As the presidential election draws nearer, the spread of bogus information online is getting a huge boost from social media accounts that have been created anonymously.

The reposts and expressions of shock from public figures followed quickly after a user on the social platform X who uses a pseudonym claimed that a government website had revealed “skyrocketing” rates of voters registering without a photo ID in three states this year — two of them crucial to the presidential contest.

“Extremely concerning,” X owner Elon Musk replied twice to the post this past week.

“Are migrants registering to vote using SSN?” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, an ally of former President Donald Trump, asked on Instagram, using the acronym for Social Security number.

Trump himself posted to his own social platform within hours to ask, “Who are all those voters registering without a Photo ID in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Arizona??? What is going on???”

…

Yet by the time they tried to correct the record, the false claim had spread widely. In three days, the pseudonymous user’s claim amassed more than 63 million views on X, according to the platform’s metrics. A thorough explanation from Richer attracted a fraction of that, reaching 2.4 million users.

The incident sheds light on how social media accounts that shield the identities of the people or groups behind them through clever slogans and cartoon avatars have come to dominate right-wing political discussion online even as they spread false information.

  • @lennybirdEnglish
    -6•8 months ago

    This confidently-incorrect fellow, who:

    • Increasingly deflected,
    • resorted to more personal attacks and,
    • ultimately ran away from the discussion after I started citing primary sourced quotes like:

    the biggest headaches for Democratic leader Mike Mansfield often came not from Republicans but from the conservative bloc of his own party caucus

    and:

    Dominating the GOP caucus, many conservatives believed the civil rights bill represented an unprecedented intrusion by the state into the daily lives of Americans.

    and:

    You had a battle with the conservatives on the committee, the southern Democrats, conservative Republicans, but you had just as tough a battle with the liberals. Their position was the old story of the half loaf or three-quarters of a loaf, and [now they were saying] “we’ll settle for nothing less [than the whole loaf.]” . . . We shared their views, and we’d love to do it their way.

    From https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/civil_rights/cloture_finalpassage.htm and https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/summer/civil-rights-act

    For which he could not even respond to let alone refute — Truly believed the 1963 Birmingham letter was some smoking-gun when — checks notes — those same white moderates MLK Jr. was talking about wound up passingthe Civil Rights Act 1 year later.

    Yes, you read those quotes correctly: Liberals were pushing to strengthen the Civil Rights Act while conservatives were trying to water it down.

    Smh.

    Don’t tell him which ideology such surviving activists from John Lewis of the Edmund Pettus Bridge march or Jim Clyburn, both of the civil Rights era joined under.

    Edit: See what I mean, guys? Still has nothing substantive to respond with. Truth can hurt sometimes. I’m still floored he tried to claim that conservatives supported the Civil Rights Act more than Liberals lol.