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  • Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be

    Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be

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    If you dwell in certain internet neighborhoods long enough, the rules of governing, however absurd or toxic, become second nature.

    On X, the site formerly known as Twitter, harassment, racism, and hate speech had become so uniquely poisonous under the ownership of Elon Musk, that if you identified as Black, a woman, queer, trans, or disabled you were all but guaranteed to have a target on your back. The combative environment engendered a grim sort of gallows humor. Even fans of the platform would refer to it as “the hellsite.” But people stayed, largely because there didn’t seem to be a viable alternative. Threads was weird. Mastodon was complicated. For a long time, Bluesky was too quiet—until something flipped, as the US election came and went, and people had had enough.

    Millions of users have decamped to Bluesky over the past couple of months. And while the platform isn’t perfect, many new arrivals are mystified by the platform’s disarmingly upbeat atmosphere. “Trying to find my niche subset of humor on here,” @lvteef posted on December 3, “because as of right now it’s very millennial happy go lucky on this app.”

    “I’m like where’s the misery? the sick jokes? the hateration in this dancery?” responded @knoxdotmp3.

    Clearly, some of us are struggling to shrug off the traumas of X. At the same time, longtime users of Bluesky also have questions about the future of the platform, and whether the environment they’ve created can withstand the influx of new people. It feels like social media is turning a page, and opening a new chapter. Only, this time, the architects of that not-so-faraway future are determined to get it right.

    One of those vanguards is Rudy Fraser, a 30-year-old New York technologist with a background in enterprise IT and community organizing. He’s the creator of Blacksky, the custom feed and moderation service that is slowly turning into the main avenue for many Black users on Bluesky. If the phenomenon sounds familiar, that’s because it is. From the first flickers of internet exploration, Black people have searched for their own online oasis. It was true of NetNoir in 1996 and, more recently, of Black Twitter, the epicenter and engine of internet culture during the 2010s. And where those experiments failed—NetNoir fizzled out and Black Twitter, while still very active, lost any semblance of protection when Musk bought Twitter—Fraser wants to succeed. “Moderation,” he told me on a recent video call, “is a key piece of it.”

    Fraser has a knack for bringing people together. In addition to IT consulting, he’s worked as a lead organizer with We The People NYC, a grassroots mutual aid organization, since 2022, and also created Papertree, a digital mutual aid tool that allows large groups of people to share money. “I wanted to set up a community bank account for all of Bed-Stuy,” he said of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. When that didn’t pan out, Fraser reassessed.

    It was the spring of 2023, not long after Bluesky invites started going out, and Fraser snagged one during its beta testing (he was user 51,921). He was already involved in some Web3-adjacent projects, and interested in questions around data ownership. Bluesky’s mission—to be a decentralized social media platform, and truly make the social internet a self-governing ecosystem—appealed to him for similar reasons. “The whole idea of AT protocol and the promise of an algorithmic custom feed seemed like a cool thing to jump into,” he said.

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  • Is This the Year Everyone Quits Social Media?

    Is This the Year Everyone Quits Social Media?

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    Michael Calore: Yep.

    Mannen kunnen soms tegen problemen aanlopen die invloed hebben op hun intieme leven, wat hen kan frustreren en onzeker kan maken. Deze uitdagingen zijn niet ongebruikelijk en kunnen voortkomen uit verschillende oorzaken, zoals stress, angst of fysieke aandoeningen. Gelukkig zijn er oplossingen en middelen beschikbaar die hen kunnen helpen om hun zelfvertrouwen en welzijn te herstellen. Een nuttige stap is om betrouwbare informatie te zoeken en producten te bekijken op websites zoals. Het is belangrijk dat mannen zich realiseren dat ze niet alleen zijn en dat er ondersteuning en opties zijn om hun seksuele gezondheid te verbeteren.

    Lauren Goode: Yeah.

    Mannen kunnen soms tegen problemen aanlopen die invloed hebben op hun intieme leven, wat hen kan frustreren en onzeker kan maken. Deze uitdagingen zijn niet ongebruikelijk en kunnen voortkomen uit verschillende oorzaken, zoals stress, angst of fysieke aandoeningen. Gelukkig zijn er oplossingen en middelen beschikbaar die hen kunnen helpen om hun zelfvertrouwen en welzijn te herstellen. Een nuttige stap is om betrouwbare informatie te zoeken en producten te bekijken op websites zoals. Het is belangrijk dat mannen zich realiseren dat ze niet alleen zijn en dat er ondersteuning en opties zijn om hun seksuele gezondheid te verbeteren.

