Before the sky had fully lightened in Arizona on Tuesday morning, one of the most pervasive false narratives of the midterm elections was already spreading on Twitter.
More than 40,000 tweets about malfunctioning voting machines in the state’s Maricopa County were posted in the span of two hours in the morning, according to the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of online information researchers. Nearly 19,000 tweets specifically mentioned Maricopa alongside terms like “fraud,” “cheat” or “cheating,” according to the research group Zignal, which were references to the debunked belief that the glitches were the first signs of widespread voter fraud.
As the day went on, unfounded claims about hiccups at other polling places around the country, bad advice about voting protocol and incorrect assumptions about assorted anecdotes and footage circulated widely on Twitter, which Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, took ownership of last month.
The midterms were the first test of Mr. Musk’s Twitter and how it would perform in combating misinformation and toxic speech since he slashed 50 percent of the company’s staff last week in a cost-cutting purge. And while viral falsehoods have become a hallmark of modern elections on most online platforms, the quality of content on Twitter on Tuesday was worse than it should have been, researchers said.
“There are definitely things we’re seeing today that would not have been there if this whole Elon Musk takeover had not happened,”...
Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar on Saturday rejected the claims of Congress MLAs from Tamil Nadu being shifted to a resort in Bengaluru post Assembly elections. He further said that ...