WIRED Politics: Twitter, Facebook, and Twitter in the wake of the 2016 September 11 riots: The story of Trump, Musk, and AmericaPAC

Donald Trump was suspended by several websites over posts he made in which he praised the violence at the Capitol. It was the most extreme moderation decision these companies had ever made. The content they shared led the US to that moment, and Platforms removed accounts belonging to militias and conspiracy theorists.

It’s not your average politics newsletter. Makena Kelly and the WIRED Politics team help you make sense of how the internet is shaping our political reality.

The balance of power in Congress changed after the mid-term elections. Republicans now had a majority—albeit a slim one—in the House of Representatives and used that sliver of power to go after the researchers and trust and safety workers who did the dizzying work of debunking election myths. Jim Jordan was elevated to chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and immediately launched investigations stifling the work of academics at best and launching harassment campaigns against entire moderation teams at worst. As a result of these attacks, the Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the top disinformation research groups, shut down for good over the summer.

In the wake of the riots, much of the social media infrastructure built to help protect our democratic systems has collapsed either through inattention or force. The chasm has developed in what little foundation remains as there are only five days left until Election Day.

We already know that Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, a conspiratorial wasteland where professional lies are sold for thousands of dollars. Musk reinstated accounts belonging to Alex Jones and Andrew Tate, both of which were banned years before the 2020 election cycle even began. Musk has been spreading election lies and campaigning for Trump in the last few weeks.

There have been fissures in the platforms. Last year several companies reduced the size of their safety and trust teams, and one of them abandoned a project to build a new fact-checking tool. Not only has Meta cast a blind eye to the militias currently organizing on its platforms, it is auto-generating militia-related groups.

The work of election-denying groups is augmented by the work of AmericaPAC’s Election Integrity Community group. This is an anti-democratic campaign designed to sow confusion and lay the way for baseless objections to elections after Election Day. This is going on all across the country, and it’s extremely dangerous,” says Barrett. It’s going to be very clear when the polls close on November 5th.

Since endorsing Trump following the first assassination attempt against him in July, Musk has poured $100 million into the America PAC, an important financial backer of the president. The Trump campaign relied on the PAC in swing states for their ground game. According to a report, a contractor employed by the PAC was threatening canvassers in Michigan and transporting them in U-Hauls.

It is a cesspool of election conspiracy theories, ranging from unauthorized immigrants voting to incorrect candidate names on ballots. “It’s just an election denier jamboree,” says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, who authored a recent report on how social media facilitates political violence.

In recent months, Musk has been using his platform to share election conspiracy theories that could undermine faith in the results of the election. The election integrity community on X was launched by the Musk backs last week. The group has nearly 50,000 members and says that it is meant to be a place where users can “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.”