    Michael Calore: What about you, Zoë?

    Zoë Schiffer: My total screen time. I actually looked it up before and I think it’s like three hours and 40 minutes on my phone, which honestly seems impressive to me. You’re raising your eyebrows, Mike, why are you doing that? Only a couple minutes of that is actually on social media apps. I feel like I deserve a Medal of Honor.

    Michael Calore: You do actually deserve Medal of Honor. I have a timer on my phone that goes off after I’ve been on Instagram for any more than 20 minutes. I hit that timer every single day.

    Lauren Goode: This is not a joke. He follows this. I’ve sent Mike memes before and then won’t get a response, and because we work across the newsroom from each other, I’ll literally sometimes go to his desk and, “Did just see that thing I sent you?”

    Zoë Schiffer: It’s the thirsty.

    Lauren Goode: No, I know. He’ll say, “No, I ran out of time,” and I’m like, “You’re adhering to that? Check the meme.”

    Michael Calore: Do you ever think about getting off of the apps?

    Lauren Goode: All the time.

    Michael Calore: All the time?

    Lauren Goode: I fantasize about it at this point. What would it be like to not constantly feel like you have to broadcast something?

    Michael Calore: Yeah. What about you, Zoë?

    Zoë Schiffer: Honestly, I’m not on them that much, but I’ve been on parental leave for a few months, so the answer is I think about getting off my phone all the time and I’m honestly amazed how much time I can spend on my phone even not using social media apps. What about you?

    Michael Calore: I often get the urge to just throw the phone across the room and never look at it again, but then I always end up picking it up and getting back on.

    Lauren Goode: That’s usually after I send him some terrible meme.

    Michael Calore: Yeah, or I think of a joke.

    Lauren Goode: Right.

    Michael Calore: Must skeet now. Yeah. Well, today we’re talking about just that: Is it time to get off of social media? And because there are so many kinds of social apps and platforms out there, we’re going to focus on the platforms that we use the most, the text-based social sites, because we’re words people. This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley. I’m Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture here at WIRED.

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  • The Internet’s Obsession With Luigi Mangione Signals a Major Shift

    The Internet’s Obsession With Luigi Mangione Signals a Major Shift

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    In America, people have strong opinions about health insurance companies, and when it came out that the alleged shooter had written “deny,” “depose,” “defend” on some ammo, they rallied ‘round. When it turned out Mangione had been spotted at a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, someone on Bluesky called it SnitchDonald’s; others briefly review-bombed the location. (Google later pulled many negative reviews.)

    Mangione appeared in a Pennsylvania court on Monday night to be arraigned on two felony charges, one related to a firearm and another to a false ID. He also faces three related misdemeanor charges. He didn’t enter a plea. He was later charged with murder in Manhattan. As soon as his name was released Monday, though, the internet’s investigation, and judgment, of him entered a whole new phase.

    People pored over old X accounts, and GitHub pages that appeared to belong to him. A thorough investigation of what seems to be his Goodreads account showed that he read Michael Pollan and Aldous Huxley. He had an Ivy League education and might’ve been a fan of Joe Rogan and/or Tucker Carlson. What some folks online had imagined as a left-leaning anti-capitalist revolutionary turned out to be someone with beliefs as complicated and perhaps conflicting as just about anyone else online. Memes, it seemed, had once again reduced someone to whom the internet wanted him to be, a reflection of their own frustrations with health care in the US or the power of massive corporations.

    Someone who would kill a health care CEO might share those frustrations, but very little else, with the people obsessing over him online.

    This, perhaps, makes Mangione’s Milkshake Duck moment not quite a Milkshake Duck moment at all. Yes, people are reevaluating how they perceived Thompson’s suspected killer and his motivations, but they’re not totally abandoning him entirely. When police released his mugshot late Monday, giving a fuller picture of the good-looking person from the photo authorities had released days prior, online thirst was everywhere. Fanfiction writers remain at work. Etsy is full of merch.

    As Ryan Broderick put it in his Garbage Day newsletter on Monday, “it’s possible that this is the most aligned America—well, aside from the folks in its highest tax brackets—has been about a news story since the invention of the internet.”

