The swirl of disinformation surrounding the 2024 election marked a new high for foreign influence efforts and the elevation of false claims by people within the U.S., raising questions about the impact on the electorate.
Russia, Iran, and China continued to promote content that sows division among Americans, perfecting techniques and reaching new audiences.
But those long-standing efforts were made in an ecosystem in which prominent Americans are increasingly promoting false claims, including President-elect Trump, who continues to wrongly assert that he won the 2020 election, and that U.S. contests are plagued with fraud.
“In terms of what was out there, it’s almost like what wasn’t out there? It’s not just in the run up to the election, but for weeks and years now, really, there’s been persistent narratives about election integrity that have been fueled by domestic and foreign nation state actors,” said David Salvo, managing director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and Malign Autocratic Influence at the German Marshall Fund.
“All that was sort of designed to exacerbate this existing strain in American society that believes that the electoral process is corrupt and fraudulent. And honestly, I think the Russian propaganda machine was gearing up for a nailbiter of an election so that if we didn’t know who the winner was [on Election Day], they would be ready to go with even more content.”
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