As election looms, disinformation has ‘never been worse’

The Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee has been falsely accused of sexually molesting students. The claims have been spread by a former deputy sheriff from Florida, now openly working in Moscow for Russia’s propaganda apparatus, on dozens of social media platforms and fake news outlets.

A faked video purporting to show one victim — creating fake people is a recurring Russian tactic — received more than 5 million views on X, a social platform owned by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Musk has not only leaned all in for the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, but he also used his platform to reanimate discredited claims about the validity of the election’s outcome.

Smears, lies and dirty tricks — what we call disinformation today — have long been a feature of American presidential election campaigns. Two weeks before this year’s vote, however, the torrent of half-truths, lies and fabrications, both foreign and homegrown, has exceeded anything that came before, according to officials and researchers who document disinformation.

The effect on the outcome on Nov. 5 remains to be seen, but it has already debased what passes for political debate about the two major party candidates, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. It has also corroded the foundations of the country’s democracy, undermining what was once a shared confidence that the country’s elections, regardless of who won, have been free and fair.

Russia, as well as Iran and China, have gleefully stoked many of the narratives to portray American democracy as dysfunctional and untrustworthy. Politicians and influential media figures have in turn given foreign adversaries plenty of fodder to work with, inciting and amplifying divisiveness for partisan advantage.

“They do have different tactics and different approaches to influence operations, but their goals are the same,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in Washington, said in an interview, referring to foreign adversaries. “Very simply, they’re looking to undermine American trust in our democratic institutions and the election specifically, and to sow partisan discord.”

Numerous factors have contributed to the surge in disinformation, which Easterly and other officials have warned will continue far beyond Election Day.

Social media platforms have helped to harden media ecosystems into distinct, disparate partisan enclaves where facts contradicting preconceived narratives are often unwelcome. Artificial intelligence has become an accelerant, making fake or fanciful content ubiquitous online with merely a few keystrokes.

In today’s political debate, it seems, facts matter less than feelings, which are easily manipulated online. It all played out in full in recent weeks, after two devastating hurricanes killed hundreds across the Southeast and prompted outlandish conspiracy theories and violent threats to rescue workers.

A fictitious image of a girl clutching a puppy in a life raft so moved Amy Kremer, the chair in Georgia for the Republican National Committee who posted it this month, that she stood by it even after she learned it was not real.

“Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she wrote on X, where her initial post received more than 3 million views. “It is seared into my mind forever.”

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, essentially used the same excuse after facing criticism for popularizing a racist fiction that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the city’s cats and dogs.

He argued he was reflecting local residents’ actual concerns, if not actual facts. (Trump, for his part, stood by the original claims in an interview with Fox News’ Howard Kurtz on Monday. “What about the goose, the geese, what about the geese, what happened there?” he said. “They were all missing.”)

In much the same way, Trump has succeeded in reviving allegations that the outcome of the race against President Joe Biden in 2020 was not legitimate — simply by flatly refusing to concede otherwise. Election officials, as well as numerous courts, have said repeatedly that there was no election fraud in 2020.

A concerted conservative legal and political campaign that went all the way to the Supreme Court has abetted the falsehoods about election fraud anyway. The project has undercut government agencies, universities and research organizations that once worked with the social media giants — especially Facebook and Twitter — to slow the spread of disinformation about voting.

In hindsight, the efforts to challenge the results four years ago were haphazard, even farcical, compared with what is happening now. At one point the people pushing claims about election fraud mistakenly chose Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a small family business in Philadelphia, as a venue for a news conference instead of the more famous hotel downtown. Even so, Trump’s challenge culminated in the violence on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.

This year’s efforts to discredit the election, many officials and experts say, could do greater harm.

“Now, that same election denial impulse is far more organized, far more strategic and far better funded,” said Michael Waldman, the CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice and New York University School of Law, a nonpartisan legal and policy institute. “And now it is something that tens of millions of people believe and share.”

Perhaps the single biggest factor in today’s disinformation landscape has been Musk’s ownership of Twitter, which he bought two years after the 2020 election and rebranded as X.

