For months, billionaire and X proprietor Elon Musk has used his platform to share election conspiracy theories that would undermine confidence within the final result of the 2024 election. Last week, the Musk-backed political motion committee (PAC) took it a step additional, launching a gaggle on X referred to as the Election Integrity Community. The group has practically 50,000 members and says it’s meant to be a spot the place customers can “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities encountered whereas voting within the 2024 elections.”
In follow, it is a cesspool of election conspiracy theories, claiming all the things from unauthorized immigrants voting to candidates’ names misspelled on ballots. “It’s only a gathering of election deniers,” says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, creator of a examine recent report on how social media facilitates political violence.
Since endorsing former President and Republican candidate Donald Trump following the primary assassination try on him in July, Musk has change into one in every of Trump’s most outstanding monetary supporters, pouring greater than $100 million into America’s PAC since July . The PAC has additionally been a mainstay of Trump’s marketing campaign in swing states. The WIRED report discovered that Blitz Canvassing, a PAC contractor, was threatening canvassers in Michigan and transporting them in U-Hauls.
In early October, Musk appeared at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the place he repeated false claims that Democrats allowed undocumented immigrants to vote illegally, and inspired Trump supporters to vote.
In January 2021, the corporate then generally known as Twitter banned Trump’s account for inciting violence throughout the Jan. 6 rebellion on the Capitol. But since taking on and renaming it X, Musk has fired many individuals on groups working to maintain misinformation and disinformation off the platform. Last yr, X fired a lot of what was left of its election integrity staff. After the information, Musk published on Xsaying, “Oh, you imply the ‘Election Integrity’ staff that was undermining election integrity? Yes, they’re gone.
Barrett says America PAC’s Election Integrity Community reinforces the work of different election-denying teams, similar to former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. “This is a parallel anti-election and anti-democracy marketing campaign designed to sow confusion and lay the groundwork for unfounded objections to the election after Election Day. This is occurring everywhere in the nation and this can be very harmful,” says Barrett. “And we’ll see the outcomes virtually instantly when the polls shut on November 5.”
