The MAGA Propaganda Machine Has Successfully Censored Voices Calling Out its Lies
We are going into this election ill-prepared to counter bogus narratives about voter fraud and other Trump lies
In 2020, the U.S. found itself in the midst of an unprecedented election—one defined not only by candidates or policies, but by a fight over what was real. During that election, I was one of the leaders of an effort called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a coalition of social media research organizations (including Stanford Internet Observatory) that set out to track election misinformation about voting, and to enable local officials and civil society groups to respond to misleading viral claims as quickly as possible. Since this was the first presidential election after 2016, with its infamous Russian trolls, we anticipated that a fair bit of our work might involve identifying “inauthentic activity”: accounts masquerading as Americans to delegitimize the American election.
The Russians—and Iranians—did indeed play at being disgruntled Americans during that race. But in 2020, the accounts that most persistently and effectively worked to delegitimize the American presidential election belonged to the sitting president of the United States and his inner circle. For months, a cluster of campaign surrogates, ideologically-aligned influencers, and hyper-partisan media steadily beat the drum of “The Steal.” Therefore, EIP found itself in the unexpected position of assessing not voting “misinformation” so much as an expansive and deliberate propaganda campaign that managed to persuade its adherents that a free and fair election was in fact rigged—ultimately leading to a violent effort to prevent its certification.
Since 2020, the same formidable network of political elites, influencers, and grassroots activists, has continued to systematically erode public trust in American elections, using its power not only to frame online discourse but to target those who stand in its way.
The Anatomy of a Propaganda Machine
“Misinformation” is not the challenge we face in American politics. “Misinformation” implies that a fact is wrong, or a claim has been misinterpreted. The information challenge plaguing election 2020 was something else entirely. The stories that the EIP tracked—allegations of ballots being destroyed or being “found,” dead people and undocumented immigrants voting, live people using maiden names to cast more than one vote, Sharpie markers being handed out to deliberately invalidate ballots, CIA supercomputers or Dominion machines changing votes—originated and spread via highly active, authentic, participatory online crowds that believed, with religious zeal, that an election was being stolen right before their eyes. They believed that because that is what they were being told. The frame of “The Steal” came from the top. But the “evidence” to support it came from ordinary people who worked backwards, starting from a preexisting conclusion and then looking for substantiating evidence around them. This led them to view even their own neighbors and local election officials—including Republicans—with suspicion. The rumors of election fraud were driven by a sincere conviction at the grassroots, exacerbated by the speed at which sensational stories go viral on social media today—information flies before the facts can even be established. But their real lift came from boosts by explicitly ideological and cynical right-wing influencers.
These influencers very effectively, and repeatedly, turned online rumor into perceived reality, and suspicion into conspiracy. These weren't isolated trolls or tiny fringe websites. They included Donald Trump’s sons, Charlie Kirk, and Benny Johnson, for example, and they had millions of followers in aggregate. When they succeeded in making an allegation go viral, news outlets like Fox and OANN would pick it up, and millions of viewers outside of social media would see what “some people online” were saying.
This political machine—consisting of a nexus of top politicians, MAGA grassroots, social media influencers and traditional right-wing media—highlighted random allegations of irregularities to undermine trust in an election that it was afraid it would lose and which it did lose. A president who refused to accept defeat continued to amplify conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, illegal ballots, and shadowy cabals for months (now years) after election day. His supporters believed him so completely that they were willing to resort to violence to put him back in the White House.
The Propaganda Machine Entrenches Itself
Nor did this process stop after the last election.
If you saw the viral stories of pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, or malevolent FEMA workers working to steal land and lithium following Hurricane Helene, you have seen this same process in action in recent weeks. A sensational allegation appears—“They’re eating the pets!”—hyper-partisan influencers boost it—“BIG IF TRUE!”—and prominent elected officials (like JD Vance) pick it up when it serves their political aims. Threats follow, targeting whatever hapless group or individual the angry people choose to scapegoat. Immigrants. FEMA workers. Weathermen. If the allegation is found to be false, the goalposts move: OK, the politician says, the specific claim in that particular rumor might have been wrong, but the concern expressed in the story is real. This is how, for example, a video of indeterminate animals on a grill, not in Springfield, Ohio, and not involving Haitians, nonetheless made the rounds on right-wing Twitter.
