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  • Will Social Platforms Take Down a Premature Donald Trump Victory Post?

    Will Social Platforms Take Down a Premature Donald Trump Victory Post?

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    One of the big questions going into election night is whether former president Donald Trump will prematurely declare victory. That declaration would likely be accompanied by social media posts on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok—all of which will not confirm if they would remove the content.

    He’s done it before: Trump falsely declared himself the winner of the 2020 election when many battleground states were still too close to call. Counts were still ongoing in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. A number of Republican lawmakers and pundits rebuked Trump’s claims. Ben Shapiro, cofounder of the Daily Wire, said “No, Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say that he has,” in an X post at the time. Trump’s own advisers are reportedly encouraging him to announce an early victory.

    “Premature claims of victory that are intended to intimidate people from voting or suppress voting may be evaluated under our Civic Integrity policy,” X spokesperson Michael Abboud tells WIRED. “ Community Notes are an effective way to add helpful context to Posts that may be misleading about voting results.”

    X authorizes users to flag and correct misinformation on its platforms through Community Notes. A recent Center for Countering Digital Hate study found that the crowdsourced fact-checking initiative does a poor job of correcting false election claims.

    X, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has already become a hotbed for election misinformation and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon. Last week, Musk’s America PAC launched an Election Integrity Community on X which has grown to nearly 50,000 members. The group says it will elevate “incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.

    In 2020, Meta said that it would add labels to early victory posts. This time around, Corey Chambliss, a Meta spokesperson, shared a blog post with WIRED explaining that the company will remove misinformation related to the dates, locations, times, and methods of voting and voting-related calls for violence. Meta will also remove content containing false election results, according to the blog post, but Chambliss did not respond to whether that rule applied to Trump.

    “As with all of our policies we will continue to monitor what we’re seeing on-platform,” Chambliss told WIRED on Tuesday.

    Ads declaring a false outcome, however, are banned. Meta bans new election ads for the week before election day, and said it would extend that ban up until a few days after polls close, Axios reported on Monday.

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  • Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Set Off a Race to the Bottom

    Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Set Off a Race to the Bottom

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    But for years, public pressure from government officials, civil society, and the media pushed tech companies to invest in teams and tools that could at least somewhat address issues of hate speech or misinformation on their platforms, so they could say they were making a good faith effort to deal with the issue.

    Musk’s purchase of Twitter signaled a change, according to six former trust and safety employees from Twitter and Meta.

    When Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he quickly fired more than 50 percent of the company’s workers, including almost all of the company’s trust and safety and policy staff—the people tasked with creating and enforcing the platform’s policies around things like hate speech, violent content, conspiracy theories, and mis- and disinformation. Since then, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Discord have all made cuts to trust and safety staff.

    Shortly after Musk purged Twitter of its trust and safety teams, other companies began layoffs. In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, including many trust and safety employees. In January 2023, Google followed suit, axing 12,000 people. Earlier this year, Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, disbanded its Safety Advisory Council.

    “I think that Elon really opened the floodgates,” says one former Meta employee. “So then other tech brands were like, ‘We can do that too, because we won’t be the black sheep for it.’”

    Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss tells WIRED that the company has “40,000 people globally working on safety and security—more than during the 2020 cycle, when we had a global team of 35,000 people working in this area,” though he did not address how many of those people are staff versus outsourced workers.

    Musk’s sudden firings made it so that “anybody else could come along and nicely fire their teams and give them severance and it was nicer. Better,” says a former Twitter employee who was fired by Musk.

