Over the past several days, Meta’s Threads has become inundated with liberal election fraud conspiracies.
The conspiracies range from skepticism about vote tallies in key swing states, to allegations of a criminal coverup by Biden to force the Democrats to lose in order to (somehow eventually?) take down Trump, to claims of Russian interference with voting technology.
One pervasive conspiracy as of Saturday morning centered around Elon Musk, alleging that the billionaire hacked the election through his Starlink satellite internet company, which conspiracy theorists claim is part of the voting machine supply chain. (This is false, and ironically Musk himself pushed a debunked Dominion voting machine conspiracy theory at a Trump rally last month).
The rampant election fraud conspiracies on Threads show how Meta’s efforts to downrank and minimize journalistic content on the app have helped to create a vacuum in which misinformation thrives unchecked and users are unable to find reliable, accurately reported news. The conspiracies also show how centrist liberals and mainstream Democrats have grown increasingly conspiratorial and unable to distinguish fact from fiction in a chaotic and broken information ecosystem….
Posts pushing false claims about the 2024 election on Threads have collectively reached thousands of people.
In May, Meta rolled out the ability for our third-party fact-checking partners to review and rate false content on Threads. Previously, the company matched similarly false content on Threads based on what was fact-checked on Facebook and Instagram.
Threads users said that the app began recommending election denial content and suggesting that users search the name Stephen Spoonamore on Friday. Spoonamore is a technologist who has claimed that previous elections were hacked and been referred to as the “liberal Q.”
“This is a must-read from Stephen Spoonamore, an expert on identifying election hacking. And we were hacked,” one user posted. ….