Trump news at a glance: US promotes Elon Musk’s X to fight foreign propaganda

 

Explainer

Trump news at a glance: US promotes Elon Musk’s X to fight foreign propaganda

 

Cable signed by secretary of state Marco Rubio endorses Musk’s platform by name and suggests staff work with Pentagon psychological operations unit – key US politics stories from Monday 30 March at a glance

 

Guardian staff

Tue 31 Mar 2026 02.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/30/trump-news-at-a-glance-latest-updates-today

 

The United States has directed every American embassy and consulate across the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda and endorses Elon Musk’s Twitter/X as an “innovative” tool to help do it.

 

The cable, signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Monday and obtained by the Guardian, also suggests embassies and consulates work alongside the US military’s psychological operations unit to address the problem of rampant disinformation. It lays out a sweeping set of instructions for how embassy staff should push back against what it describes as coordinated foreign efforts to undermine American interests abroad.

 

The cable also endorses Musk’s platform X by name – specifically its Community Notes feature – as an “innovative” and “crowdsourced” instrument to cull disinformation in “countering anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech or privacy”.

 

It comes as the United States is at war with Iran, whose government has for decades operated one of the world’s most sophisticated and prolific state disinformation apparatuses, and as Russian and Chinese influence operations continue to target American allies across Europe, Asia and Latin America.