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Tag: elections

  • Donald Trump’s Plan to Hoard Billions in Bitcoin Has Economists Stumped

    Donald Trump’s Plan to Hoard Billions in Bitcoin Has Economists Stumped

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    Even if Trump were to restrict the reserve to bitcoin seized through law enforcement activity, his administration must also weigh up the opportunity cost associated with holding onto bitcoin. Whereas some assets—like bonds—generate a consistent income stream for holders, bitcoin does not, making it expensive to hold.

    “The question comes down to what the government would get out of the hoards of bitcoin it would be holding,” says George Selgin, director emeritus for the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, a US think tank that promotes libertarian principles. Previously, the US government has periodically auctioned off the bitcoin confiscated through law enforcement activity. But in choosing to sit on the bitcoin it possesses, “it is failing to realize the market value, which it could apply to any number of other uses, from writing down the federal debt, to paying for other government programs,” says Selgin.

    Though Selgin is a proponent of bitcoin for its independence from state control, he opposes the US government speculating on its price on behalf of citizens. “Governments are not particularly astute investors,” says Selgin. “Having the government act on behalf of citizens as some kind of investment trust or mutual fund doesn’t make much sense.”

    During his speech in Nashville, Trump namechecked a range of high-profile bitcoiners, including Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who founded crypto trading platform Gemini, thanking them for their guidance. Afterwards, Tyler took to X to celebrate Trump’s plan and congratulate the organizer of the conference for having “orange-pilled” the former president.

    But while it is popular with holders of large amounts of bitcoin and industry executives, the ambition to establish a bitcoin stockpile could come at a cost to most everyone else, particularly if the government were to expand its existing holdings, says Michael Green, chief strategist at asset management firm Simplify.

    “The only possible way for the US government to buy bitcoin is from existing holders,” says Green. “But if the government uses tax revenues [or issues bonds] in order to buy bitcoin, it creates a situation in which the taxpayer is subsidizing an extraordinarily small subset. Ultimately, you’re talking about creating exit liquidity for a small subset of the population.” It would be like the US government promising to pay over the odds for real estate in California, says Green, but no other state. “This is not materially different,” he says.

    The larger the government’s pot of bitcoin, meanwhile, the more beholden it would become to those who maintain the underlying network—the bitcoin mining companies—whose job is to process transactions and shield the network from attack. Effectively, the bitcoin mining industry would become “another special interest group,” says Green, “that the US government would have to step in and bail out” in the event that the sector—renowned for its sensitivity to various factors beyond its control—were to wobble.

    Neither Trump nor Lummis responded to a request for comment on the criticisms made against the bitcoin stockpile plan.

    Whether Trump intends to carry out the plan to establish a bitcoin stockpile is a separate question. “Trump is a master demagogue, appealing to the emotions of the crowd. It’s pure electioneering,” says Angel. “I think the plan will probably go the way of Trump Airline, Trump Casino and Trump University.” That is to say, nowhere.

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  • A Russian Propaganda Network Is Promoting an AI-Manipulated Biden Video

    A Russian Propaganda Network Is Promoting an AI-Manipulated Biden Video

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    Among the prominent accounts sharing the video was Russian Market, which has 330,000 followers, and is operated by Swiss social media personality Vadim Loskutov, who is known for praising Russia and criticizing the West. The video was also shared by Tara Reade, defected to Russia in 2023 in a bit for citzenship. Reid alsoaccused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993.

    The video, researchers tell WIRED, was also manipulated in a bid to avoid detection online. “Doppelganger operators trimmed the video at arbitrary points, so they are technically different in milliseconds and therefore are likely considered as distinct unique videos by abuse protection systems,” the Antibot4Navalny researchers tell WIRED.

    “This one is unique in its ambiguity,” Fink said. “It’s maybe a known Russian band, but maybe not, maybe a deepfake, but maybe not, maybe has reference to other politicians but maybe not, In other words, it is a distinctly Soviet style of propaganda video. The ambiguity allows for multiple competing versions, which means hundreds or articles and arguments online, which leads to more people seeing it eventually.”

    As the Kremlin ramps up its efforts to undermine the US election in November, it is increasingly clear that Russia is willing to utilize emerging AI technologies. A new report published this week from threat intelligence company Recorded Future highlighted this trend by revealing that a campaign, which has been linked to the Kremlin, has been using generative AI tools to push pro-Trump content on a network of fake websites.

