While Elon Musk faces his own election integrity issues offline, the owner of The community it spawned is rife with baseless claims passed off as evidence of voter fraud.
Musk opted not to appear at a required court appearance Thursday in Philadelphia to respond to a lawsuit challenging his political action committee’s $1 million daily donation to voters. Meanwhile, online, he has started a dedicated community space on X, formerly Twitter, where it asks users to share any problems they see with voting. Users posting to the independent feed, the “election integrity community,” quickly began pointing out what they considered evidence of fraud and election interference.
Tweets showing everything from ballots arriving broken, a test of the ABC news system, a postal worker doing his job and delivering mail-in ballots, were presented as evidence that the upcoming presidential election had been compromised. Some users posted videos of people they considered suspicious, despite providing little to no evidence of suspicious activity, and asked other members of the community to help them identify them.
Among the tweets are attempts to deceive and identify people whom users falsely accuse of stuffing ballot boxes or preventing Trump supporters from voting. In one case, a post that received 14,000 shares and 31,000 likes includes a video of a postal worker carrying ballots to a polling place in Northampton County, Pennsylvania.
The same video was shared on X and other forums and retweeted by right-wing influencers like Alex Jones. The user asks for help identifying the man. “It says it’s at the post office, but I don’t know if I buy that,” the post says. “He didn’t want to talk to us and was acting very suspicious.” The man in question was the acting postmaster and a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service, Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure. confirmed to NBC News. McClure told NBC News that the postal worker was already being harassed over the video.
Experts say the community, which has more than 50,000 members, is following the same playbook used in feverish online forums after the 2020 election to fuel accusations of vote theft. In 2020, it was the “Stop the Steal” Facebook group, Telegram groups, and message boards of the far-right social media company Parler.
These groups amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who perpetuated the baseless claim that the election was being stolen from Donald Trump. Much of the anecdotal and often unfounded stories shared in these groups by individuals were seized upon by right-wing influencers and other figures to create the narrative that the election was compromised, according to a study. report from the Electoral Integrity Association.
-JC (@JMJ33777) October 31, 2024
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“These are real rumors from real people that are being picked up and used by a propaganda machine that really wants to spread that opinion,” said Renee DiResta, an associate professor at Georgetown University and former research director at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “That’s what happened in 2020. (It was the same) ‘stop the steal’ process. The slogan came from the top, but it was ordinary people who provided the ‘evidence’ to support the idea that the election was stolen.”
Before anyone can determine whether the claims are true or false, users take over the posts and assume that the often unsuspecting person depicted is guilty or doing something wrong, DiResta said. “Unfortunately, the people who bear the costs are the random people whose pictures they take.”
The “election integrity community” offers another look into the echo chamber of people across the country who believe the election will be or has already been rigged against Trump. Although the space is separate from the normal X feed, Musk has also shared some of the concerns posted in the community on his own page.
Among the narratives being pushed in the community is one that has become Musk’s favorite conspiracy theory. The CEO of SpaceX has loudly and often made the false claim that the Biden administration was “importing voters” in the form of “unvetted illegal immigrants.” In the last few days, A Musk-funded super Pac has been pushing a fake pro-Kamala Harris initiative called Project 2028.. The initiative has run fake pro-Harris ads and sent text messages to voters that include claims that Harris will open the country’s borders and is pushing to allow undocumented immigrants to vote. Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in the United States and there is no evidence available that they are voting en masse as claimed. Community users are sharing videos They say it provides evidence that Democrats are “busing” undocumented immigrants to vote their way.