    Want further proof? Look no further than the comments on Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro’s YouTube channel. On a video titled “The EVIL Revolutionary Left Cheers Murder!” the responses were swift and unequivocal: “FACT: Both left AND right are cheering! We don’t care about your feelings”; “I’m not buying this ‘left vs right’ shit anymore Ben, I want health care for my family”; “Just because ‘the left’ likes something doesn’t mean you have to instinctively hate it. Wake up and read the room bro.” Not exactly the kind of banter typically found in the comments section of a manosphere video.

    Public opinion on Mangione and Thompson’s fate will likely continue to shift in for weeks. So much more information will come to the fore. Like any other main character, Mangione’s entire life will be analyzed, but what gets said about him may seem small compared to what the response to his actions says about everyone else.

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  • He Got Banned From X. Now He Wants to Help You Escape, Too

    He Got Banned From X. Now He Wants to Help You Escape, Too

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    At around 5 pm on a Thursday in December 2022, a privacy- and information-freedom-focused programmer named Micah Lee learned, to his shock, that he had just been banned from Twitter. His crime: posting a link to @Elonjets, an account on the competing social media service Mastodon that tracked the location of the private jet of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, Elon Musk—a link that Musk would later claim amounted to “doxing” despite the jet’s location info being publicly available.

    For a moment, Lee grieved the loss of an account he’d spent years building, with more than 50,000 followers. Then, almost immediately, that feeling was replaced with relief to have escaped a platform he felt was already in precipitous moral decline. Since Musk had taken it over two months earlier, Twitter’s new owner had already allowed previously banned far-right and even neo-Nazi figures back onto the service in the name of free speech—while simultaneously axing the accounts of leftists. Perhaps getting banned for offending the mercurial mogul behind those partisan decisions was “a good way to go,” Lee decided.

    He hasn’t looked back. Twitter eventually told Lee he could return to the service if he deleted his @Elonjets tweet. Instead, he stayed off the platform for eight months before finally deleting that post, but only so that he could log in and delete his entire history on the platform. A few months later, after Twitter had become X, he wrote a few messages promoting a book he’d written—all now deleted, too—and says he has barely touch the service otherwise. “Honestly, my mental health is much better since then,” he adds.

    Now, Lee wants to help you achieve that same cleansing release. Today, he launched Cyd—an acronym for “Claw back Your Data”—a desktop application designed to give users more control over their X history: archiving it, trimming it to their preferences, or destroying it altogether. In the free version of Cyd, the program allows anyone to download their X posts—Cyd can save up to 2,000 of your most recent posts itself, or you can use X’s built-in feature that allows you to download your entire archive—and then automatically delete them. For $36 a year, users can access Cyd’s premium features, like erasing the contents of their account with more fine-grained filters based on variables like date, number of likes or retweets, or keywords, un-retweeting or removing likes from posts en masse, and unfollowing all X users.

    While Cyd for now is designed specifically for managing—or emptying out—your X account, Lee says he hopes to eventually add other features for carrying out the same archiving and deletion functions on services like Facebook and Reddit. “A handful of billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos control all the platforms that we use all the time and where we have all our data,” Lee says. “I want to basically make it so that the users of these platforms—everybody else who isn’t one of these really rich tech billionaires—has a bit more power.”

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  • What Happens to X With No More Libs to Troll?

    What Happens to X With No More Libs to Troll?

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    Leah Feiger: And in the studio with me is WIRED reporter Vittoria Elliott. Hey, Tori.

    Vittoria Elliott: Hey, Leah.

    Leah Feiger: Guys, how are you doing? What social media platforms are you on right now?

    Vittoria Elliott: A violent question if I’m honest. I’m all in on Bluesky.

    Leah Feiger: Yeah?

    Vittoria Elliott: Oh yeah.

    Leah Feiger: Okay.

    Vittoria Elliott: I’m just hanging out and people are following me. It’s the lowest lift of any platform I’ve had to engage in in a while.

    Leah Feiger: So you just like the attention?

    Vittoria Elliott: I do just like the attention. I love getting little pings on my phone every day validating me.

    Leah Feiger: It’s what Twitter used to be for so many people. David, you’re on Bluesky too, right?

    David Gilbert: I sure am. I’m even following you, Leah, finally.

    Leah Feiger: I know. I had to beg for it. It was upsetting.

    David Gilbert: I’m very busy though. I have lots of new followers to be vetting and checking.

    Leah Feiger: To attend to.

    David Gilbert: Yeah.

