Over the past couple of years, as the major social media platforms have begun to police content more carefully, a cottage industry of smaller platforms, such as Gab, Gettr, and Parler, have sprung up to cater to an audience primarily of the far right, eager for fewer restrictions on what they can say online.
These alt-conservative platforms – where conspiracy theories like QAnon blend seamlessly with Covid-19 vaccine skepticism – have become a launching pad for online falsehoods, which can gather a wide audience on the fringes of the internet before taking off. major platforms.
“One of the biggest trends of the day has been the role of Donald Trump,” said Claire Wardle, co-director of the Future of Information Lab at Brown University, whose team is tracking online lies related to the midterms.
“He is a critical figure in terms of pushing narratives that undermine the integrity of elections,” she added. “What it shows is that while the major platforms were able to take him down, they couldn’t stop his supporters from re-sharing the content on Twitter and Facebook that Trump is posting on fringe platforms like Truth Social or Telegram.”
Trump’s ability to reach a mainstream audience with baseless claims — all of which were uncorrected on these particular sites — also highlights how, despite being banned from Facebook and Twitter, Trump remains the central figure in how how election-related conspiracy theories can be prevalent. attention
On Election Day, his denied claims of voter fraud were picked up by MAGA-backed candidates, far-right influencers and social media streamers, based on POLITICO’s review of that social media activity.
On major platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, they posted footage of Trump’s unproven claims and shared links to the former president’s fringe social media accounts.
None of Trump’s comments reviewed by POLITICO, which were shared most widely on Facebook and Twitter, were fact-checked or identified as spreading election-related disinformation. Both companies have strict policies that election-denying content has no place on their platforms, and the platforms have invested heavily in suppressing such falsehoods online, including working with outside fact-checking organizations.
It highlights the difficulties that social media giants continue to have in their relationship with the businessman-turned-politician. Trump was removed from Facebook and Twitter after the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol for posting comments that incited violence.
“His messages that undermine US electoral integrity are still able to gain significant traction on the major platforms on which he is banned,” said Christopher Giles, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which is monitoring lies associated with the middle terms.
Trump may soon return to the social media mainstream, despite public statements that he would stick to his Truth Social platform, which is hemorrhaging money and has failed to attract users to compete with some of the names Silicon Valley’s biggest.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will decide next year whether to allow Trump back on its platform, according to Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October and has championed a free speech ethic, said in a post that individuals like Trump, who were removed for violating the platform’s community standards, could return in “a few more weeks.”
As the midterm election fraud spree began to gain momentum Tuesday, Trump — spurred on by like-minded conservative voters who have spent the past two years being duped about how the former president lost the 2020 presidential election — rejected any claims that this week’s election was rigged.
After unproven claims that voters in Detroit were leaving the polls were distributed by candidates affiliated with MAGAthe former president quickly pounced on the allegations, posting them through his Truth Social account, which has 4.5 million followers.
His comments were then shared on Facebook and Twitter tens of thousands of times, either through links to his Truth Social account or screenshots of his election denial statements, based on data from CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool in owned by Meta.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, pushed back against Trump’s comments in a post on Twitter shared more than 16,000 times. “This is not true. Please do not spread lies to incite or incite political violence in our state,” she wrote.
In Arizona, where problems with voting machines in the state’s Maricopa County became a flashpoint for online conspiracy theorists and far-right influencers, Trump similarly positioned himself as the defender of democracy against corrupt politicians.
In a series of Telegram posts that were each read at least 150,000 times by his followers, the former president made repeated and baseless claims about how voting machines in conservative-leaning precincts had stopped working.
“People of Arizona: Don’t step out of line until you vote. They are trying to steal the elections with bad and late machines. Don’t let it happen!” Trump wrote on Telegram.
Those comments were then reshared on Facebook and Twitter by other social media users thousands of times, based on CrowdTangle data. This included a video from Trump about alleged voting machine problems in Arizona that MAGA-affiliated accounts posted on Facebook, which was viewed, on its own, 10,000 times.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer tried to dispel such conspiracy theories. While he did not mention Trump by name, the elected official posted on Twitter that every vote would be counted and that the problem with some of the country’s voting machines had been identified — and efforts to fix the problem were underway.
His tweet, however, was shared just over 600 times.
