The infographic spreading across the internet in the final days before Tuesday’s midterm elections is adorned with an American flag and resembles a public service announcement reminding people to vote.
But the message is not merely to cast a ballot, but how: “Use a blue ballpoint pen only when you vote!”
The meme, plastered across online platforms such as Twitter and the fast-growing messaging app Telegram, may be unintelligible to anyone not steeped in the misinformation and fearmongering fueled by reports of smeared ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County during the state’s August primary.
But it illustrates how misinformation is operating in 2022. The message recycles key narratives from 2020, when President Donald Trump refused to concede and his allies spread baseless claims about election manipulation, including that the use of Sharpies to mark ballots caused them to be thrown out. The claims, though easily debunked, have proved remarkably durable, according to researchers and election officials….
There is also new uncertainty driven by cuts to Twitter’s workforce following billionaire Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of the company. An employee with a key role in fending off threats to the platform said the cuts to a division focused on trust and safety were only about 15 percent, compared to the nearly half of all employees who were dismissed across the company.
Since the takeover, there have been signs of increased suspicious activity on the platform. Cyabra, the data analysis company commissioned by Musk to study spam and bot activity on Twitter during the legal battle that preceded his takeover, found that 14 percent of accounts discussing the term “stolen elections” in the past week were fake accounts, according to analysis shared with The Washington Post. That marked an increase of four percentage points from the previous month.
Most of the inauthentic profiles were sharing pro-Republican content, said Rafi Mendelsohn, a Cyabra spokesman. And some were invoking words like “consequences” and “catastrophic,” he said, raising the possibility that they were anticipating or even planning real-world ramifications.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.