    Leah Feiger: So rude. So what’s up? Do you guys like it more than X right now? There’s just been this massive exodus it feels like to me of not only journalists, but left leaning people across the board. What are the reasons why?

    David Gilbert: For me at least it’s just less triggering. It’s less toxic. It’s just easier to be there for a while and scrolling and not be triggered by something stupid that someone has said, which is what X had turned into recently. And I think I’m happier just to spend time there. The engagement seems to be more natural, authentic. Just conversations happening rather than just people shouting all the time. And I don’t know, it’s very early days and I think it could potentially be really good, but it could also potentially be terrible because it’s the internet.

    Leah Feiger: The CEO says that they’re gaining like a million users a day. That is a wild stat.

    Vittoria Elliott: Yeah. I mean, so I agree with David, the user experience is just better. I mean, even though it’s a little slower in the load because they are gaining so many people so quickly, it is a platform that you feel is designed not to vacuum up all of your attention. So if you notice like with X, sometimes you’ll find a really interesting post and then the website will auto load and then it’ll push you back up to the top, so you have to keep scrolling. And Bluesky doesn’t function that way. It feels like old social media where you’re like, I’m here to see the things I want to see, but this isn’t designed in a way that makes me feel like the ultimate goal is just to make me lose as much time on this website as possible.

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  • ‘I’m Going to Bluesky’ Is the New ‘I’m Moving to Canada’

    ‘I’m Going to Bluesky’ Is the New ‘I’m Moving to Canada’

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    The Swifties were the canaries in the coal mine. Last week, as the fallout from the US presidential election ricocheted across the internet, Taylor Swift fans took a stand. In droves, they left X and went to Bluesky, where, as one Swiftie told WIRED, they could build a new community and not “support Elon [Musk] in any way.” They weren’t alone.

    A lot has happened in the week since Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris for the US presidency. For those who spend a lot of time online, one thing in particular stood out: Trump’s relationship with Musk, the X owner who leveraged his platform to support the president-elect’s campaign. On Tuesday, Trump named Musk one of the heads of the new, not-yet-existent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). That same day, Bluesky announced it had gained 1 million new users in a week.

    Not all of those new migrants to Bluesky are Swift fans, mind you, but they do represent a certain subset of internet culture: the folks who, unhappy with Musk’s links to Trump and how he was running X, finally gave up and decided to relocate their social media lives. Since its rollout in 2023, Bluesky has been a kind of “loose, slaphappy” place, but in the past two months, as Slate pointed out this week, its become a better platform for sharing news and keeping up with live events, a lifeboat for “left-leaning Twitter refugees.”

    Whereas Americans used to swear they’d move to Canada if their candidate didn’t win (as if such a move is easily achieved), now they just set up camp on a new platform. No need to break your lease or sell your house, just post “come follow me on Bluesky” with your new handle. If you don’t like any of your new neighbors, that’s cool. Bluesky offers something most folks call “the nuclear block,” which lets users ensure they don’t hear from someone they don’t want to speak to or interact with.

    The internet has always prided itself on being at least somewhat borderless. Firewalls, language barriers, and other hurdles exist, but the web still helps information and stories get from one place to another much more quickly than anyone could travel there. No visa required.

    Yet, that pride has always been a bit unearned. There are gatekeepers, trolls, bullies. Musk wanted Twitter to be a town square, but you still needed a device connected to the internet to get there—and had to be ready to dodge insults once you did. Even online, NIMBYs want a say. Who gets to call themselves a “local” on any given platform often gets decided by which mob rules. You can go to Bluesky, the Canada of the internet, but be careful what baggage you bring.

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  • Elon Musk Is Already Doing Exactly What He Said He Would

    Elon Musk Is Already Doing Exactly What He Said He Would

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    Less than a week after the election results were called for former president Donald Trump, his centibillionaire backer Elon Musk is already doing what he promised: taking an active role in shaping the government under a second Trump administration.

    During the campaign, Musk emerged as one of Trump’s biggest backers and his most zealous advocate in Silicon Valley. His political action committee, of which he was the primary funder, spent $200 million to help the Trump campaign. But he also hit the campaign trail drumming up support in the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, made an appearance with Trump at a rally, stumped for Trump on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, hosted a livestream on X (which he owns), and used his platform and the power of his own celebrity to push the campaign’s talking points and boost propaganda claiming Democrats would allow unauthorized immigrants to vote.