This process is repetitive, but we seem unable to interrupt it. Why?
Because of another long-running delegitimization campaign by this same nexus: A deliberate effort to demonize fact-checks, content labeling, and platform responses to viral lies as a “censorship-industrial complex.”
Social media platforms did act in response to the election rumor mill in 2020. They leveraged their procedures to take down inauthentic foreign state-sponsored trolls, and implemented election-specific policies to address premature claims of victory, false claims of fraud, or posts that deliberately misled by telling people to vote on the wrong day. (In 2022, some sites added policies to prohibit threats to election officials that had been proliferating at an alarming rate.)
They fact-checked, labeled, and sometimes removed misleading content. They occasionally engaged with outside researchers who were also tracking election rumors—EIP periodically flagged misleading viral posts that appeared to violate these platform policies.
However, the sites made their moderation decisions independently. When EIP subsequently examined the few thousand posts it had flagged, it found that platforms overwhelmingly either did nothing, or merely labeled the content. Only about 10% of the posts came down.
But MAGA politicians and their allies spun these facts quite differently.
In 2020, most of the viral and misleading election-related claims were in support of Donald Trump; consequently, a significant portion of the platforms' enforcement actions involved right-wing speakers. For right-wing politicians and influencers, this was irrefutable proof of anti-conservative bias—not of a problem of falsehoods and lies on their side. They leveraged the narrative to fuel a growing right-wing backlash against Big Tech.
From Machine to Movement
The aftermath of the 2020 election should have been a reckoning. The courts weighed in, systematically dismissing every claim of widespread fraud. Had this been a problem of “misinformation,” perhaps the updated facts would have swayed the believers. Instead, even as the MAGA propaganda machine lost legal battles, its persuasive power successfully turned the myth of the stolen election into a movement, populated by people convinced they were patriots defending democracy itself.
Perhaps the most visible among them today is Elon Musk, CEO of X (formerly Twitter) and an influential figure with over 200 million followers. Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform two years ago gave right-wing political elites a useful ally deeply sympathetic to the notion of an anti-conservative bias in social media. During the 2022 election, Musk briefly continued to support then-Twitter’s commitment to tackling foreign interference: when the EIP worked to expose Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence operations in conjunction with Twitter’s integrity teams, Musk amplified and praised the work. However, as Musk increasingly engaged with election-denying influencers, some, like former Trump administration staffer Mike Benz, began to press their advantage, even calling on Musk to fire specific moderation team “censors” by name.
Musk obliged. In order to eliminate the “censorship regime” of Old Twitter, he also released the “Twitter Files,” a cherry-picked selection of internal communications between platform staff and outsiders in government, academia, or civil society. Largely ignored by mainstream media, the Files caused a huge sensation within right-wing and heterodox Twitter. The effort sought to provide evidence to justify the belief that Twitter and its collaborators in government and academia had conspired to suppress conservatives in 2020—and to delegitimize any kind of content moderation. In reality, the files largely showed Twitter employees doing their best to make hard decisions, regularly opting not to take action on accounts that government or other outsiders suggested they look at, and in fact actively attempting to avoid moderating prominent conservatives. (One can debate to what extent the state should speak to private platforms, but the small number of flagged posts that were taken down suggests that the platforms weren’t fearing reprisals, and X’s own lawyers stated that the materials “[did] not plausibly suggest” evidence of censorship in legal filings following their release.)
