On a recent Sunday night in Virginia, Henrico County Registrar Mark Coakley was waiting for the delayed Cowboys-Steelers NFL game to start when he came across a troubling post on X (formerly known as Twitter). The post came from the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, a vocal Trump supporter, who had reshared a tweet from 2023 that falsely claimed “election integrity leaders in Virginia” found fraudulent votes in Henrico County during the 2020 election.

“Is this accurate @CommunityNotes?” Musk asked in his post, referencing X’s Community Notes feature, which allows users to fact-check posts.

Upon seeing Musk’s post, Coakley, Henrico County’s chief election official, quickly worked to respond. By Monday morning, the Henrico County X account had posted a five-part thread debunking the misinformation.

“They were uninformed tweets,” Coakley said in an interview with ABC News. “Media was calling, friends were calling me.”

The challenge for Coakley, however, is that while Musk’s original post had racked up 27.7 million views, Coakley’s correction had reached fewer than 100,000. It highlights the difficulty in combating misinformation online, where falsehoods can spread rapidly while the truth struggles to gain traction.

As Musk continues to share misleading election-related content on X, election officials are increasingly finding themselves needing to correct him on his own platform. But their reach is limited in comparison to Musk’s 200 million followers.