Elon Musk’s X Caught Slapping Spam Warning on NPR Story About Trump

Elon Musk’s “free speech” project is once again under fire—this time for flagging an article critical of Donald Trump.

On Thursday, X users and NPR editors noticed that a link to an NPR story about Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery mishap was being marked as spam on the platform.

When users clicked on the article link, they received an alert reading: “Warning: this link may be unsafe,” followed by the URL to the webpage. This type of warning is typically displayed when the URL leads the user to spam or another kind of malicious link, not a factual news report.

The issue now appears to be resolved, but there doesn’t seem to be any official explanation from X for the warning.

Steve Inskeep, host of Morning Edition and Up First on NPR, flagged the issue, writing: “As of 12:45 p.m. ET, X has blocked this NPR story. Other NPR stories are not blocked, so I’m assuming a good faith mistake.” 

That assumption may be a bit too generous. Recently, X has come under fire for limiting access to several political accounts such as KamalaHQ, the official rapid response page for Harris’s campaign, the Uncommitted movement, and the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

This also is not the first feud between Elon Musk and NPR. In 2023, Musk labeled the new organization “state-affiliated media,” a label usually reserved for true propaganda outlets in countries like Russia and China. In response, the outlet formally left the platform. 

Meanwhile, Musk continues to back Trump every way he can, including using X to get him greater attention. Perhaps that support may include more overt censorship going forward.

J.D. Vance was greeted by loud boos during an address to the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston on Thursday—and that was only the beginning of an incredibly rough speech for Donald Trump’s running mate.

“Thank you guys—” Vance said as he grabbed the mic to speak, only to be interrupted by loud booing from the audience.

“Semper fi, guys,” Vance said, seeming to signpost his background as a Marine to get the hecklers to stop. “Sounds like we’ve got some fans and some haters, that’s OK,” he joked.

“Listen to what I have to say here, and I’ll make my pitch,” he said.

Vance asked his audience, which had voted to endorse Joe Biden in 2019, to “ignore the campaign rhetoric and look at the record,” before predictably diving into campaign rhetoric blaming undocumented immigrants for unsupported claims about increased crime and drug use.

Vance touted projections of how much undocumented immigrants were costing different cities around the country, referring to New York, Chicago, Denver, and Washington, D.C., but didn’t conjure a single number about Boston, where the speech was actually taking place.

“We shouldn’t be forced to spend billions of dollars on people who aren’t even supposed to be here. We should be spending that money on schools, police and fire departments, and our citizens, and under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, we will,” Vance said. The Ohio senator’s imagining of a world where by funding public institutions, you can somehow police the citizenship of those who receive their benefits, was met by a mix of claps and boos.

If Vance thought his earlier plea would be enough to settle the disruptions, he had another think coming.

“Now, President Trump and I are proud to be the most pro-worker Republican ticket in history, and I want to talk about why we’re fighting for working people,” Vance said, once again interrupted by loud booing from actual working people.

As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz pointed out to the IAFF the day before, during a much friendlier reception, Trump had blocked overtime benefits, opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage, and proposed slashing federal fire service budgets. Walz warned that under Project 2025, Trump would continue to weaken unions.

On stage, Vance’s declaration that he was a “populist, and proud of it,” was again met by some claps and boos. Vance’s cold reception didn’t prevent him from attempting jokes, although he brutally fumbled their delivery in the face of an indifferent crowd.

Vance explained that Donald Trump is a “different kind of Republican, and under his leadership, the Republican Party is the party of the American worker,” and asked his audience to take the Republican National Convention as an example.

“It says a lot who each party chose to put up on that stage. At the Republican convention we were featuring everyday American workers—and of course, we had Hulk Hogan. And while it’s tempting, and I’m sure it would make some big headlines, don’t worry any-ev-everybody, I’m not going to try to take off my shirt here—” he said, stumbling slightly, to zero crowd response.

His rough way into a complaint that the Democrats had only invited celebrities fell flat, highlighting his awkward public speaking style and inability to depart from a prepared speech.

As Vance left the stage, he was met once again by deafening jeers mixed into some applause.

Vance’s team is already attempting to spin his dismal reception, lauding his bravery for stepping into hostile territory. Vance’s communications director William Martin posted his own video of the event, showing the “massive round of applause” for Vance as he walked on the stage, but stopped short of showing the booing that would begin once he opened his mouth.

Even Donald Trump’s staffers can’t defend his recent chauvinistic tirades against Vice President Kamala Harris.