In November of 2022, the House flipped to Republican control. That shift operationalized the effort to delegitimize and silence researchers like myself who’d studied the Big Lie and engaged with Big Tech. Leading that charge was Congressman Jim Jordan, himself an election denier, who ushered in a bold new version of McCarthyism by launching investigations into platforms, people, and institutions that had pushed back against the narrative of election fraud. Subpoenas went out—including to me—demanding information and interviews in response to the spurious allegations of the Twitter Files, imposing a significant monetary and time cost. The effort wasn’t about finding the truth so much as punishing those who had spoken it. And as was the case with McCarthy, no documents that were turned over, and nothing that was said, could ever actually exonerate the accused. Researchers, civil society organizations, and election integrity groups were baselessly reframed as the real villains, accused of orchestrating a vast conspiracy to suppress speech and rig elections.
In other words, the MAGA propaganda machine levitated baseless allegations of censorship it itself had made to impose real censorship.
And it has succeeded.
Some institutions and researchers backed away from election work, afraid of threats and continued government attention. Stanford University exited the space; the Election Integrity Partnership is not operating in the 2024 election. Other civil society and academic institutions are still tracking election rumors, but no longer speaking directly with state or local election officials or tech platforms. Governments backed away from engaging with tech companies even about suspected foreign interference. Platforms themselves have become vague about the extent to which they will moderate or fact-check rumors and conspiracy theories. The political backlash they faced for a few high-profile mistakes—like the ill-considered temporary suppression of coverage of Hunter Biden’s Laptop—has put them back on their heels.
Networks adept at spreading rumors and conspiracy theories require a networked response—which is why this concerted targeting campaign set out to dismantle collaboration, ensuring fewer obstacles to their messaging in the 2024 election. Meanwhile, policy and product changes at X since 2022 have also significantly aided the cause. Musk himself, once an advocate for platform neutrality, has become a vocal Trump surrogate. His personal political identification is not a problem; business leaders are entitled to their beliefs and speech. However, he is simultaneously X’s largest account and the governor of its policies. He has an unparalleled ability to capture attention due to how his platform recommends content, as well as a predilection for amplifying conspiracy theories that reinforce his political beliefs. He recently re-aired debunked claims about voting machines that cost Fox News a $700 million settlement.
X has now become what Truth Social aspires to be: a massive amplifier of MAGA’s preferred reality. Fact-checking is the purview of X’s Community Notes feature, which is designed to let users add context to misleading posts. It is an important and worthwhile feature, but it simply can’t match the speed and scale of the rumors spreading on X—especially when the platform’s owner is now one of the elite political influencers actively amplifying them.
The Path to Defeating the Propaganda Machine
Still, if the election is contested, fighting the battle for reality in Community Notes may be the most useful way to inject truth in that space.
On these last few days before the election, the rumor mill will be in full swing. A lot of people will be working very hard to ensure that the election is free and fair, and that the public is not actively misinformed. However, with less networked communication between election officials, academia, civil society groups, and platforms, rumor control is an uphill battle. The question of election integrity is no longer just about countering or flagging false claims—it’s about protecting the democratic institutions undergirding our society from coordinated attempts to undermine them.
After this election, we must shift from reactive measures to proactive ones. Civil society, academic institutions, and platforms need to recommit to meaningful engagement with one another, ensuring that we are prepared and resilient. We can also reconsider how we engage with social media. Following Musk’s Twitter takeover and subsequent shenanigans, millions of social media users moved to platforms like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon showing that there is a market for non-vituperative platforms that care about the truth. Influencers, businesses, and liberal institutions can invest in building and participating in online spaces where facts matter and where trust can be rebuilt.
The battle for reality is about facts—but it’s also about ensuring that our democratic systems can withstand political pressure and technological distortions alike, whatever the outcome tomorrow.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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I allocate a good share of blame to what we call the “Mainstream Media”. For decades they have given up on actual research, digging and fact checking. Instead they opted for Celebrity Journalism (•”Tomorrow I have an exclusive interview with …..”). All those interviews do is give the experienced politician a forum to repeat lies to a stenographer who won’t go beyond a tepid challenge for fear of losing future Access. As a result right-wing lies go unchallenged by facts and the right wing perpetrators get an added forum in the MSM to reinforce them.
Our Journalists have failed us.
It is really interesting how so many of the folks who were so worked up about "Election Integrity" in 2020 were the greatest threats to actual Election Integrity... and probably still are.