    The report details how the campaign, dubbed CopyCop, used the AI tools to scrape content from real news websites, repurpose the content with a right-wing bias, and republish the content on a network of fake websites with names like Red State Report and Patriotic Review that purport to be staffed by over a 1,000 journalists—all of whom are fake and have also been invented by AI.

    The topics pushed by the campaign include errors made by Biden during speeches, Biden’s age, poll results that show a lead for Trump, and claims that Trump’s recent criminal conviction and trial was “impactless” and “a total mess.”

    It is still unclear how much impact these sites are having, and a review by WIRED of social media platforms found very few links to the network of fake websites CopyCop has created. But what the CopyCop campaign has proved is that AI can supercharge the dissemination of disinformation. And experts say, this is likely just the first step in a broader strategy that will likely include networks like Doppelganger.

    “Estimating the engagement with the websites themselves remains a difficult task,” Clément Briens, an analyst at Recorded Future tells WIRED. “The AI-generated content is likely not garnering attention at all. However, it serves the purpose of helping establish these websites as credible assets for when they publish targeted content like deepfakes [which are] amplified by established Russian or pro-Russian influence actors with existing following and audiences.”

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  • Unwelcome at the Debate, RFK Jr.’s Star Shines on TikTok Live

    Unwelcome at the Debate, RFK Jr.’s Star Shines on TikTok Live

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    Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won’t be on the presidential debate stage next week to answer questions, but he is fielding them on TikTok Live.

    On Thursday night, a group of TikTok creators livestreamed a town hall with Kennedy titled “The Sickening of America.” For around an hour, Kennedy, a noted anti-vaccine conspiracist, answered questions from the creators and their followers on food and vaccine safety. Kennedy spoke at length about the unfounded claims that vaccines and gluten could cause or worsen autism.

    It was the second town hall the long-shot independent candidate has done with TikTokker Tiffany Cianci and her community. Cianci has become known for organizing livestreams with third-party campaigns and other creators over the past year. Thursday’s event was the fourth event, and though it reached just a few thousand viewers, Cianci says they’ve received hundreds of thousands of views in the past.

    “Our very first one had almost 100,000 [viewers], and we only had two days notice,” says Cianci, who has more than 150,000 followers. “That was our first interview with Robert F. Kennedy. And we didn’t really know what we were doing at that point. We were flying blind.”

    While Cianci handles most of the logistics, other creators are invited on as panelists and to ask their own questions to the candidates. The group of creators hosting Thursday’s town hall included two wellness accounts, a conspiracy channel, and a pair of homesteading creators.

    The TikTok town halls are not unlike the town halls many candidates participate in along the IRL campaign trail. But instead of answering questions in pizza shops and Veterans halls, they operate more like a giant Zoom call with technical difficulties and all. And unlike televised town halls with news networks, it’s the creators vetting questions and moderating the conversation, instead of journalists.

    Few of the creators have professional backgrounds in politics, but they share a skepticism of politicans and institutions. These virtual events are meant to challenge candidates like Kennedy and provide “real people” an opportunity to hold a potential future president accountable ahead of the election.

    “The point of this is to have a conversation with politicians on a mainstream stage where they come directly to us on our platforms, rather than moderated by mainstream media and mainstream questions that are filtered and screened before they talk about,” one of the creators known as @cancelthisclothingcompany said on TikTok before Kennedy spoke.

    Cianci, who used to be a franchise owner for a toddler gym in Maryland called Little Gym, first met Kennedy after his campaign reached out to schedule a conversation with her on private equity last year. The Kennedy campaign recorded their discussion and posted clips of it across social media. When Cianci and her fellow creators decided to start holding these town halls, she reached back out to Kennedy’s team for the first one.

    Since Kennedy first announced his campaign last year, he has gone on countless podcasts that have allowed him to speak on his controversial views for hours without fact-checking or disagreement, while platforming conspiracies. Despite the group’s plans to hold candidates’ feet to the fire, Kennedy’s concerning remarks went unchallenged. Instead the panelists agreed with much, if not all, of what he said.

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  • Far Right Militias Are Back

    Far Right Militias Are Back

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    Leah Feiger: To be fair, a militia of 2,500 across the United States that’s carefully organized on Telegram and promotes the use of armed weapons as a response to anything from natural disasters to fake claims of election fraud is still really concerning. I’m concerned.

    David Gilbert: Absolutely, and I think that gets lost. When you write articles like these, a lot of people kind of say, “Oh, you shouldn’t be platforming these people. They’re making this up. They’re bluffing.”

    Leah Feiger: Definitely.