In an interview with CNN’s John Berman on Thursday, Trump’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt couldn’t seem to offer a rational explanation for why the former president was reposting QAnon slogans and sharing a screenshot of an exchange on X that featured a photo of Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton alongside a comment that read, “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently.”

“You say that Donald Trump was a candidate of stability,” prompted Berman. “Why was Donald Trump over the last 36 hours on his social media reposting slogans from QAnon and reposting misogynistic, sexist content about Vice President Harris?”

“Well, look, I don’t think your viewers at home are concerned about social media posts. I think they are concerned with the news of the day,” Leavitt started before launching an attack on President Joe Biden’s border policies.

“Karoline, Karoline—do you know why he posted that?” Berman asked. “Do you know why he reposted that content?”

“I haven’t been able to talk to President Trump yet this morning because he’s calling in to media interviews, unlike Kamala Harris who has been avoiding the press for more than 40 days,” Leavitt said. “And we’re excited that CNN finally has the opportunity to question Kamala Harris tonight about her disastrous record.

“Again, Americans aren’t concerned with social media posts and silly memes, they are concerned with the problems that are plaguing them and their families right now,” she continued, pointing to three unconnected murders of women by migrants as being more “demeaning” to women than Trump’s rhetoric.

But Berman argued that Americans are capable of deliberating more than one issue at a time.

“When there’s content being reposted that uses QAnon slogans and when there are these sexist, misogynistic posts, it’s interesting to me that you can’t, you’re not—you don’t think they’re bad,” Berman said. “You have no problem with them.”

“I didn’t say that. I said that I don’t believe voters care,” Leavitt said.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp doesn’t think that Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in his state was a big deal, calling it a “distraction” in a Fox News interview.

Speaking to Fox & Friends on Thursday, Kemp was pressed by Steve Doocy to explain what happened between Trump and himself to resolve enmity between the two.

“Well, look, there was a little distraction, obviously, on their side when it came to Georgia. To me, that’s in the past,” Kemp said. “I have been saying that, guys, literally for over a year now, that I was going to support our nominee, that we had to win Georgia, the road to the White House runs through Georgia. And I still believe today, we cannot afford four more years of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.”

Trump attacked Kemp at an Atlanta rally earlier this month for refusing to overturn the 2020 election, saying, “He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy. And he’s a very average governor. Little Brian, little Brian Kemp. Bad guy.”

Trump also attacked Kemp’s wife, Marty Kemp, for saying that she wouldn’t vote for Trump and would instead write in her husband’s name on the presidential ballot in November. At the time, Kemp responded on X, telling Trump to “leave my family out of it” and to stop engaging in “petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans, or dwelling on the past.”

Kemp didn’t vote for the convicted felon and Republican presidential nominee in June’s primary elections in Georgia but has endorsed Trump for November. However, Kemp’s office has said that the governor will be looking into ethics violations from three new pro-Trump members of the state’s election board, signaling that he may once again thwart Trump’s efforts to interfere in Georgia’s voting process.

Trump infamously told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have” in January 2021. The Trump team’s efforts to stop democracy in the state resulted in felony charges for election interference against the former president and 17 co-defendants. The case is currently stalled thanks to Republican efforts to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as prosecutor, even though she originally filed the charges.

Even Donald Trump’s biggest allies admit that his social media posts are going over the top.

On Wednesday, Trump shared a series of frightening and outright offensive posts on his platform Truth Social, all before 10 a.m. The posts called for the imprisonment of Kamala Harris, Bill Gates, and Anthony Fauci, among other Democrats, as well as a military tribunal for former President Barack Obama. Multiple posts even referenced QAnon, including the far-right conspiracy group’s slogan “WWG1WGA.”

In response, former Trump campaign adviser David Urban, now a pro-Trump CNN analyst, called the erratic posting “terrible” and warned that the former president should cease with the ad hominem attacks. 

On Thursday, when asked by CNN host John Berman about Trump’s posts, Urban sarcastically replied that he was “loving it,” before encouraging Trump to stick to politics rather than threats or attacks against his opponents.

“What Donald Trump should be doing—and I’ve shared this with him and I’ll share it with him again every chance I see—stick to the issues,” said Urban. “If you want to attack Kamala Harris, please, let’s do so, but on the issue of immigration, on the porous border, and the failed economic plan of the Biden-Harris administration.”

Trump has had no filter on social media for many years, causing him to get banned from multiple platforms for inciting violence. But as his tone only gets more unhinged, his team is growing increasingly worried.