    After Musk fired the trust and safety staff, experts warned that this cut, coupled with Musk’s “free speech absolutism,” would allow toxic content to flood the platform and ultimately cause an exodus of users and advertisers, leading to Twitter’s eventual demise. Hate speech and misinformation did increase and advertisers did pull their dollars. Last year, X fired members of what remained of its elections team. Around the same time, Musk posted on X, saying, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

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  • Elon Musk Has Spent the Final Days Before the Election Posting About Peanut the Squirrel

    Elon Musk Has Spent the Final Days Before the Election Posting About Peanut the Squirrel

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    Billionaire X owner Elon Musk has become one of former president Donald Trump’s most important backers. Since Musk endorsed Trump in July, he has pulled out all the stops to support his candidacy. Musk has donated more than $100 million to his Trump-supporting America PAC; he criss-crossed the swing state of Pennsylvania holding town halls; he’s spoken at Trump rallies in Butler, Pennsylvania, and New York City; hosted Trump for an interview on X; and put the full weight of the social media platform he owns behind Trump’s presidential bid.

    But with mere days to go before the polls open, Musk spent the weekend posting on X mostly about a squirrel.

    Specifically, Peanut, an orphaned pet squirrel adopted by Mark Longo, a resident of New York state. Videos of Longo with Peanut garnered hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Instagram. Longo also had adopted a pet raccoon named Fred. But on October 30, according to the Associated Press, local government officials responded to anonymous complaints about the animals, and both were euthanized after the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) removed them from Longo’s home.

    “On Oct. 30, DEC seized a raccoon and squirrel sharing a residence with humans, creating the potential for human exposure to rabies. In addition, a person involved with the investigation was bitten by the squirrel,” the DEC said in a statement. “To test for rabies, both animals were euthanized.”

    Longo posted about the incident on Instagram, and it gained steam on social media over the weekend. A GoFundMe for Longo entitled “Call for Justice for Peanut the Squirrel and NYSDEC Reform” has currently raised more than $150,000.

    Musk seized on the story, posting or reposting about the incident on X at least 20 times between Saturday and Sunday, framing it as an example of government overreach, particularly by Democratic party-run governments.

    “The government should not be allowed to barge into your house and kill your pet! That’s messed up,” Musk said in one post that garnered 23.7 million views. “Even if it is illegal to have a pet squirrel (which it shouldn’t be), why kill PNut instead of simply releasing him into the forest!?” In another, which racked up more than 35 million views, he asked, “why is the Democratic Party so cruel?”

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  • Tracking Elon Musk’s Activities Over the Last Month Ahead of the Election

    Tracking Elon Musk’s Activities Over the Last Month Ahead of the Election

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    Billionaire X owner Elon Musk has become one of former president Donald Trump’s most important financial backers, and certainly his most vocal in Silicon Valley, since endorsing him in July.

    For the final month of the US presidential campaign, Musk has been pulling out all the stops, going “all in” on getting Trump back into the Oval Office, both online and IRL. He’s appeared at rallies; hosted town halls; poured well over $100 million into his own pro-Trump political action committee (PAC); started a (possibly illegal) giveaway of $1 million a day to voters in swing states; and used his social media platform and over 200 million followers to bolster pro-Trump messaging and conspiracy theories that could undermine faith in the election.

    We’ve created a timeline to show Musk’s last month leading up to the election, with a particular focus on when he’s acting as a campaign surrogate, discussing how he might slot into a future administration, or putting money behind the campaign itself.

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  • Elon Musk Could Have US Citizenship Revoked If He Lied on Immigration Forms

    Elon Musk Could Have US Citizenship Revoked If He Lied on Immigration Forms

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    These questions, says immigration lawyer Ira Kurzban, are asked to see whether an applicant obtained their residence validly, a prerequisite for citizenship. US immigration authorities have, he says, become “very exacting” on this point over the past 10 years.

    The US Citizenship and Immigration Service didn’t respond to an inquiry about whether forms used by its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, asked exactly these questions at the time Musk would have been using them, but experts say he would have been asked substantively similar questions, as the relevant law hasn’t changed.

    “Those grounds of deportability have been around for decades,” says Yale-Loehr, “and the forms back then probably had similar or identical questions.”

    An immigrant who makes misrepresentations as part of the naturalization process can also face criminal exposure: Under US federal law, making a false statement to or concealing a material fact from the government carries a potential penalty of five years in prison.