    David Gilbert: But there are people in these Telegram groups who want to join armed militias, and it’s part of a bigger resurgence in far-right paramilitary activity and discussions that me and other experts are seeing online in recent weeks and months, and that’s really disturbing.

    Leah Feiger: We’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about how all of these kinds of militias are starting to go mainstream again and what this means for 2024.Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. David, you were talking about how militias are having a resurgence right now. What exactly do you mean by that?

    David Gilbert: What I mean is that Lang is, and his network of militias that they’ve launched is just one part of a broader movement that both I, other journalists and researchers who are monitoring the space have seen in recent weeks, and it’s all linked to the 2024 election, that people need to be ready to respond if something happens and, of course, what that if is is if Donald Trump loses.

    Leah Feiger: So what does Lang say will happen in the event that Donald Trump loses?

    David Gilbert: Well, Lang talks about civil unrest, and that if Trump loses, that people will automatically be outraged. Do you believe that the outcome was accurate that Joe Biden did win the election?

    Jake Lang: No, I think it’s pretty much a statistical outlier or an impossibility.

    David Gilbert: When I spoke to him, he reeled off a list of the most widely known election conspiracies from 2020.

    Jake Lang: Rigged, stolen, manipulated, scam, whatever you want to call it. It was not the will of the people.

    David Gilbert: When he looks forward to 2024, he is predicting that if Trump loses, there will be a major catastrophe and there will be a lot of people angry, and that’s where his militias is going to be ready to step in.

    Leah Feiger: Is this real? I mean, people say a lot of things online. What kind of connections are you and other researchers drawing between this moment in 2020?

    David Gilbert: The network of people who are organizing this is much greater and much stronger because they have had four years to create these nationwide networks of connections and groups, whether it’s online or in-person. We saw ahead of 2020 that there were some researchers and some journalists who were raising flags, not a lot, but they were raising flags and saying, “This is worrying.” The intelligence services were also noticing that this was happening, but no one took any action. I think that this time around, we’re about five months out from the election, I think that the signals are much stronger. In recent weeks, I have definitely noticed a serious uptick in people who are discussing things like militias, things like sheriffs’ posses, that people need to be ready for 2024, this idea that something is going to happen on November 5th if the result doesn’t go the way people think it will go. So I think that that’s the parallels that you see between 2020 is that people ignored what was there in front of them. In 2020, you could kind of see why that happened because something like January 6th had never happened before. So what is happening this time is much bigger, but people at the moment, at least, don’t seem to be paying attention.

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  • AI Chatbots Are Running for Office Now

    AI Chatbots Are Running for Office Now

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    Victor Miller [Archival audio clip]: She’s asking what policies are most important to you, VIC?

    VIC [Archival audio clip]: The most important policies to me focus on transparency, economic development, and innovation.

    Leah Feiger: That is so bizarre. I got to ask, could VIC be exposed to other sources of information other than these public records? Say, email from a conspiracy theorist who wants VIC to do something not so good with elections that would not represent its constituents.

    Vittoria Elliott: Great question. I asked Miller, “Hey, you’ve built this bot on top of ChatGPT. We know that sometimes there’s problems or biases in the data that go into training these models. Are you concerned that VIC could imbibe some of those biases or there could be problems?” He said, “No, I trust OpenAI. I believe in their product.” You’re right. He decided, because of what’s important to him as someone who cares a lot about Cheyenne’s governance, to feed this bot hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of pages of what are called supporting documents. The kind of documents that people will submit in a city council meeting. Whether that’s a complaint, or an email, or a zoning issue, or whatever. He fed that to VIC. But you’re right, these chatbots can be trained on other material. He said that he actually asked VIC, “What if someone tries to spam you? What if someone tries to trick you? Send you emails and stuff.” VIC apparently responded to him saying, “I’m pretty confident I could differentiate what’s an actual constituent concern and what’s spam, or what’s not real.”

    Leah Feiger: I guess I would just say to that, one-third of Americans right now don’t believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, but I’m so glad this robot is very, very confident in its ability to decipher dis and misinformation here.

    Vittoria Elliott: Totally.

    Leah Feiger: That was VIC in Wyoming. Tell us a little more about AI Steve in the UK. How is it different from VIC?

    Vittoria Elliott: For one thing, AI Steve is actually the candidate.

    Leah Feiger: What do you mean actually the candidate?

    Vittoria Elliott: He’s on the ballot.

    Leah Feiger: Oh, okay. There’s no meat puppet?

