It took just minutes for the conspiracy theories about the 2024 US presidential election to flood Elon Musk’s X platform after Donald Trump was announced as the winner in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
The number of posts casting doubt on the election results and calling for a recount exploded on Wednesday morning, according to data from research company PeakMetrics. At noon Eastern time, posts on centibillionaire Elon Musk’s X platform peaked at 94,000 posts per hour. Many of the posts received significant amplification on X, with numerous posts reviewed by WIRED receiving more than 1 million views.
“How can we have had record turnout and twenty million fewer votes cast nationally?” author John Pavlovitz wrote in a post viewed 5.3 million times.
Gordon Crovitz, the CEO of NewsGuard, told WIRED that the term “Trump cheated” was trending on X on Wednesday morning. “There are 92,100 mentions of ‘Trump cheated’ on X since midnight,” Crovitz said.
The exact details of the conspiracy theories are still being ironed out by those promoting them, but for the Harris supporters sharing them, her loss was reason enough to indulge in pushing baseless disinformation about the election being stolen. Meanwhile, the massive pro-Trump election denial movement that sprung up in the wake of the 2020 election remained virtually silent on Wednesday morning, in comparison to the flood of content it shared in the days and weeks leading up to the election.
“It doesn’t matter whether baseless allegations about voting irregularities come from the right or the left,” says Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project. “The impact on our system of these lies is the same: People will end up trusting the infrastructure of democracy less, setting us up for more disinformation and disengagement. These drop-offs in trust take decades to undo. Take a look at countries in Eastern Europe that have been attempting to rebuild trust in the system since the ‘90s. We should all be wary of these allegations, no matter their source.”…