    Greg Siskind, a leading immigration attorney, doesn’t disagree that the law as written could expose someone who lied about working without authorization to loss of citizenship, but says that as a practical matter, it may not amount to a material fact.

    “If he had disclosed it, would that have prevented him from getting later immigration benefits?” he asks. “The answer to that is probably no.”

    Siskind nonetheless believes that there are serious questions here about, among other things, the nature of the professional relationship between the Musk brothers. And Musk’s past is highly relevant to the clearances he reportedly holds as a top government contractor with an extensive portfolio of holdings related to national security.

    Even if Musk were found to have violated the law, he would not be summarily deported. “It’s generally quite difficult to revoke someone’s citizenship for relatively minor status violations which occurred decades earlier,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, who adds that this is “a good thing given how easy it can be to violate arcane immigration rules.”

    Under Trump, though, several experts pointed out, the government did far more to denaturalize citizens than it had previously. As Frost wrote in 2019, in the first year and a half of the Trump administration, USCIS opened an office dedicated to denaturalization, investigated thousands of citizens, and reported 95 to the Department of Justice with a recommendation for deportation. (From 1990 to 2017, there was an average of just 11 denaturalization cases per year.)

    Even if USCIS had solid evidence that Musk had broken the law, it would, experts say, not handle the matter administratively, but rather could refer it to a US Attorney’s office. Prosecutors, who have broad discretion to take up or decline cases, could then proceed, or not, as they saw fit.

    Many of the open questions here could be cleared up by Musk authorizing the release of his immigration records under the Freedom of Information Act. His lawyer, Spiro, did not respond to a question asking whether he would do so.

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  • Elon Musk’s America PAC Has Created an Election Denial Cesspool on X

    Elon Musk’s America PAC Has Created an Election Denial Cesspool on X

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    For months, billionaire and X owner Elon Musk has used his platform to share election conspiracy theories that could undermine faith in the outcome of the 2024 election. Last week, the political action committee (PAC) Musk backs took it a step further, launching a group on X called the Election Integrity Community. The group has nearly 50,000 members and says that it is meant to be a place where users can “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.”

    In practice, it is a cesspool of election conspiracy theories, alleging everything from unauthorized immigrants voting to misspelled candidate names on ballots. “It’s just an election denier jamboree,” says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, who authored a recent report on how social media facilitates political violence.

    Since endorsing former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump following the first assassination attempt against him in July, Musk has become one of Trump’s most important financial backers, pouring more than $100 million into the America PAC since July. The PAC has also been a pillar of the Trump campaign’s ground game in swing states. WIRED reporting found that Blitz Canvassing, a contractor for the PAC, was threatening canvassers in Michigan, and transporting them in U-Hauls.

    Earlier in October, Musk appeared at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he repeated false claims that Democrats would allow undocumented immigrants to vote illegally, and encouraged Trump’s supporters to vote.

    In January 2021, the company then known as Twitter banned Trump’s account for incitement to violence during the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. But since taking over and rebranding it as X, Musk has fired many of the people on the teams that worked to keep mis- and disinformation off the platform. Last year, X fired much of what remained of its elections integrity team. After the news broke, Musk posted on X, saying, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

    Barrett says that the America PAC’s Election Integrity Community group augments the work of other election-denying groups, like former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. “This is a parallel anti-election, anti-democracy campaign designed to sow confusion and lay the groundwork for baseless objections to elections after Election Day. This is going on all across the country, and it’s extremely dangerous,” says Barrett. “And we’re going to see the results of it almost immediately when the polls close on November 5th.”

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  • Ahead of the Election, Social Media Platforms Have Given Up

    Ahead of the Election, Social Media Platforms Have Given Up

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    Our social media platforms and government have had four years to get this right. Instead, they’ve thrown up their hands.

    In the days following January 6, Meta, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch suspended former president Donald Trump over posts the companies said glorified the violence at the Capitol. It was the most extreme moderation decision these companies had ever made. Platforms also took sweeping actions to remove thousands of accounts belonging to militias, conspiracy theorists, and the content they shared that led the US to that moment.

