Disinformation from adversaries and Americans swamped 2024 election

The swirl of disinformation surrounding the 2024 election marked a new high for foreign influence efforts and the elevation of false claims by people within the U.S., raising questions about the impact on the electorate.

Russia, Iran, and China continued to promote content that sows division among Americans, perfecting techniques and reaching new audiences.

But those long-standing efforts were made in an ecosystem in which prominent Americans are increasingly promoting false claims, including President-elect Trump, who continues to wrongly assert that he won the 2020 election, and that U.S. contests are plagued with fraud.

“In terms of what was out there, it's almost like what wasn't out there? It's not just in the run up to the election, but for weeks and years now, really, there’s been persistent narratives about election integrity that have been fueled by domestic and foreign nation state actors,” said David Salvo, managing director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and Malign Autocratic Influence at the German Marshall Fund.

“All that was sort of designed to exacerbate this existing strain in American society that believes that the electoral process is corrupt and fraudulent. And honestly, I think the Russian propaganda machine was gearing up for a nailbiter of an election so that if we didn't know who the winner was [on Election Day], they would be ready to go with even more content.”

Fake videos from Russia that showed Vice President Kamala Harris involved in a hit and run and another accusing her husband of accepting a bribe are among the countless videos and articles that circulated false claims.

Others falsely portrayed noncitizens attempting to vote, while Trump and his running mate JD Vance promoted a false conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ill.

Many of the false claims were funneled through websites designed to look like real news outlets while other Russian-backed narratives were spread via contracts made with conservative American influencers.

Russia and Iran also ramped up their Spanish-language disinformation efforts, improving their ability to reach a growing pocket of the American electorate.

There were numerous instances of accounts purporting to be the FBI warning of election issues – all followed by a string of discredited bomb threats made at polling places.

“The information environment was definitely polluted in this election cycle,” said Laura Thornton, senior director for global democracy programs with the McCain Institute.

Thornton said the country isn’t “operating on the same cylinders” as in past elections as organizations that track and counter disinformation have been bombarded with lawsuits and accused of working to censor voices.

“So that's one thing that's really different. I think another thing that's really different is you have the purchase of Twitter by someone who has very open political ambitions and opinions and is very secret about his algorithm. So you have Elon Musk, who's been promised a role in the Trump administration, also controlling one of the most popular social media sites. I think that creates complications in the information space,” she said.

“You also have another thing that you didn't have a few years ago, which is an election that is an existential issue for the Kremlin. Russia is fighting, as we all know, a full-scale, unjust war in Ukraine, and Ukraine's support from the United States is a threat to Russia.”

U.S. intelligence agencies tracking foreign influence efforts issued repeated warnings in the months leading up to the election, documenting multiple fake videos as well as broader shifts in using AI and adopting more sophisticated techniques for making content appear authentic.

“Russia is the most active threat. Influence actors linked to Russia in particular are manufacturing videos and creating fake articles to undermine the legitimacy of the election, instill fear in voters regarding the election process, and suggest Americans are using violence against each other due to political preferences, judging from information available to the [intelligence community],” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency wrote in a joint statement late Monday.

Russia operates hundreds of fake news sites, many purporting to be local news outlets, that were launched through its “Doppelganger” project.

“They're just paper tigers. They're just a way for them to repurpose information and not identify it under RT,” Thornton said, referencing the publication previously known as Russia Today.

And through its contract with Tenet Media, Russia was also involved in getting influencers like Bennie Johnson and Tim Pool to spread Russian narratives – though both have said they were unaware of the true funder behind the contract and did not shift their content in any way.

“Russia is using front companies to try to get authentic American voices to be useful idiots and disseminate Russian created propaganda,” Salvo said.

But even outside of foreign influence operations, plenty of Americans already play a role in forwarding disinformation.

“You don't need nation state actors involved for that sort of disinformation to have a real impact. You've got Americans who are very eager to amplify nonsense, and tens of millions of people believe it,” he said.

Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters, particularly Hispanic men, also calls into question the impact growing Spanish-language disinformation campaigns may have had.

“It's certainly a demographic that Russian state actors have intentionally targeted,” Salvo said.

“The last two to three years, really, there's been a real uptick in that activity. So can you draw a causal link between that activity and how Hispanic-American men voted in this election? No. But it's not a coincidence that we're seeing significant Spanish language propaganda from Russia targeting the Latino American community. That's not coincidental. It's by design.”

The speed and saliency of the disinformation surrounding the two hurricanes that battered the East Coast also showed the power of such narratives and the difficulty in dispelling them.

GOP figures promoted inaccurate information about the weather events that ranged from the bizarre – with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) asserting that “they can control the weather” – to false information suggesting FEMA would only give very limited disaster assistance.

“It gets back to something that I think everyone's lamented, which is just that our society lives in really pretty insulated info bubbles, and it's so hard to get a shared set of facts. So even if you know the Republican governor is saying, ‘No, this is not happening,’ a huge subset of Americans never even hear that. They just don't hear it,” Thornton said.

“So it makes it really hard to quote, unquote fact check or provide accurate information because we were unable to penetrate these different spaces.”

The disinformation surrounding the hurricanes is just a snapshot compared to the steady drumbeat of false claims about the election.

“I think that's a really good example of how fragile our information space is right now,” Salvo said of the potency of false hurricane-related claims.

“I think it speaks to this increasingly dominant strain in our information consumption, right, where more and more people are skeptical of pretty much everything they read. They're looking for some sort of hidden hand behind everything that's happening. And it's the same with election integrity as it is with emergency management.”

It’s unclear, however, the extent disinformation impacted the election or its results, a contest Trump won handily, securing for the first time the popular vote as well as the electoral college.

“That's just sort of the million-dollar question. Like, I don't know how you can quantify its impact on results,” Thornton said.

“But to say it has no influence, I think, is incorrect.”