Social Media Platforms have given up ahead of the election
The Rise and Fall of Social Media During the 2016 November 11th Reionization Reaction of the U.S. Capitol Against Altruist Controversy
In the days following January 6, Meta, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch suspended former president Donald Trump over posts the companies said glorified the violence at the Capitol. It was the most extreme moderation decision these companies had ever made. Platforms also took sweeping actions to remove thousands of accounts belonging to militias, conspiracy theorists, and the content they shared that led the US to that moment.
It’s not your average politics newsletter. Makena Kelly and the WIRED Politics team help you make sense of how the internet is shaping our political reality.
After the 2022 midterms, the balance of power shifted in Congress. Republicans had a slim majority in the House of Representatives and used it to go after researchers and safety workers who did the debunking of election myths. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee immediately started investigating the work of academics and launched harassment campaigns against entire moderation teams after he was elevated to the position. As a result of these attacks, the Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the top disinformation research groups, shut down for good over the summer.
In the aftermath of the deadly riot, much of the social media infrastructure built to protect our democratic systems collapsed, either by inattention or force. There are only five days left until Election Day and a chasm has formed in what little foundation remains.
To start with what we all know: Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, a conspiratorial wasteland where professional disinformation purveyors earn thousands of dollars peddling lies. Musk reinstated accounts belonging to Alex Jones and Andrew Tate, both of which were banned years before the 2020 election cycle even began. And, to bring us to the present day, Musk has spent the last few weeks campaigning for Trump and spreading election lies.
These fissures in platforms have happened across the board. Last year, Alphabet, Meta, and X reduced the size of their trust and safety teams and Meta completely abandoned a project building a new fact-checking tool as a result of cuts. Not only has Meta cast a blind eye to the militias currently organizing on its platforms, it is auto-generating militia-related groups.
The AmericaPAC has an election integrity community group that enhances the work of other election-denying groups. This campaign is used to lay the groundwork for baseless objections to elections after Election Day. This is a very dangerous situation that is going on all across the country. “And we’re going to see the results of it almost immediately when the polls close on November 5th.”
After endorsing the Republican nominee after the first assassination attempt against him, Musk has poured more than $100 million into the America political action committee, which is the most important financial backing of Trump. The Trump campaign has relied a lot on the PAC in order to be successful in swing states. WIRED reporting found that Blitz Canvassing, a contractor for the PAC, was threatening canvassers in Michigan, and transporting them in U-Hauls.
In practice, it is a cesspool of election conspiracy theories, alleging everything from unauthorized immigrants voting to misspelled candidate names on ballots. “It’s just an election denier jamboree,” says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, who authored a recent report on how social media facilitates political violence.
For the past few months, billionaire Musk has been using his platform to share theories about the upcoming election that could undermine faith in the outcome. The Election Integrity Community was launched last week by the political action committee Musk backs. The group is meant to be a place for people to share incidents of voter fraud and other illegal activities if they notice it during the election.