    But that didn’t last long.

    This is an edition of the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter. Sign up now to get it in your inbox every week.

    It’s not your average politics newsletter. Makena Kelly and the WIRED Politics team help you make sense of how the internet is shaping our political reality.

    After the 2022 midterms, the balance of power shifted in Congress. Republicans now had a majority—albeit a slim one—in the House of Representatives and used that sliver of power to go after the researchers and trust and safety workers who did the dizzying work of debunking election myths. Jim Jordan was elevated to chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and immediately launched investigations stifling the work of academics at best and launching harassment campaigns against entire moderation teams at worst. As a result of these attacks, the Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the top disinformation research groups, shut down for good over the summer.

    Now, much of the social media infrastructure built to protect our democratic systems in the months and days after the deadly riot has collapsed—either by inattention or force. There are only five days left until Election Day and a chasm has formed in what little foundation remains.

    To start with what we all know: Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, a conspiratorial wasteland where professional disinformation purveyors earn thousands of dollars peddling lies. Musk reinstated accounts belonging to Alex Jones and Andrew Tate, both of which were banned years before the 2020 election cycle even began. And, to bring us to the present day, Musk has spent the last few weeks campaigning for Trump and spreading election lies.

    These fissures in platforms have happened across the board. Last year, Alphabet, Meta, and X reduced the size of their trust and safety teams and Meta completely abandoned a project building a new fact-checking tool as a result of cuts. Not only has Meta cast a blind eye to the militias currently organizing on its platforms, it is auto-generating militia-related groups.

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  • X’s First Transparency Report Since Elon Musk’s Takeover Is Finally Here

    X’s First Transparency Report Since Elon Musk’s Takeover Is Finally Here

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    Today, X released the company’s first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022.

    Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter would release transparency reports every six months.These largely covered the same ground as the new X report, giving specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content removals, as well as data about which content was reported and, in some cases, removed for violating policies. The last transparency report available from Twitter covered the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages long. (X’s is a shorter 15 pages, but requests from governments are also listed elsewhere on the company’s website and have been consistently updated to remain in compliance with various government orders.)

    Comparing the 2021 report to the current X transparency report is a bit difficult, as the way the company measures different things has changed. For instance, in 2021, 11.6 million accounts were reported. Of this 11.6 million, 4.3 million were “actioned” and 1.3 million were suspended. According to the new X report, there were over 224 million reports, of both accounts and pieces of individual content, but the result was 5.2 million accounts being suspended.

    While some numbers remain seemingly consistent across the reports—reports of abuse and harassment are, somewhat predictably, high—in other areas, there’s a stark difference. For instance, in the 2021 report, accounts reported for hateful content accounted for nearly half of all reports, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts actioned. (The reports used to be interactive on the website; the current PDF no longer allows users to flip through the data for more granular breakdowns.) In the new X report, the company says it has taken action on only 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content.

    But this may be due to the fact that X’s policies have changed since it was Twitter, which Theodora Skeadas, a former member of Twitter’s public policy team who helped put together its Moderation Research Consortium, says might change the way the numbers look in a transparency report. For instance, last year the company changed its policies on hate speech, which previously covered misgendering and deadnaming, and rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misinformation in November of 2022.

    “As certain policies have been modified, some content is no longer violative. So if you’re looking at changes in the quality of experience, that might be hard to capture in a transparency report,” she says.

    X has also lost users since Musk’s takeover, further complicating what the new reality of the platform might look like. “If you account for changing usage, is it a lower number?” she asks.

    After taking over the company in October of 2022, Musk fired the majority of the company’s trust and safety staff as well as its policy staff, the people who make the platform’s rules and ensure they’re enforced. Under Musk, the company also began charging for its API, making it harder for researchers and nonprofits to access X data to see what was really going on on the platform. This may also account for changes between the two reports.

