2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG
RAPID RESEARCH NOTE
This is part of an ongoing series of rapid research blog posts and rapid research analysis about the 2024 U.S. elections from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. This research memo identifies election rumors using a combination of qualitative, quantitative, digital ethnographic, and visual, methodologies. It was crossposted on the CIP’s election rumor research Substack newsletter.
Since Donald Trump won the presidential election, rumors and audience attention have focused on interpreting the results. A new rumor has emerged on the left as part of this collective sensemaking process. Social media users speculated that Starlink, a satellite-based Internet provider owned by Elon Musk, was used to alter election results in Trump’s favor. Fact-checks by PolitiFact and AFP have debunked these claims. The rhetoric and tropes of this rumor have the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory, which academics typically define as an explanation for social or political events that suggests without verifiable evidence that perceived ill-intentioned actors are secretly plotting to alter social, political, and economic institutions to their benefit — such as elections. In this research note, we analyze the spread of this conspiracy theory on X and its rumoring dynamics within left-leaning audiences on the platform.
Left-leaning accounts with relatively small followings (ranging from 10k to 200k) have driven the conversation about this conspiracy theory on X, especially in its early stages on November 9 and 10. Most engagement on X comes from tweets posted by these accounts over these two days. On November 11, tweets rumoring about this conspiracy theory continued, but got fewer retweets. At the same time, several right-leaning accounts joined the conversation, mainly to mock left-leaning speculation and dismiss the rumor as a conspiracy theory.
Analyzing the spread of the conspiracy theory
The crux of the theory postulates that Starlink was used to alter vote counts in Trump’s favor. They speculate, without evidence, that tabulators that are used to count paper ballots, were tampered with via an internet connection: namely Musk’s Starlink internet provider. It is important to note that most machines used in U.S. elections are not connected to the Internet.
We saw several X users sharing TikTok videos endorsing the Starlink conspiracy theory, suggesting that this claim may have emerged on TikTok before migrating to X. The conspiratorial rumoring later peaked on November 10 on platforms such as X and Threads, a newsfeed style platform owned by Meta. Though a particular TikTok video went viral on X around November 9, we saw rumoring in both left-leaning New Age spirituality and technology aficionado TikTok communities speculating that Musk was involved in tampering with voting machines as early as November 6. The conspiratorial rumors that spread on X deployed rhetoric that signals technological expertise, while also being vague and nonspecific.
Figures 1 and 2 provide complementary views of the same X data. Figure 1 shows the most retweeted posts about Starlink rumors (with a minimum of 10 retweets). In contrast, Figure 2 highlights the highest follower accounts (with a minimum of 50,000 followers) engaged in the conversation. Figure 1 reveals that engagement was driven primarily by left-leaning, low-follower accounts, particularly on November 9 and 10. In contrast, Figure 2 shows that high-follower accounts engaged later on, predominantly from right-leaning voices, including newsbrokers we have written about previously, who were mocking or debunking the conspiracy theory. These graphs illustrate that most high-profile left-leaning accounts didn’t engage with the left-leaning Starlink rumors, with the exception of @johncoopertweet’s amplification (visible in Figure 2). This is in stark contrast with the right-leaning rumors we’ve analyzed before, where right-leaning accounts with high-follower counts tend to amplify rumors that are gaining engagement among right-leaning audiences.
Figure 1: Graph showing the cumulative number of tweets about rumors alleging or insinuating that Elon Musk used Starlink to interfere in the 2024 election. The y-axis shows the total number of tweets related to rumoring, while the visualized circles represent tweets retweeted ten or more times and are sized by the number of retweets. The timezone visualized is UTC, five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time (EST). Tweets began gaining virality around 4:30 PM EST on November 9, 2024.
Figure 2: Graph showing the cumulative number of tweets about rumors alleging or insinuating that Elon Musk used Starlink to interfere in the 2024 election. The y-axis shows the total number of tweets related to rumoring, while the visualized circles represent tweets from accounts with 50,000 or more followers, sized by follower count. The timezone visualized is UTC, five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time (EST). The two posts without repost counts are themselves reposts, which cannot be reposted and, therefore, don’t have engagement metrics listed here.
Observations
In our work, we generally anonymize X accounts that don’t meet a threshold of 250,000 followers or aren’t public figures. In analyzing this rumor, we realized many of the left-leaning accounts that spread this conspiracy theory fell below this threshold, and thus chose to anonymize them. Much of our previous work has indicated that right-leaning communities have developed infrastructure for “evidence generation,” newsbrokers, and mechanisms to amplify or endorse claims. This case study indicates that left-leaning communities on X may not have the same rumoring dynamics and structures as those on the right. These initial findings must be further examined in future left-leaning rumoring on X. It is possible that some analogous kind of infrastructure and activity occurs on other platforms.
Right-leaning creators with large followings engaged with these conspiratorial rumors, but the posts they created did not get a lot of retweets. There could be a number of potential factors contributing to this observation, and we hope they will be explored in future research. First, audience attention on X may be more drawn to allegations of malfeasance than to refutations or debunkings of it; this aligns with previous research. Second, there may not be any political value for right-leaning creators in prolonging conversation or drawing attention to debunking a left-leaning conspiracy theory that doesn’t contribute to a larger political narrative — especially when few left-leaning elites, on or offline, have amplified the conspiracy theory.
Conclusion
Claims about individuals who own or have other business interests in voting machines and related technologies are common in election rumoring. In the past, we have seen speculation from the left and right that owners of voting machine companies will use their perceived access to election technology to interfere with elections in service of their own interests. Such claims may be particularly persuasive to many, given that election technology is complex. Such unfamiliar technology may seem opaque and complex — like a ‘black box’ — especially given that most people only interact with voting machines, at most, a few times a year. The security measures, checks and balances, and fail safes — human, legal, and technological — that guarantee the integrity of the voting process using voting machines are not necessarily as visible to voters as a machine itself.
The Starlink conspiracy theory and the rumors surrounding it resonate with recurrent claims during this and prior election cycles that machines used to cast and tally votes are vulnerable to interference through Internet connections. (Note that most jurisdictions do not use machines with internet connectivity — which we’ve written about in more detail here). For instance, a 2020 conspiracy theory known as “Italygate” spread on the right alleging that Italian satellites were used to alter results for Biden received particular attention due to the first Trump administration’s interest in them. While the claims are similar, the rumoring dynamics on the left are markedly different due to the lack of endorsement or amplification by left-leaning influencers, candidates, or party elites.