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X’s plan to interfere with the election

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X’s plan to interfere with the election

Elon Musk’s effort to deny Kamala Harris an election victory is already underway. Can it work?

By Casey Newton • 4 Nov 2024

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(Elliott Stallion / Unsplash)

Here's the first free Platformer post of the week: a look at what to expect on social networks in the potentially turbulent days ahead. In particular, we should focus on what happens on X, which I expect to be a kind of super-spreader of misinformation about voter fraud.

After the election, I'll be writing three times a week covering how platforms are responding to the conspiracy theories, AI slop, and foreign influence campaigns that we know could play a huge role in the aftermath. But two of those updates will be limited to subscribers — the people who support my work.

Worried about the election? Consider upgrading your subscription today. I promise you a sane, rational guide to the intersection of tech and democracy in the aftermath of Election Day — along with a private RSS feed, chatty Discord server, and lots more. Sound good?

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With polls essentially tied and hours to go until Election Day, no one knows for certain who will win the 2024 US presidential election. But we can say with some certainty what will happen if the result is anything other than a landslide victory for Donald Trump: a concerted campaign to delegitimize the election’s results, organized and amplified on Elon Musk’s X.

Today, let’s talk about what we should expect to see in the potentially tumultuous aftermath of the election. While I’m as anxious as anyone else about the result tomorrow, I find it somewhat calming to remember that we already know which narratives and strategies will likely be used to deny Kamala Harris a victory in all but the most convincing of outcomes. When these start to reverberate around the internet tomorrow, there will be at least some comfort to be had in the knowledge that we all saw it coming.

So here’s what to look for, with a focus on where falsehoods about the election will have the greatest intersection with tech platforms.

One: We might not know the results on Election Day. Cognizant of the fact that delayed results breed conspiracy theories, many states have worked over the past four years to speed up the count. The Harris campaign expects same-day results from Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan, Reuters reported, but Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada may take until Wednesday or beyond. The single most effective thing the press could do to calm nerves in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the election could be to remind their audiences that a multi-day count is normal and not evidence of fraud.

Two: Republicans will claim massive voter fraud again anyway. This is of course a repeat from the 2020 election, when Trump spent the entire year warning that he could only lose if Democrats cast millions of fake ballots for Joe Biden. The Big Lie led to the death and destruction of January 6, but Trump and his enablers doubled down on it. The twist this time is that rather than place the blame on mail-in ballots, which he once feared would favor Democrats, Trump and his campaign surrogate Musk are scapegoating undocumented immigrants.

Musk has posted about the issue more than 1,300 times this year, according to a Bloomberg analysis, and is his most discussed subject online. If the race is tight, expect Musk to continue scapegoating immigrants.

Three: X — and Musk’s X account — will be a central clearinghouse for voter fraud election claims and other election misinformation.

Musk has destroyed most of the financial value of the company once known as Twitter. But it remains the default destination for politics among social networks, and usage of the platform will undoubtedly surge tomorrow.

That gives Musk a potent weapon as he attempts to shape narratives about election results. Having manipulated the platform’s recommendation algorithm to show his posts to more users, he can single-handedly push election narratives to millions of people with the tap of a button. (Over the past day he has become obsessed with the euthanization of a TikTok-famous squirrel at the hands of the state, which he has presented as an example of government overreach.)

Musk and X generally will likely be powerful nodes for what scholars of misinformation call “participatory disinformation”: false and misleading stories shared by average people on social networks that are elevated by influencers to the attention of elites like Musk, who can then turbocharge their distribution. Eventually, the platforms Community Notes feature might offer pushback on false claims — but don’t count on it.

Four: look for “it went viral on X” to be used as a mark of legitimacy and a pressure point on other platforms.

In 2016 and 2020, platforms coordinated to share information about foreign influence operations and other efforts to harm the integrity of their networks. Their policies about which claims would and would not be allowed were fairly similar.

Today, Musk has transformed X into a political operation designed to get Trump elected at all costs. That means not only hosting election misinformation, but actively promoting it. Some of these claims might appear to have gotten millions of views — and this alone will be used to pressure other media outlets into covering the story, and other platforms to continue hosting it or even amplifying it.

Caution may be warranted here. Platformer reported last year that Musk ordered changes to X’s algorithm to ensure that his posts got wider distribution than others. From that moment on, extreme skepticism about X’s public metrics has been warranted.

Five: false claims that get the most traction will be amplified across right-leaning platforms, including Rumble, Substack, and podcasts.

Earlier this year I wrote about the “cinematic universes” that spring up around false and misleading claims, through interconnected series of X posts, newsletters, blogs, Congressional hearings, and other media. (The phony “Haitian immigrants are eating neighborhood pets” is a recent example of this phenomenon.)

While media consumption has been fragmenting and polarizing for decades now, in 2024 we have begun to approach the end state. While large national newspapers and broadcast networks do most of the journalism that the rest of the ecosystem feeds on, voters have never had an easier time creating what researcher Renee DiResta calls “bespoke realities” from their publications and influencers of choice.

Six: mainstream platforms may take a light hand in moderating false and misleading claims.

Meta prohibits misinformation intended to prevent people from voting, but not false claims about the results. In 2020, “Stop the Steal” became one of the fastest-growing Facebook groups in history. The company took that one down. It remains to be seen what the company will do with the inevitable sequel.

Last year, YouTube announced that it would no longer remove false claims about the 2020 election, including claims about widespread voter fraud. Its current policies make no mention of removing false claims of voter fraud in this election, either.

TikTok’s policies make no direct mention of voter fraud, but state that “we label unverified election claims, make them ineligible for recommendation, and prompt people to reconsider before sharing them.”

The only major platform I know that has an explicit ban on phony voter fraud posts is Snap, which prohibits it as part of its policy on content that seeks to delegitimize civic processes: “content aiming to delegitimize democratic institutions on the basis of false or misleading claims about election results, for example.”

As always, the real policy is what you enforce. But most platforms have gone out of their way to let the public know that they are going to take a less active role on election integrity matters than they did last time.

Of course, voter fraud is only one narrative that may come to the fore in the weeks ahead. There are likely still some surprises in store — the results of a foreign influence campaign, or generative artificial intelligence, or some combination of the two.

But whatever dirty tricks are coming, expect X to be at the center of them. Its historical role as the best place to turn to for breaking news means that millions of Americans will be returning there for real-time updates. And its post-2022 incarnation as a right-wing political project means that many of them might not apply the skepticism that is warranted to whatever Musk decides to show them.

In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg called the notion that fake stories on Facebook had influenced the outcome of the election “a pretty crazy idea.” In 2024, Elon Musk appears to have calculated that the idea is so crazy it just might work. As X fills up with fake stories in the days ahead, here’s hoping that the electorate doesn’t fall for it.

More on platform policy and elections: Check out this comprehensive look at current social media companies’ content moderation policies, and recommendations for the period following Election Day. (Jordan Kraemer, Tim Bernard, Diane Chang, Renée DiResta, Justin Hendrix and Gabby Miller / Tech Policy Press)

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