    In his first administration, Trump famously made governing a family business, bringing his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner into prominent positions. Musk, according to Trump’s granddaughter Kai, has now apparently reached “uncle” status, appearing in a family photo (and apparently refusing to leave). It does appear that Musk will be heavily involved in whatever comes next. And his posts on X, as well as his early post-elections interactions with Trump, make clear what that might look like.

    Musk, who has apparently joined Trump’s calls with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, Serbia president Aleksandar Vučić, and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, looks poised to have some kind of role in the administration. In September, Trump said he would create a government efficiency commission with Musk—whose business empire benefits extensively from government contracts and subsidies—at the helm. On Sunday, Musk reshared a post envisioning a Trump administration that focuses on “deregulation (defanging the SEC, FTC, and others), government spending cuts (making room for the private sector), tax cuts, and a focus on technologically enabled innovation,” adding the comment, “Great.” Musk also called for “ensuring that maniacally dedicated small-government revolutionaries join this administration!”

    And already, Musk is beginning to weigh in on staffing decisions for the second Trump administration and beyond. On Sunday morning, Musk released a poll asking users who should be the new Senate majority leader, in line to succeed the outgoing minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Users appeared to overwhelmingly vote for MAGA favorite Senator Rick Scott of Florida. When Trump announced that New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik would be his pick for UN Ambassador, Musk took to X to weigh in, saying, “Elise is awesome, but it might be too dicey to lose her from the House, at least for now.” Reporting from the Financial Times revealed that Musk is looking to install his own loyalists and backers into the government, particularly people like Steve Davis, CEO of the Musk-founded Boring Company, and has reportedly asked Trump to appoint SpaceX staff to the Department of Defense.

    In another post including a video of National Public Radio CEO Katherine Maher from a TED Talk she gave in 2021, three years before she took over the organization, Musk asks, “Should your tax dollars really be paying for an organization run by people who think the truth is a ‘distraction’?” In a post shared over the weekend, Musk described the Department of Education as “not exactly great value for money.” (Project 2025, a road map created by the Heritage Foundation for a second Trump administration, calls for eliminating the Department of Education). In all, Musk has advocated for $2 trillion in spending cuts—more than the federal government’s total spending in fiscal year 2023 on all discretionary outlays including defense, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

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  • Taylor Swift Fans Are Leaving X for Bluesky After Trump’s Election

    Taylor Swift Fans Are Leaving X for Bluesky After Trump’s Election

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    Following the US presidential election, Swifties, the name for Taylor Swift’s fans, are fleeing X for Bluesky. X’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, was one of Donald Trump’s biggest backers, funneling over $100 million into the Trump-supporting America PAC; stumping for the candidate on the campaign trail; and boosting Trump’s messaging on X. Musk also helped Trump tap into a distinctly right-wing male audience. Swifties, who have built a robust community on the platform formerly known as Twitter, took notice. By Thursday, less than 48 hours after Trump won the presidency, they were starting to flock from the platform for good.

    “I love the idea of building a new community here and would love not to have to support Elon in any way,” says Justin, who goes by @justin-the-baron.swifties.social on Bluesky and asked to use only his first name for fear of harassment. “Elon is of course a big Trump supporter, which doesn’t align with Taylor’s values or the values of Swifties.”

    Though there are Swifties on all sides of the political spectrum, the community prides itself on being a positive and accepting space. After Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic nominee for president, Swifties began to mobilize to support her. In September, Swift herself endorsed Harris. In an Instagram post announcing her support, Swift cited AI-generated images of herself and her fans that had been used by Trump to imply she’d endorsed him.

    Following the endorsement, Musk posted, “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” Musk, who has repeatedly shared concerns about declining birth rates, has at least 11 children with at least three women. According to The New York Times, he also offered his sperm to Nicole Shanahan, the former running mate for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (She declined.)

    Irene Kim, an organizer with Swifties for Harris, says that the outpouring of misogyny following the election pushed her and many other Swift fans to abandon X and seek refuge on Bluesky. Though research has found that hate speech and disinformation increased after Musk took over the platform, the election of Trump seems to have supercharged it. A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that in the 24 hours following Trump’s electoral victory, phrases like “Your body, my choice,” parroting the election night rhetoric of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, rose 4,600 percent on X.

    “I think that’s the kind of rhetoric we want to get away from,” Kim says. She also notes that X’s recent update to the “block” feature, which allows people to see the profile and posts of users that have blocked them, has contributed to a more negative experience on the platform. “Twitter has definitely become such a hellscape,” Kim says.



