Elon Musk and the Wired Politics Project: The Last Five Days of Campaigning for Trump and Spreading Election Illusion on Social Media

It was in January 2020 that the company banned Trumps account because he was encouraging violence during the January 6 insurrection. But since taking over 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. X fired most of its elections integrity team last year. After the news broke, Musk posted on X, saying, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they are gone.

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

After the 2022 midterms, the balance of power shifted in Congress. Republicans in the House of Representatives had a slim majority and used it to go after people who did the 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 months and days after the deadly riot, most of the social media infrastructure built to protect our democratic systems collapsed. There are only five days left until Election Day and a chasm has formed in what little foundation remains.

Elon Musk has turned the social networking site into something called X, a conspiratorial wasteland where professional false information is sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Alex Jones and Andrew Tate were both banned before the 2020 election cycle began but were restored by Musk. And, to bring us to the present day, Musk has spent the last few weeks campaigning for Trump and spreading election lies.

These fissures in platforms have happened across the board. As a result of cuts, the trusts and safety teams were reduced and Meta abandoned the project building a new fact-checking tool. Meta is blind to the militias currently organizing on its platforms and they are also auto-generated militia-related groups.

Barrett says that the America PAC’s Election Integrity Community group augments the work of other election-denying groups, like former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. There is a parallel anti-elected, anti-democracy campaign meant to sow confusion and lay the groundwork for baseless objections to elections after Election Day. This is going on all across the country, and it’s extremely dangerous,” says Barrett. When the polls close on November 5th, we’re going to see the results.

Since endorsing former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump following the first assassination attempt against him in July, Musk has become one of Trump’s most important financial backers, pouring more than $100 million into the America PAC since July. The PAC has also been a pillar of the Trump campaign’s ground game in swing states. WIRED reporting found that Blitz Canvassing, a contractor for the PAC, was threatening canvassers in Michigan, and transporting them in U-Hauls.

There are so many election conspiracy theories that it’s a cesspool. “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.

For months, billionaire and X owner Elon Musk has used his platform to share election conspiracy theories that could undermine faith in the outcome of the 2024 election. The Musk backers launched a group called the Election Integrity Community 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.”