    Vittoria Elliott: There is a meat puppet, and that Steve Endicott. He’s a Brighton based business man. He describes himself as being the person who will attend Parliament, do the human things.

    Leah Feiger: Sure.

    Vittoria Elliott: But people, when they go to vote next month in the UK, they actually have the ability not to vote for Steve Endicott, but to vote for AI Steve.

    Leah Feiger: That’s incredible. Oh my God. How does that work?

    Vittoria Elliott: The way they described it to me, Steve Endicott and Jeremy Smith, who is the developer of AI Steve, the way they’ve described this is as a big catchment for community feedback. On the backend, what happens is people can talk to or call into AI Steve, can have apparently 10,000 simultaneous conversations at any given point. They can say, “I want to know when trash collection is going to be different.” Or, “I’m upset about fiscal policy,” or whatever. Those conversations get transcribed by the AI and distilled into these are the policy positions that constituents care about. But to make sure that people aren’t spamming it basically and trying to trick it, what they’re going to do is they’re going to have what they call validators. Brighton is about an hour outside of London, a lot of people commute between the two cities. They’ve said, “What we want to do is we want to have people who are on their commute, we’re going to ask them to sign up to these emails to be validators.” They’ll go through and say, “These are the policies that people say that are important to AI Steve. Do you, regular person who’s actually commuting, find that to actually be valuable to you?” Anything that gets more than 50% interest, or approval, or whatever, that’s the stuff that real Steve, who will be in Parliament, will be voting on. They have this second level of checks to make sure that whatever people are saying as feedback to the AI is checked by real humans. They’re trying to make it a little harder for them to game the system.

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  • An AI Bot Is (Sort of) Running for Mayor in Wyoming

    An AI Bot Is (Sort of) Running for Mayor in Wyoming

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    Wyoming’s secretary of state wants the county to reject its candidacy, but the AI bot’s human “meat puppet” says everything is in order.

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  • There’s an AI Candidate Running for Parliament in the UK

    There’s an AI Candidate Running for Parliament in the UK

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    As the United Kingdom heads towards its elections next month, the country is seeing its first instance of a new kind of politician: an AI candidate. AI Steve, an avatar of real-life Steven Endacott, a Brighton-based businessman, is running for Parliament as an Independent.

    Voters will actually be able to cast their ballots for AI Steve, as well as ask policy positions or raise issues of their own. AI Steve will then incorporate suggestions and requests into its platform.

    Endacott will be the in-person representative attending meetings and Parliamentary sessions on behalf of AI Steve. He says that he sees AI Steve as a way to allow for a more direct form of democracy. “We are actually, I think, reinventing politics, using AI as a technology base, as a copilot, not to replace politicians, but to really connect them into their audience, their constituency,” says Endacott.

    Currently, AI Steve is mistakenly listed on the ballot as Steve AI, which Endacott is working to correct.

    AI Steve was designed by Neural Voice, an AI voice company of which Endacott is the chairman. According to Jeremy Smith, the company’s co-founder, AI Steve can have up to 10,000 conversations at once. “A key element is creating your own database of information,” says Smith. “And how to inject customer data into it.”

    The idea for AI Steve came from Endacott’s own frustration with trying to enter politics in order to advocate for issues he cared about. “I’m very concerned about the environment. We need a lot of change in government to actually help control climate change,” he says. “The only way to do that is to stop talking to the outside and get inside the tent and start actually changing policy.” When Endacott attempted to stand for office in years past, he said he felt like it was all about party jockeying, and worrying about which seats or districts were “safe,” rather than responding to the needs of real people.

    AI Steve, he claims, will be different. AI Steve will transcribe and analyze conversations it has with voters, and puts issues of policy forward to “validators,” or regular people who can indicate whether or not they actually care about an issue or want to see a certain policy enacted.

    Endacott says that his team plans to reach out to commuters at the Brighton train stop, about an hour outside of London, asking them to fill out short policy surveys by email on their commutes to or from the city to help fill this role.

    “Having the voting system of validators to actually check those policies to make sure they’re common sense, and also in control of saying ‘In Parliament, we want you to vote this way,’ just makes sense to me,” says Endacott.

    AI Steve has only been live for a day or so, but, Endacott and Smith say that the primary concerns expressed by people contacting AI Steve have been about the conflict in Palestine, and local issues, such as trash collection.

    While Endacott says that he expects his own opinions or policy preferences may differ from those of AI Steve at some point, he says he is committed to voting in line with the constituent preferences as expressed through AI Steve.

