Rumours, lies and disinformation: ‘A lot of crazy’ in United States election

Disinformation is permeating the 2024 US presidential election on an unprecedented scale, with online instigators escalating doubts about the integrity of the electoral process as millions of US citizens cast their ballots.

Heading into Election Day, conspiracy theorists and foreign actors are amplifying unverified allegations of fraud that echo Donald Trump’s claims that the result can’t be trusted if he loses to Vice-President Kamala Harris. They’re using Elon Musk‘s X and other social media platforms to sow scepticism among voters by circulating fake images of destroyed ballots and bogus reports about blocked polling places.

Operatives linked to American adversaries including Russia are behind some of the latest election-related hoaxes, according to US officials and misinformation researchers. On Friday, US intelligence agencies blamed Russian influence actors for manufacturing a video that falsely depicted Haitian migrants voting in the closely contested state of Georgia as part of a broader effort by Moscow to stoke divisions in the US.

Voting rights groups have warned that intentionally spreading rumours and falsehoods can result in citizens deciding not to cast a ballot or trust the integrity of the election. Doubts being spread by Trump and his allies — including Musk, the world’s richest man — open the door for the former president to contest the outcome just as he did after his loss in 2020.

“There’s a lot of crazy going on,” said Carah Ong Whaley, director of election protection at Issue One, a non-partisan think-tank focused on electoral policy. 

“We’ve always had false information in elections,” she said. But in 2024, “the sheer volume of different sets and facts and beliefs about election integrity is at a scale that I don’t think we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes.”

Spokespeople for X and for the Trump and Harris campaigns had no immediate comment.

While the effect of such narratives on voter behaviour is difficult to quantify, polling numbers show that faith in electoral results has diminished significantly since the last two US elections. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans say they have faith in the accuracy of results nationwide, down from 44 percent in 2020 and 55 percent in 2016, according to a Gallup poll released in September. Of Democrats, 84 percent said they were confident in election results, up from 76 percent in 2020 but down slightly from 85 percent in 2016, according to the Gallup results.

Seventy percent of Republicans say they have confidence in the integrity of the vote at their local polling place, according to Gallup’s findings. The extent to which GOP voters trust their own election offices suggests that relative lack of faith in the nationwide results is at least in part fuelled by online conspiracies, researchers say.

“Some of these conspiracies don’t make any damn sense, but they’re still propagating and influencing people’s faith in the electoral process,” said William Pelfrey Jr., a professor focused on domestic terrorism at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Social media users seized on a fake video that purportedly showed people in Pennsylvania tearing up ballots, footage that the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence quickly said was the work of Russian operatives. Bogus videos on that theme, though, have bolstered doubts about election integrity that prominent Republicans have aired.

Vice-presidential candidate JD Vance on Thursday reposted a video suggesting that Democrats had stopped people from voting in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Bucks County officials said on X that people in line to apply for a mail-in ballot were briefly told they couldn’t be accommodated due to a miscommunication. The county said voters will still have the opportunity to pick up a ballot in person or have it mailed to them.

Even with that explanation, misleading videos about the episode have continued to spread, with some users accusing Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, of election interference. Musk boosted those claims to his more than 200 million followers on X, and Trump has also claimed in posts on his Truth Social network there was widespread fraud in the state without offering any evidence. 

Rumours about non-citizens illegally voting also have been a theme of online conspiracies, according to anti-misinformation specialists. A network of phoney X accounts has masqueraded in recent weeks as foreign nationals openly stating that they planned to vote in the election, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a non-profit that advocates for policies to fight extremism.

“I’m going to illegally vote for Donald Trump as a European national,” said one X account. The posts, including one that X promoted with a push notification, received more than 11.7 million views on the platform, and a sample of 50 accounts in the networks had more than 14 million views, according to ISD.

Propaganda groups outside the US have promoted similar messaging. A Russian disinformation network known as Doppelganger sought to flood social media with websites meant to resemble US media outlets such as The Washington Post and Fox News, according to the US Justice Department. Those fake websites would then post content disparaging Harris and President Joe Biden while faulting Western support for Ukraine.

Major social media companies are taking a hands-off approach in handling false or misleading information in the 2024 race compared to past election cycles. The US Justice Department said in September it won’t ask platforms to remove potentially harmful posts that are traced to foreign instigators.

In 2020, Twitter said it would hide messages from prominent political figures containing false information and promised to warn users about misleading content. Now known as X, the site under Musk’s ownership has become a haven for anti-immigrant conspiracies and accusations that Democrats are working to steal the election.  

Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook has stopped labelling posts involving election information and directing users to its voting information centre, as it did in 2020. Meta also has stopped recommending posts about politics to most users on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

Outside organisations that previously flagged falsehoods have been largely sidelined, limiting the extent to which independent watchdogs can examine political narratives that go viral. The Stanford Internet Observatory, which tracked misinformation, ceased operations this year after Republican lawmakers and conservative groups accused researchers of censoring free speech online.

As disinformation efforts intensify, intelligence agencies in Washington have increased the tempo at which they disclose foreign attempts to sway US political opinions. The Justice Department, FBI, ODNI and state officials in recent weeks have revealed details about such efforts. The approach represents a stark difference from the way the Barack Obama administration largely kept quiet about Russian meddling ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

“The government has to position itself to control the narrative, so that means operationalising intelligence,” said George Barnes, former deputy director of the National Security Agency. “You need to act on intelligence. Yes, in the classified domain but also in the public domain. You have to have the trust of the population.”