Misinformation floods the midterms, at times urging violence

Misleading videos, recirculated months after they were shot, carried unfounded claims that Republican voters were being barred from the polls.

Viral tweets spun early-morning mechanical problems with vote tabulators into elaborate claims of systematic fraud.

And users on the pro-Trump extremist forum TheDonald urged armed intervention at ballot counting centers in Georgia, advising, “If it gets violent, shoot first.”

Election myths built up over the last two years coalesced Tuesday into a torrent of misinformation that fed an alternative online ecosystem where all unfavorable election outcomes are suspect. The paranoia and preemptive efforts to discredit the results of the midterms found perhaps their clearest expression in a headline on a website devoted to disseminating false claims about the pro-Trump siege of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an attack propelled in large part by online misinformation. “Expect the steal,” the website warned.

That expectation is no longer a fringe view. It is political doctrine for whole swaths of the country.

“We’re not looking at single narratives or false claims here and there that happen to go viral,” said Cindy Otis, a former technology executive and CIA analyst who now researches disinformation. “We’re looking at entire social media platforms, independent news commentary websites and social media influencers who are starting from a place of ‘Elections are rigged against conservatives’ and covering the election from there.”

In some instances, the online conversation has included calls for violence.

The encouragement to storm counting sites in Georgia came in response to news that the mail-in ballot deadline had been extended for some voters in Cobb County following a logistical hiccup, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online extremists. On TheDonald, where much of the planning for the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol took place, some posters called on supporters in Georgia to “be ready to lock and load” around election offices in case of “shenanigans.”

One user responded: “I hope for your sake, you’re willing to follow through and not go back. Because there will be no second chances soon.” Wrote another, “We are not doing this s— again!”

Problems with machines at some voting locations in Maricopa County, home to more than half of Arizona’s voters, became grist for prominent right-wing voices who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election to claim without evidence that Tuesday’s vote was also fraudulent.

County officials stressed that ballots were not being misread but rather rejected, and that voters had multiple options to ensure their choices were reflected in the results. By midafternoon, the county said new printer settings had resolved the issues.

But former president Donald Trump used his Twitter clone, Truth Social, to throw his weight behind conspiratorial allegations of fraud not just in Arizona but also in Michigan and Pennsylvania. He issued a stream of false or exaggerated election claims that he said were proof that the “same thing is happening with Voter Fraud as happened in 2020???” — a continuation of his baseless claims about his election loss.

In one post, he said the “Absentee Ballot situation in Detroit is REALLY BAD” and urged his followers to “Protest, Protest, Protest!” By the time of his post, the Michigan secretary of state’s office had announced that the issue, a minor technical glitch, had been resolved: Electronic poll books there had incorrectly marked some voters as having filed absentee ballots, but every polling location had a backup paper poll book, state election officials said, and no one had been denied the opportunity to vote.

That fact-check did not prevent Trump’s call from being shared on TheDonald, where it was described as “marching orders” from “GEOTUS,” or “God Emperor of the United States.”

Similar calls to action focused on Arizona. A thread on TheDonald included statements expressing outrage about mechanical errors in Maricopa County and arguing that it was “time to rebel!”

The anonymous recesses of the pro-Trump Web and the social media accounts of Arizona’s top Republicans were united in suggesting that something nefarious was occurring.

Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in that state, painted the mechanical errors as part of a Democratic ploy. “Hard to know if we’re seeing incompetence or something worse,” he wrote on Twitter. “All we know right now is that the Democrats are hoping you will get discouraged and go home.”

Arizona Republicans also quickly sought to portray the incidents as part of a national problem, though their claims were at odds with the facts. A post from a Twitter account with about 30 followers, claiming that voting machines were also malfunctioning in Bell County, Tex., gained widespread attention after it was shared by Kelli Ward, chair of the Arizona GOP. “It’s not only happening in Arizona…” she wrote. That tweet, in turn, inspired a headline on the Gateway Pundit website. “THE FIX IS IN!” the site claimed.

None of it was true. James Stafford, a Bell County spokesman, told The Washington Post there were issues not with voting machines but rather with check-in machines, which briefly failed to come online at eight of the county’s 42 vote centers. The issues were addressed early Tuesday morning, Stafford said, and county officials extended voting time by an hour to give residents additional opportunities to cast their ballots.

Efforts by election officials to set expectations about the time it will take to count ballots also fueled right-wing conspiracy theories.

On Truth Social, Donald Trump Jr. posted a collage of news headlines explaining that it’s normal for vote counts to last through the night and said, “Vote to overwhelm this bulls—.”

The tabulation process from 2020 — and the “red mirage” of early votes suggesting a Republican victory, only for following ballots to shift toward Democrats — has become a fixture of right-wing suspicion, even though delays in the counting of mail-in and other ballots are largely a result of decisions in Republican states not to count mail-in ballots before Election Day.

The anticipated delay in ballot counting, especially in tight races, could lead to “an extended period of uncertainty” that is likely to incubate rumors, said Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington who researches online disinformation. Because of sustained attacks on election administration, she added, “the pump is already primed” for voters to believe such rumors.

After initially declining to take action against a wave of assertions that a multiple-day count would allow Democrats to cheat, Twitter applied informational boxes to some of the most popular posts. “Democrats are saying it could take days and weeks to count the mail-in ballots,” wrote one right-wing commentator, gaining thousands of retweets or likes. “It sounds like they need time to cheat.”

By midafternoon on Tuesday, the rallying cry “Stop the Steal,” popularized when Trump refused to concede in 2020, was plastered across Twitter, including by accounts with thousands of followers. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Researchers and campaign officials said they observed a marked slowdown in Twitter’s approach to content moderation, which they linked to workforce cuts following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform.

Some online claims had little basis in reality. On Facebook and the messaging app Telegram, some people urged voters to check for WiFi signals around their polling places, which they said could be a sign that the votes were being tampered with via the internet. (WiFi networks are ubiquitous in the United States, and there’s no evidence that such tampering has occurred.)

Adding to the confusion, the social media platforms diverged Tuesday in their approach to moderating some of the same content spreading online.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, initially declined to remove or add context to a misleading video, captured during the Texas primary in March, that’s now recirculating on its platforms with unfounded claims of suppressed GOP votes in Tuesday’s elections.

The video captured a poll worker appearing to tell Republicans they could not vote because of staffing shortages. The parties were responsible for recruiting election judges, who had to be on-site for balloting to take place.

An Instagram account operated by a news agency that says it caters to Jewish readers reposted the video with no context about the time or location of the alleged problems. When the watchdog group Common Cause flagged the video to Meta, the company first responded that the content did not violate its policies, according to communications reviewed by The Post. Then, on Tuesday afternoon, the company reversed course, adding a label indicating that the post “could mislead people” and providing a link to a fact-check.

Twitter had already applied a label informing users that the video was “presented out of context.” Still, one of the posts sharing the misleading claims gained more than 5,000 retweets.