Trump’s premature claim of victory stokes confusion and conflict online

Far-right influencers lined up behind Trump, praising him for going “on offense” and lashing out at social networking services for applying labels to his posts noting that the count was still ongoing.

There were notable exceptions, however. Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit with a vast online following, wrote in a tweet shortly after the president’s remarks from the White House, “No, Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say he has.”

On Twitter, where unverified allegations that Democrats were trying usurp the vote surged under the hashtag #stopthesteal throughout Election Day, the tone sharpened after Trump’s remarks from the White House shortly before 2:30 a.m., that “We did win this election.” He said that he would appeal to the Supreme Court to halt the counting of ballots in numerous states, though he did not say on what grounds he would make the appeal.

A Wednesday morning report from SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks political extremism, reported a Twitter account saying, “Trump won [and] any attempts to alter the outcome should be treated as acts of treason.”

The monitoring group found a different user on Twitter taking a more belligerent tone, “And so the boogaloo begins” — a reference to a far-right movement that contends the United States will soon descend into civil war. The movement, which is virulently anti-government, has fueled numerous cases of real-world violence, including the fatal shooting of a security guard at a federal court in Oakland in May.

A neo-Nazi group on Telegram, a messaging app with little moderation, predicted “actual civil war” could be weeks away, according to SITE.

“The far-right adopted a near-unanimously supportive and combative posture,” the monitoring group reported. “Supporters further indicated that a contested election would lead to far-right demonstrations and possible acts of violence.”

On TheDonald, a pro-Trump message board previously banned from Reddit, roughly 6,000 accounts boosted an early-morning thread saying “they are trying to STEAL the election. We will never let them do it.”

Dozens of users called for “war.” “Lock and load,” one responded; “I’m ready,” another said. One account, named “America1stAndOnly,” said they were “standing by and keeping my rifle by my side.”

Long before the polls closed, researchers tracking disinformation on social media had grown alarmed about the prospect of calls for violence in the case of a close, hotly contested election whose results were not immediately known. Numerous analysts and state officials had warned of the potential for late shifts toward the Democrats, who disproportionately voted through mail ballots, which in several states were counted later than others.

Misleading images showing piles of bricks, for example, were used on Tuesday to bolster claims that left-wing activists were preparing for dangerous street brawls. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, in a Zoom call with reporters for a disinformation research consortium, warned of the risk that social media posts might amount to “a match thrown into a pile of dry leaves.”

But while anger played out in isolated and predictably partisan corners of the Internet, fears of widespread election-day unrest ultimately did not unfold.

Facebook and Twitter, enforcing new policies governing premature claims of victory, applied labels to the president’s Wednesday-morning posts accusing Democrats of “trying to STEAL the Election” and falsely arguing that, “Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”

Trump’s post on Twitter claiming victory was quickly hidden with a warning by the company. Facebook appended a notice advising, “Final results may be different from initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks.”

But reaction to the president’s premature claims of victory, and false assertions of widespread fraud as the only possible impediment to his second term showed how he has advanced and exploited the fracturing of the country’s information ecosystem, with more and more Americans self-selecting into partisan echo chambers.

On fringe platforms that have picked up new users because of heightened moderation on the major social networking services, Trump’s most hard-line supporters urged each other off cable networks that cautioned against the president’s claims, even longtime conservative favorite Fox News.

“Go to OAN,” one wrote on the MeWe service, in a channel devoted to Pennsylvania, recommending the adamantly pro-Trump One America News.

“You have to get buy-in from the mainstream to have big cultural impact,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. As the results arrived on Tuesday, she said, “most people are watching the networks, not social media streams.” But as the count drags on in the ensuing days, more and more voters may search online for confirmation of their existing biases.

The harsh tone followed months of unproven allegations by Trump, leading Republicans and widely followed online conservative figures that Democrats were planning to commit widespread fraud, especially in urban areas in swing states. Accounts of an election-day incident in Philadelphia, when a Republican poll watcher was temporarily prevented from entering a polling place, garnered 287 million likes, retweets and views across Twitter, according to researchers who tracked the incident, which was recounted in misleading ways online.

The Trump campaign on Wednesday morning attempted to capitalize on anger over false allegations of a stolen election, sending fundraising emails saying Democrats will ” do whatever it takes to manipulate the results.” We “ask for you to step up ONE LAST TIME and DEFEND YOUR PRESIDENT!” one email said just before soliciting donations. “Everything we’ve worked for is on the line.”

Some far-right users online said the social-media sites’ increased levels of fact-checking and content moderation, such as marking certifiably false claims as “disputed,” were election-skewing attempts to censor the president and tantamount to “treason.” The companies said the rules applied to all posts across the political divide, and data show Trump has had no issues getting his message across: On Twitter alone, he has gained more than 270,000 followers since election day began.

In stoking claims about the authenticity of the vote, Trump touched off a wave of skepticism about the integrity of the system among his supporters online. They quickly blasted the election as fraudulent, sharing posts, photos and videos online questioning the veracity of mail-in ballots despite a long documented history of such voting being safe and secure. Some pointed to news organizations’ incomplete electoral maps — still being updated as states continue their counts — as a sign votes are being suppressed.

“Trump was winning in Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina with only a few percent of votes remaining, when they stopped counting votes and all news channels went offline,” tweeted one user. “And suddenly Biden is apparently winning in all of these states?”

Amplifying Trump was a vast network of influential conservative accounts that he has sought to incubate as some of his staunchest, most effective surrogates.

“They stopped counting votes because the Republicans were winning,” tweeted Brigitte Gabriel, the founder of ACT for America, which styles itself as a “grass-roots national security organization.”

Her post shortly before 2:30 a.m. had been shared nearly 5,000 times in a matter of a few hours.