How a Twitter Flood of Disinformation Has Shaped the Public Sector, and why we need to stop Worrying about The Capitol Insurrection

The company banned Trump for inciting violent behavior during the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. But since taking over and rebranding it as X, Musk has fired many of the people on the teams that worked to keep mis- and disinformation off the platform. Last year, X fired much of what remained of its elections integrity team. Musk wrote on X, “Oh you mean the Election Integrity Team that was undermining election integrity” after the news broke. Yeah, they’re gone.”

It’s not an average 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 now had a majority—albeit a slim one—in the House of Representatives and used that sliver of power to go after the researchers and trust and safety workers who did the dizzying work of debunking election myths. Jim Jordan was appointed to chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, immediately started investigations, and launched campaigns of harassment against any moderation team that didn’t agree with him. The Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the top disinformation groups, shut down for good over the summer because of these attacks.

Now, much of the social media infrastructure built to protect our democratic systems in the months and days after the deadly riot has 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.

The 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.

Barrett says that the America PAC’s Election Integrity Community group augments the work of other election-denying groups, like former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. This campaign is meant to confuse the voters and lay the groundwork for false objections to elections after Election Day. This is going on all across the country, and it’s extremely dangerous,” says Barrett. “And we’re going to see the results of it almost immediately when the polls close on November 5th.”

Since endorsing Donald Trump in July, Musk has increased his financial support for him tenfold, putting more than $100 million into the AmericaPAC. The PAC has also been a pillar of the Trump campaign’s ground game 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.

The billionaire and X owner has used his platform to share election conspiracy theories that could undermine the faith of the voters. The Musk backs launched a group called the Election Integrity Community last week. The group says it’s designed to be a place where users can share any potential instances of voter fraud or how they voted in the upcoming election.