Left-wing conspiracy theorists have claimed the 2024 US presidential election was “stolen”, as posts falsely alleging Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network was used to manipulate the result spread on social media.
Claims that 20m votes in the election have “disappeared” or that Starlink was used to interfere with vote-counting machines have been shared by thousands of people across X, Threads and TikTok.
A nine-minute video claiming states had used “Starlink in order to tally up or count ballots” had more than 100,000 likes, 55,000 shares and had been viewed almost 900,000 times on TikTok. The video falsely claimed: “This is why the numbers don’t make sense.”
Similar claims that Mr Musk, a Trump ally, may have used Starlink to tamper with the election have spread widely across Threads, the social network owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, as well as on X, which is owned by Mr Musk and was previously known as Twitter.
On Threads, one post with more than 42,000 views and 840 shares claimed Mr Musk “knew who won four hours earlier than we did”.
It alleged Starlink had been “exploding” communications satellites, with Mr Musk “destroying the evidence”. Another lengthy post with more than 370,000 views and 6,300 shares claimed that voting had been hacked “at the tabulation level”.
Hashtags such as “TrumpCheated” have been shared across Threads and X, while calls for recounts have been shared with the phrase “SwingStateHandRecount”.
There is no evidence to support the claims spreading on social media. US voting machines are typically disconnected from the internet in order to prevent interference.
The hashtag #DoNotConcedeKamala received 30,300 mentions over the course of eight hours on Nov 6, according to NewsGuard.
Analysts at Cyabra, an Israeli start-up that tracks disinformation campaigns, said the surge in these posts was initially driven by a network of fake accounts, before being picked up by real online influencers.
Cyabra found that 270 apparently fake X profiles sent more than 2,100 posts including the hashtag, which were viewed around 40m times. After this, genuine Harris supporters began to share the same claims.