Twitter’s previous CEO, Jack Dorsey, along with Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, faced public and government pressure to enforce their own policies against intentionally false or harmful content, especially around the COVID pandemic and the 2020 election.

In August, Zuckerberg wrote a mea culpa to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, who has led the conservative charge against moderation by the major social media platforms.

Zuckerberg said that, in hindsight, Facebook had wrongly restricted access to some content about the pandemic and the laptop belonging to Biden’s son, Hunter.

“We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again — for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers,” he wrote.

Meta’s stance signaled a desire to step back from America’s fractious political debate, though the company says it continues to moderate false election content. Musk has by contrast used X to thrust himself square into the middle of it.

He dismantled the platform’s teams that flagged false or hateful content and welcomed back scores of users who had been banned for violating company rules.

He has raised millions of dollars for Trump’s bid and campaigned for him in appearances in Pennsylvania. In posts to his 200 million followers — more than Trump had in his heyday on the platform — he has also repeated unsubstantiated claims that the Democrats are recruiting ineligible immigrants to register to vote.

Last week, he echoed the refuted assertion that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the count in 2020, a falsehood that resulted in a $787.5 million settlement paid by Fox News.

Musk also, according to a recent study, played an outsize role in amplifying content promoted by Tenet Media, a news outlet that the Justice Department accused last month of covertly using $10 million in laundered funds from Russia to pay right-wing media personalities like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin.

It is not clear whether Musk knew of the Russian links — the influencers claimed they did not. He certainly engaged regularly with Tenet Media’s content, though, and Tenet regularly tagged him, presumably to draw his attention, according to the study, published by Reset Tech, a nonprofit research and policy organization based in London.

At least 70 times from September 2023 to September 2024, he responded to or shared accounts linked to Tenet and its influencers to his followers on X — many of them relating to this year’s election, the study found.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

The disinformation challenge has grown even as government officials have become more attentive and, as this election approached, more proactive than in previous election cycles.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have issued regular updates on intelligence collected about interference from foreign actors, principally Russia, Iran and China.

The goal is to focus public attention on foreign attempts to manipulate the election, but it is not clear that such efforts — themselves criticized as partisan — can have a significant impact on views at home.

One of the trailblazers in fact-checking in the United States has been PolitiFact, which journalist Bill Adair founded in 2007 to measure the claims politicians make on a scale from true to mostly true, mostly false to “pants on fire.”

Adair now says that the effort has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies that cloud the nation’s political debates. “It’s never been worse,” he said an interview following the publication of a new book about his fact-checking life, “Beyond the Big Lie.”

The problem, he said, is not fact-checking itself but that even the act of calling out falsehoods has been characterized by some as a political exercise.

While “all politicians lie” might be a common lament, Adair said that the blame has tilted significantly to the Republican Party. “You have a convergence of a politician and a party that believe they can benefit from lying,” he said.

John Mark Dougan, the former sheriff’s deputy from Florida now working for Moscow’s propaganda apparatus, has previously declined to comment on his connections with Russia’s disinformation campaigns, but his contributions are clear.

He appeared in a video on the platform Rumble earlier this month, detailing what he and the host claimed was an account by an exchange student from Kazakhstan accusing Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris’ running mate, of sexual abuse. He has spread that and the other smears on multiple social media platforms and in scores of news outlets he has created from his apartment in Moscow.

In a text message, he reacted angrily to questions about making false accusations against Walz. “What about E Jean Carrols claims?” he wrote, imprecisely, about E. Jean Carroll, the woman who accused Trump of sexual assault. Referring to her vulgarly, he said she “didn’t have any evidence whatsoever,” even though a jury in New York ordered Trump to pay her $83 million for defaming her in 2019 after she came forward with her accusation.

Dougan then shared links to Hindustan Times, an English-language news outlet in Delhi, and to two sites that he created, Patriot Pioneer and State Stage, both included on a list of websites the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency cited last week as platforms for Russian disinformation campaigns.

“Lots of publications have been writing about this,” he wrote.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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