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  • Why Threads Is All the Ragebait

    Why Threads Is All the Ragebait

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    One surefire way to go viral on Threads—the Meta-owned Instagram-spinoff social network with more than 200 million users—is to ask a ridiculous question that enrages your followers so much, they just have to chime in to answer you, mock you, or berate you. When it first launched last summer, Threads was seen as a blatant Twitter clone. At the time, that was an appealing attribute, as users fleeing the chaos and toxicity of the platform now known as X were looking for a new place to gather. Threads turned out to be a safe haven from the trolling and engagement bait on X, Reddit, and Facebook, but only for a while. Threads, like any for-profit social media site, was not able to keep those jokers and bad actors at bay. In its effort to boost engagement on the platform, Threads began prioritizing posts with the most replies and comments—which also happen to be the posts that stirred up the most drama and pissed everyone off.

    This week on Gadget Lab, we chat with Business Insider senior correspondent Katie Notopoulos about her personal experiment with rage bait immersion on Threads. We also ask whether social media sites are making the right decision by catering to their most furious users.

    Show Notes

    Read Katie’s story about ragebait on Threads. Read Lauren’s story about the new app SocialAI, where the only human is you, and everyone else is a bot.

    Recommendations

    Katie recommends the reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives on Hulu. Mike recommends the HBO show Industry. Lauren recommends the Apple TV+ show Slow Horses.

    Katie Notopolous can be found on Threads @katienotopoulos. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @[email protected]. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

    How to Listen

    You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

    If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.



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  • Barron Trump Is Finally Taking the Stage

    Barron Trump Is Finally Taking the Stage

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    Donald Trump’s youngest son, and his only child shared with Melania Trump, has largely remained out of the public eye to the degree any former president’s child could. Well, until recently. Newly 18, Barron Trump is now a freshman at NYU and a burgeoning political adviser to his father.

    For the past two weeks, my TikTok For You page has been filled with posts from New York University students posting clips of Barron Trump attending classes as if he were Sasquatch: the videos are all blurry and taken hurriedly, and mostly feature fellow students trying to track down the once-elusive Trump. These cryptic videos, complete with shaky camera angles set to songs like Chamillionaire’s “Ridin,’” are all over, taken from “day in my life”-style student videos and reposted to the dozens of Barron stan accounts across TikTok and Instagram.

    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.

    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.

    These posts have garnered millions of views and look like paparazzi shots. You can tell from the camera angle that the people filming are trying to hide their cameras under backpacks or sweaters. New genres of Barron memes have flourished.

    This is an edition of the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter. Sign up now to get it in your inbox every week.

    It’s not your average politics newsletter. Makena Kelly and the WIRED Politics team help you make sense of how the internet is shaping our political reality.

    “I feel like Barron could’ve gone to any school, but the fact that he chose one of the most liberal schools in the country speaks volumes,” Grace Rowley, an NYU student who posted about Barron on TikTok, told me. “I was shocked and super intrigued that he would choose NYU. Would love to speak with him and would love to read his ‘why NYU’ essay.”

    This kind of projection has been part of Barron’s story for years.

    Before September, Barron was an enigma. He had no social media accounts and rarely made public appearances. For eight years, his personal life and interests were left to the public’s imagination. In 2020, rumors spread on TikTok that his then classmates had identified his Roblox username, “JumpyTurtlee.” The account’s bio said that the user was a fan of anime and K-pop and supported LGBTQ+ rights. While the rumor was never confirmed, it became part of Barron’s online mythos. Users would grab clips of him looking glum and make it sound as if he were miserable and despised his father, and then post them under the hashtag #savebarron2020.

    Barron was the subject of dozens of pieces of fan fiction on sites like Archive of Our Own and Wattpad, and on fan accounts that recycle the same few clips and images over and over again. As Slate writer Luke Winkie noted earlier this year, Barron became a blank canvas for anyone even somewhat interested in the Trump family to project their own “fantasies” on to.



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