Elon Musk’s baffling new theory revolving around a Pentagon contract was ripped apart by CNN’s in-house fact-checker Daniel Dale, who offered a thorough debunking on Friday.
Dale was all over claims Musk made on his social media platform X over the last 24 hours where he misrepresented a government contract awarded to Thomson Reuters Special Services, a company selected by the Department of Defense to test defenses against “social engineering” cyberattacks, which use “social deception” strategies to trick humans, according to CNN.
But Musk instead told his legions of online followers that the government paid Reuters news agency, which is a sister company to Thomson Reuters Special Services, to engage in deception.
“That’s literally what it says on the official government documents!!” Musk wrote Thursday on X.
But that is not at all true, according to Dale.
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“Musk’s comments are as if he saw a budget line for the National Cancer Institute and insinuated that the government was funding cancer,” Dale said Friday. “Or saw a budget line for the National Terrorism Advisory System and insinuated that the government was advising terrorists.”
Dale continued his smackdown of the half-baked claims after the DOD came out to also set the record straight against the allegations being made by the world’s richest man and staunch ally of President Donald Trump. Notably, the CNN fact checker pointed out to readers that the $9.1 million contract Musk is referring to began under Trump’s watch in 2018.
“Even before DoD’s comment, it was obvious to anyone who did 1 minute of research that this contract was for military defense against deception tactics, not for a news agency to engage in deceiving the public,” Dale wrote on X. “But here we are.”
In a statement, the Defense Department said that Thomson Reuters Special Services was “competitively selected” to test the effectiveness of defensive tools “to protect people from social engineering attacks,” such as spearfishing. They are being developed under the "Active Social Engineering Defense Program."