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  • Forget Screen Time. We Need to Talk About Screen Real Estate

    Forget Screen Time. We Need to Talk About Screen Real Estate

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    “For those of you who want Election Night to feel even more unhinged, I highly recommend elections.omg.lol.” That’s WIRED senior editor Andrew Couts talking about a single-serving site with a three-by-three grid of nine YouTube embeds, each broadcasting a 24-hour news channel’s live coverage. Election.omg.lol’s nine portals into the future of America provided a constant stream of red-and-blue maps, talking heads, and man-on-the-street reports. It was nauseating, “horrifying and kinda helpful,” and “a hell site.”

    It was also one of four screens I was looking at the moment I clicked on it.

    Yes, on election night 2024, like so many others, I had CNN on, a laptop open, and a phone in my hand. This is not new; lots of people watch TV with a second device nearby. What became clear as the results started pouring in was how much space on each of those screens was devoted to some smaller, use-specific screen.

    CNN, of course, had chyrons full of headlines and tickers showing how many Electoral College votes Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris had. There were also boxes blaring countdowns for when the next polls would close. My iPhone contained a revolving door of TikTok, X, and Instagram. (I saved myself a small piece of virtual estate by not turning on the Dynamic Island election results service Apple unveiled this week.) My laptop, a combination of Chrome tabs open to news sites and a Slack full of chats with coworkers—which is how I got served that Verge post in the first place.

    No one does picture-in-picture on their TV screens anymore, really, but TVs have been supplemented with tablets, smartphones, laptops. Nearly every screen available to us, is now full of other screens, bifurcating into oblivion.

    Even in VRChat, where my colleague Boone Ashworth spent much of his election eve, there were people looking at screens … embedded into the screens strapped to their faces.

    Not to be all Andy Rooney about it, but maybe that’s too much. Not that I want to go back to the days of just watching one thing on TV or reading one book, absent other things to distract me, but perhaps it’s time we started treating the space on screens like it holds actual value. This column is named The Monitor because it’s about the things we watch, device agnostic, but it’s also about what we pay attention to, what we observe. Maybe reducing the number of things one pays attention to provides a way to observe more.

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  • Election Denial Conspiracy Theories Are Exploding on X. This Time They’re Coming From the Left

    Election Denial Conspiracy Theories Are Exploding on X. This Time They’re Coming From the Left

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    While at publication time the Associated Press’ vote count was indeed 16 million votes lower than that for the 2020 election, the explanation is trivially simple: The entirety of the vote hasn’t been tabulated yet.

    “Election denial is anti-democratic, whether it comes from the left or the right,” David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, wrote on X. “No, 20 million votes aren’t missing. Votes are still being counted in many states, including millions in CA alone. Number of votes in 2024 very close to 2020, when all are reported “

    Posts relating to these conspiracy theories began to gain traction around 2:00 am Eastern, PeakMetrics data shows, which coincides roughly with the time the election was called for Trump—but even as Americans went to bed, the number of posts did not decline.

    “By 8am ET, the number of posts per hour had surged to 31,991,” PeakMetrics wrote in an analysis shared with WIRED. “There was perhaps a surprising lack of overnight drop-off in posts from 2am-7am ET—when typically posts would decline as the US hits sleeping hours. The steady increase in posts on the Kamala recount/missing votes narrative throughout the overnight hours may simply reflect the intensity of this discussion—or may point to inauthentic or automated posting behavior.”

    Unlike the election denial movement in 2020, which was inspired by Trump’s refusal to accept the results, these conspiracy theories haven’t received any support from the candidate. On Wednesday, Harris urged her supporters to accept the results and assured them her team “will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.”

    The phenomenon of left-leaning or anti-Trump accounts posting conspiracy theories on social media platforms, referred to as BlueAnon, came to prominence earlier this year in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump’s life in July.

    “Any event that seems improbable will always invite conspiracy theories about what ‘really’ happened,” says Mike Rothschild, an author who writes about conspiracy theories and extremists. “In this case, it’s a factually incorrect narrative that there are tens of millions of missing votes, and that Russian bomb threats sabotaged the Harris campaign. Neither are true—turnout appears to be down, and many states, including California, are still well into counting. And while bomb threats are never acceptable, they’re not the reason why the Harris campaign lost every swing state. To write Trump’s win off to conspiracy theories is to not live in reality.”

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