Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok spreads misinformation about protests in the US

Billionaire Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok was criticized for providing false information about the No Kings protest event in its responses to users.

A man dressed as former President George Washington during a protest against President Trump’s policies in Boston on October 18 – Photo: REUTERS

Last week, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in many major cities across the United States, participating in the ” No Kings ” campaign – a massive protest movement to oppose the policies of President Donald Trump.

Marches took place simultaneously in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and spread to Europe with similar events in Madrid and Paris.

However, immediately after the wave of protests, social network X appeared with a series of accusations that the American TV channel MSNBC had “inflated” the scale of the event by using old footage.

One of the most prominent allegations was made by the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok – a product of billionaire Elon Musk – when the tool asserted that the video broadcast by MSNBC was actually from the 2017 protest in Boston.

“No, that video was from a protest on Boston Common in August 2017. At that time, about 40,000 people protested a small demonstration in support of free speech,” Grok replied on the X platform.

France 24 quoted the answer of AI Chatbot Grok on the X platform – Photo: France 24

Grok’s response quickly went viral, garnering millions of views and sparking a wave of criticism from MSNBC, with many accusing the network of “staging,” “misleading the public,” and “using old footage to fake a revolution.”

Some people even asserted: “MSNBC aired a video from 2017 but said it was live footage from yesterday’s protest” – accusing this of propaganda, not real journalism.

However, the “Truth or Fake” verification team of France 24, after conducting an investigation, rejected all of the above allegations. They confirmed that the video that MSNBC broadcast was real, recording images from the “No Kings” protest in Boston on October 18, 2025.

Using reverse image search, experts found that the video was used by multiple local TV stations, including WCVB – Channel 5 Boston, on the same day.

Details such as the stage, sound system, and crowd location all match exactly with the scene of the event, with no trace of the video appearing before October 18, 2025 .

According to France 24, this is not the first time Grok has been criticized for spreading false information.

In June 2025, when President Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles to suppress anti-immigration protests, California Governor Gavin Newsom posted photos of soldiers sleeping on the floor in cramped spaces to condemn the federal government’s actions.

When users asked Grok about the authenticity of the photo series, the chatbot continued to give false information, claiming that this was an old photo from 2021 – the time when the US withdrew troops from Afghanistan.

However, the truth is that the above photos were taken at the exact time of the protest and were first published by the San Francisco Chronicle , as verified by the independent verification organization Politifact.