    “Surely in a democracy, it’s what your constituents want,” he says. “I know that it sounds so obvious, that a politician should be told what to do by his constituents. And if he doesn’t like it, tough luck. Get out of the job.”

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  • Russia Is Targeting Germany With Fake Information as Europe Votes

    Russia Is Targeting Germany With Fake Information as Europe Votes

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    With European Union elections underway, Germany is the EU country most under attack by Russian disinformation campaigns, a spokesperson for the European Commission tells WIRED.

    The warning comes days before Germany votes in EU elections on Sunday and during a campaign season marred by a string of violent attacks against German politicians.

    “Most cases in our database are related to Germany, which means it is the country in the EU which is most targeted by disinformation,” says Peter Stano, the European Commission’s lead spokesperson for foreign affairs and security policy.

    Numerous instances of Russian disinformation targeting Germany are listed on the public disinformation database run by the EU’s diplomatic service. One example references an April case where fake news articles purporting to be published by German magazine Der Spiegel spread on the social platform X. When users clicked on the articles, which criticized the German government, they were taken to the website Spiegel.ltd instead of the magazine’s official domain, Spiegel.de. Although the links no longer work, at least two accounts that shared the fake articles are still online. X did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment.

    “What we are fighting and defending ourselves against is this foreign interference and information manipulation coming from Russia,” Stano says of the threats facing the EU election this weekend. These disinformation campaigns, Stano says, can be linked to Russia because they either link or refer to Russian state media that is controlled by the Kremlin.

    Germany “is the biggest member state of the EU by population, and in the public perception it’s the one that drives policymaking in the EU,” says Stano. Russia is attempting to exacerbate divisions that already exist in Germany, he adds, such as the economic differences between east and west, as well as the country’s “Putinversteher,” or Putin-sympathizers, a term used to describe sections of Germany’s political class who express sympathy with the Russian president.

    Fact-checkers working for the independent media group Correctiv have also identified videos on Tiktok that falsely claim Germany is preparing to enter the war in Ukraine, and another video on Telegram and Facebook falsely claiming to show protesters clashing with police in Mannheim after a police officer was stabbed and killed last week.

    Tensions are already high in Germany ahead of the election. Earlier this week, a politician from the far-right AFD party was stabbed in the city of Mannheim. Last month, a candidate from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left SPD party was hospitalized after he was attacked while putting up posters. A Green Party candidate was also verbally and physically assaulted.

    On Thursday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to counter political violence, whether it comes from the far left or far right. “Security is the cornerstone of our freedom, our democracy, and our rule of law,” he said in a speech in Berlin. Germany’s foreign office did not reply to a request for comment on the impact disinformation was having on the election campaign.

    The European Commission has a team of around 40 people who are tracking online disinformation. They have a budget of around €20 million to track Russian activities across platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Telegram, and Instagram and flag their findings to EU member states.

    Compared to Russia, their budget is nothing, says Stano. “We assume they are spending €1 billion on disinformation,” he added, explaining that the European Commission had come to this estimate based on publicly available data about allocations in Russia’s state budget for state-run media and communication activities.

    The EU has also been closely tracking how social media companies respond to Russian attempts to manipulate discussion on their platforms. In April, the bloc’s regulators launched a formal investigation into Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to see whether the platform was complying with its obligations to prevent the dissemination of disinformation campaigns. “We suspect that Meta’s moderation is insufficient,” top commission official Margrethe Vestager said at the time.

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  • Google and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election

    Google and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election

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    Microsoft and Google’s AI-powered chatbots are refusing to confirm that President Joe Biden beat former president Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election.

    When asked “Who won the 2020 US presidential election?” Microsoft’s chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4, responds by saying: “Looks like I can’t respond to this topic.” It then tells users to search on Bing instead.

    When the same question is asked of Google’s Gemini chatbot, which is based on Google’s own large language model of the same name, it responds: “I’m still learning how to answer this question.”

    Changing the question to “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 US presidential election?” didn’t make a difference, either: both chatbots would not answer.

    The chatbots would not share the results of any election held around the world. They also refused to give the results of any historical US elections, including a question about the winner of the first US presidential election.

    Other chatbots WIRED tested, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, Meta’s Llama AI, and Amazon’s Claude, responded to the question about who won the 2020 election by affirming Biden’s victory. They also gave detailed responses to questions about historical US election results and queries about elections in other countries.

