posts that "lure people into clicking on an included link by creating misleading expectations about the post or article’s content." In its own story about the onslaught of AI-generated Musk content that appeared on Facebook before the election, 404 Media, a digital media company, noted that one Indian YouTube vlogger appeared to identify this strategy as a way for content generators outside of the U.S. to grow "USA Channels." Since the election, "Beautiful Mansions," "Earth Guardian," "Easy Eats and Tips" and "The Jet Fighter" have continued to post claims about Musk. One Nov. 13 post by "The Jet Fighter" said, "Elon Musk declared SR-72 Darkstar is finally ready to fly." The aircraft would supposedly "revolutionize aerial warfare and global surveillance." SR-72 is an aircraft being developed by Lockheed Martin as of 2016; Darkstar was a fictional aircraft with real capabilities built for the movie "Top Gun: Maverick." Musk has no recorded connection to such an aircraft. Nevertheless, one comment said, "This guy doesn't mess around. No wonder Trump put him to work. How can we lose?" CORRECTION, Nov. 21, 2024: Although their research was published in a Harvard University journal, Renée DiResta and Josh A. Goldstein are affiliated with Georgetown University. An earlier version of this story was inaccurate on their university affiliation. Sign Up For Our Weekly Newsletter Our Sources