For months, billionaire and X proprietor Elon Musk has used his platform to share election conspiracy theories that might undermine religion within the consequence of the 2024 election. Final week, the political motion committee (PAC) Musk backs took it a step additional, launching a bunch on X referred to as the Election Integrity Neighborhood. The group has practically 50,000 members and says that it’s meant to be a spot the place customers can “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see whereas voting within the 2024 election.”
In follow, it’s a cesspool of election conspiracy theories, alleging every thing from unauthorized immigrants voting to misspelled candidate names on ballots. “It is simply an election denier jamboree,” says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Middle for Enterprise and Human Rights at New York College, who authored a recent report on how social media facilitates political violence.
Since endorsing former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump following the primary assassination try in opposition to him in July, Musk has change into certainly one of Trump’s most vital monetary backers, pouring greater than $100 million into the America PAC since July. The PAC has additionally been a pillar of the Trump marketing campaign’s floor sport in swing states. WIRED reporting discovered that Blitz Canvassing, a contractor for the PAC, was threatening canvassers in Michigan, and transporting them in U-Hauls.
Earlier in October, Musk appeared at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the place he repeated false claims that Democrats would enable undocumented immigrants to vote illegally, and inspired Trump’s supporters to vote.
In January 2021, the corporate then often known as Twitter banned Trump’s account for incitement to violence through the January 6 rebellion on the Capitol. However since taking up 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. Final 12 months, X fired a lot of what remained of its elections integrity team. After the information broke, Musk posted on X, saying, “Oh you imply the ‘Election Integrity’ Workforce that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”
Barrett says that the America PAC’s Election Integrity Neighborhood group augments the work of different election-denying teams, like former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. “This can be a parallel anti-election, anti-democracy marketing campaign designed to sow confusion and lay the groundwork for baseless objections to elections after Election Day. This is occurring all throughout the nation, and it is extraordinarily harmful,” says Barrett. “And we’ll see the outcomes of it virtually instantly when the polls shut on November fifth.”