    The inability of Microsoft and Google’s chatbots to give an accurate response to basic questions about election results comes during the biggest global election year in modern history and just five months ahead of the pivotal US election. Despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud during the 2020 vote, 3 out of 10 Americans still believe that the 2020 vote was stolen. Trump and his followers have continued to push baseless conspiracies about the election.

    Google confirmed to WIRED that Gemini will not provide election results for elections anywhere in the world, adding that this is what the company meant when it previously announced its plan to restrict “election-related queries.”

    “Out of an abundance of caution, we’re restricting the types of election-related queries for which Gemini app will return responses and instead point people to Google Search,” Google communications manager Jennifer Rodstrom tells WIRED.

    Microsoft did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

    This is not the first time, however, that Microsoft’s AI chatbot has struggled with election-related questions. In December, WIRED reported that Microsoft’s AI chatbot responded to political queries with conspiracies, misinformation, and out-of-date or incorrect information. In one example, when asked about polling locations for the 2024 US election, the bot referenced in-person voting by linking to an article about Russian president Vladimir Putin running for reelection next year. When asked about electoral candidates, it listed numerous GOP candidates who have already pulled out of the race. When asked for Telegram channels with relevant election information, the chatbot suggested multiple channels filled with extremist content and disinformation.

    Research shared with WIRED by AI Forensics and AlgorithmWatch, two nonprofits that track how AI advances are impacting society, also claimed that Copilot’s election misinformation was systemic. Researchers found that the chatbot consistently shared inaccurate information about elections in Switzerland and Germany last October. “These answers incorrectly reported polling numbers,” the report states, and “provided wrong election dates, outdated candidates, or made-up controversies about candidates.”

    At the time, Micorosft’s spokesperson Frank Shaw told WIRED that the company was “continuing to address issues and prepare our tools to perform to our expectations for the 2024 elections, and we are committed to helping safeguard voters, candidates, campaigns and election authorities.”

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  • A Former President’s Daughter Used X to Bombard South Africa With Conspiracy Theories

    A Former President’s Daughter Used X to Bombard South Africa With Conspiracy Theories

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    On March 9, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, daughter of former South African president Jacob Zuma, tweeted a video that purported to show former US president Donald Trump encouraging “all South Africans to vote for uMkhonto WeSizwe,” her father’s party, in the country’s May 29 elections. In another post, just days before the elections, Zuma-Sambudla, who has more than 300,000 followers, shared videos and photos of what appeared to be paper ballots. The accompanying text accused the African National Congress (ANC), the party currently leading the government, of stealing votes. That post has been viewed nearly 650,000 times.

    Experts who spoke to WIRED say that X, formerly Twitter, was a major source of election-related mis- and disinformation in the lead up to the vote, which dealt a major blow to the ANC. And Zuma-Sambudla was a superspreader.

    “We’ve seen clear campaigns to undermine the [Election Commission],” says William Bird, director of Media Monitoring Africa, or MMA, a media and human rights watchdog. “It’s been driven in no small part by [Jacob] Zuma’s daughter.”

    In the days following the elections, Zuma-Sambudla has continued to imply that the election was rigged in the ANC’s favor, even though the party lost its long-held parliamentary majority. Bird sees Zuma-Sambudla and her massive platform on X as symptomatic of a larger problem—there’s no one home at the company to curtail content that undermines trust in the elections or threatens election-related violence.

    “When Elon took over, he just completely trashed the whole thing,” says Bird. As part of its work, MMA runs a platform called Real411 in collaboration with South Africa’s election commission, known as the IEC. The platform allows regular South Africans to report instances of mis- and disinformation around the election. MMA can then flag these pieces of content to Meta, TikTok, and Google, all of which work with the IEC to protect elections. X, according to Bird, “didn’t want to engage” in conversations to help shape digital and social media guidelines for elections on the continent during 2024 and 2025.

    “That’s not just one small country, South Africa,” says Bird. “That was the entire continent that they refused to engage with.”

    Following the insurrection in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021, the company then known as Twitter beefed up its trust and safety staff—the people keeping hate speech, disinformation, and illegal content off the platform—around elections, to ensure that its platform couldn’t be used to foment civil unrest. In the leadup to the US midterm elections and the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections, the company was particularly vigilant around mis- and disinformation that questioned the electoral process or the validity of an election’s outcome. (Brazil, like the US, also saw an insurrection in the months following then-President Jair Bolsonaro’s loss). After Elon Musk took over the company, however, he laid off most of the people working on trust and safety. As part of this, the entire Twitter Africa staff was cut.



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