Election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, are not destroying mail-in ballots cast for former President Donald Trump. The Defense Department last month did not issue a directive giving U.S. soldiers unprecedented authority to use lethal force against rioting Trump supporters if the former president loses next week. And no, 180,000 Amish did not register to vote in Pennsylvania, given that there are only 92,600 Amish living in the state, including minors. Ron DeSantis never said Florida would not use Dominion voting machines in next week’s election. And California municipalities do not allow noncitizens to vote in this year’s presidential election.
These are just a small sample of the avalanche of voting-related disinformation narratives that are being seeded and spread on social media platforms like X, Instagram and Facebook in the run-up to November 5.
The denial movement never left and is bigger than ever.
In the weeks leading up to the 2020 vote, Trump and his allies had already begun spreading claims that the election would be stolen, but those accusations were vague and disorganized. However, for the past four years, a well-funded network of election denial groups across the United States has worked tirelessly to rally supporters and foment conspiracy theories about voting machines flipping votes in the middle of the night and Votes are shredded into full bags. and “mules” filling mailboxes with ballots.
These conspiracy theories are shared by right-wing election-denying networks, the Trump campaign, and Russian propaganda groups. With a week to go until the historic vote, fully formed conspiracy theories about threats to the vote are being presented to audiences who have been primed to believe everything they hear.
Many of these narratives are spreading virtually unchecked on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook; where those in charge have all but abdicated their responsibility to verify information about one of the most critical votes in American history, and have also made it harder for everyone else to see what is happening.
“What worries me most about this year is that we have a much more opaque window into the penetration of these lies, no matter where they come from,” said Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration misinformation czar who is now executive director. by American Sunlight. Project, he tells WIRED. “By and large, social media platforms have stopped moderating such content and, equally worrying, have cut off researchers’ access to the data streams that allowed us to objectively report on the scale of these campaigns, all due to political pressure on disinformation researchers and social media. platforms.”