Candidates Keep Pushing Election Denial Online — Because It Works
On the evening of June 27 this year, Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, posted a Fox News interview on Facebook claiming there was “a mountain of evidence” about hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes in the state. The video collected at least 291,700 views, shares and comments.
Later, she followed up on Twitter: “🚨 BREAKING: Forensic Audit/Paper Ballot Analysis confirms (once again) that President Trump won Arizona in a landslide. 🚨,” including a photo that falsely asserted the “authentic” 2020 election outcome showed 59% of votes had gone to former President Donald Trump. Her tweet was liked and shared at least 58,700 times.
Lake is among candidates campaigning for next week’s election by denying the results of the last one. While the conspiracies have been roundly debunked in post-election audits and the results of dozens of lawsuits brought by former President Donald Trump, they’re still useful to candidates like Lake — for drawing attention, according to a new Bloomberg News analysis.
Candidates who have pushed the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen routinely saw their posts collecting more engagement overall compared to the performance of each candidate’s average post, Bloomberg found. The review covered the Facebook and Twitter posts of every Republican running for Senate, Congress, governor, attorney general or secretary of state this year. The social media companies, which have alerted users about election falsehoods in the past, did not have any context added to the misleading posts that surfaced at the time of Bloomberg’s review.
“What these data show is that promoting lies about the 2020 election is profitable for both candidates and social media platforms themselves,” said Nina Jankowicz, vice president at the nonprofit group Centre for Information Resilience, which aims to counter disinformation. “Candidates recognize that if they fall in line with the prevailing rhetoric about stolen elections they are rewarded with incredibly engaged supporters.”
A spokesperson for Lake declined to comment.
After the 2020 vote, while Trump was disputing the results and pushing his “stop the steal” campaign, social media companies responded by labeling any users’ posts about elections with extra context from the official results. After determining that Trump helped incite the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection — and that his posts might lead to more violence — Facebook, Twitter and YouTube blocked him from posting.
Now, other candidates have taken up his same strategy, successfully saturating the idea across the electorate almost two years later. The responses to their social media posts tend to be positive, as the stolen election lie has become a popular rallying cry.
Bloomberg analyzed more than 1 million tweets and Facebook posts from hundreds of candidates who said they believed — somewhat or fully — that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The analysis focused on postings that contained phrases or keywords used by election deniers, including “rigged election,” “illegitimate president” or “2000 Mules,” a debunked documentary by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, which falsely suggests ballot “mules” aligned with the Democratic Party were paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in swing states.
It’s unclear whether social media companies’ motivations “are purely profit or political expedience — wishing to avoid the ire of those who might run afoul of their policies,” Jankowicz said. “But the detrimental impact of their lack of action on our democracy can’t be understated.”
Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc., when asked to respond to a series of detailed questions about the prevalence of election-denying posts on its platform, instead took aim at Bloomberg for “intentionally” excluding competitors like YouTube and TikTok. “Meta has invested a huge amount to help protect elections and prevent voter interference, and we have clear policies about the kind of content we’ll remove, such as misinformation about who can vote and when, calls for violence related to voting, as well as ads that encourage people not to vote or question the legitimacy of the upcoming election,” spokesman Kevin McAlister said in a statement.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Election denialism thrives on YouTube and TikTok, too, and their amplification of misinformation exceeds Facebook’s, according to a recent report from the Integrity Institute, an advocacy group. The institute also said it found that Facebook had the most instances of misinformation of all platforms, which it says it was able to record because of the company’s third-party fact checking efforts. But Bloomberg’s own review found that midterm candidates generally had a more complete presence on Facebook and Twitter. Video platforms have also made their content far less accessible for analysis by outside researchers.
Bloomberg’s review found 160 candidates promoting the falsehood that Biden had lost the presidential race, going back at least a year. Nearly 400 election-denying posts from Republican candidates on Facebook collected at least 421,300 total likes, shares and comments across the platform, and reached as many as 120.4 million people, according to CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analysis tool. On Twitter, 526 tweets promoting the Big Lie carried at least 401,200 shares on the platform, according to Bloomberg’s analysis.
Meanwhile, the social media firms are occupied by other crises. Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who started off his third quarter 2020 earnings call by noting the importance of protecting democracy through controls on Facebook and Instagram, made no mention of the upcoming midterms on last week’s call. Instead, he reassured investors that his big bet on virtual and augmented reality, called the metaverse, was worthy of their patience. Meta’s stock has dropped more than 70% so far this year.
Meta said Zuckerberg this year promoted Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, in order for him to lead on issues like elections, and that Clegg had spoken publicly about the 2022 US midterms twice in the last month.
Twitter, too, is undergoing a major transition. Elon Musk, whose $44 billion acquisition of the company closed last week, has spent time publicly debating new product ideas, gutting the company’s leadership team and planning for wider cuts. Hate speech surged on the platform amid his takeover, Bloomberg reported, and Twitter employees in charge of moderation have been widely curtailed in their ability to monitor misinformation ahead of the midterms. “We’re staying vigilant against attempts to manipulate conversations about the 2022 US midterms,” Yoel Roth, the head of safety and integrity at Twitter, tweeted Tuesday.
Some of the candidates in Bloomberg’s analysis appeared to slow their prognostications after winning their primaries, thus needing to make their messages more palatable to a general election audience.
But others have continued. The rhetoric isn’t just about 2020 — it’s priming the electorate to doubt Tuesday’s results and the presidential results in 2024, said Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Even if the candidates don’t win their elections, the topic’s popularity makes winning less necessary: it sets fans up to expect that any loss would be rigged, she said.
“Ultimately, using social media to spread election denialism is about sowing doubt in democratic processes and normalizing contestation,” Donovan added. “If we continue down this path, political violence will become a more common response to elections in general.”
Of the 540 Republican candidates analyzed by Bloomberg, social media posts by Lake, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, garnered the most engagements across Facebook and Twitter. She posted about a stolen election 23 times on Facebook in the past year, racking up at least 81,400 likes, shares and comments on the social network. On Twitter, she posted 40 times, collecting nearly 65,000 retweets, according to Bloomberg’s analysis.
If Lake becomes Arizona governor, she is likely to keep Arizona at the center of a national fight over election denial ahead of the 2024 presidential race, when Trump is expected to run again. In an unorthodox first-time campaign for political office, Lake embraced Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud and has declined to say if she would accept the results of this election if she lost.
Bloomberg’s analysis of Lake’s social media presence shows how her posts denying the results of the 2020 presidential race netted her better engagement than an average post. The Fox News interview in which she pushed the false notion of widespread fraud in Arizona received 15 times more likes and was commented on 50 times more on Facebook than another Fox News interview she posted in May, where she discussed her border policy for the state.
Social Media Posts Spreading “Stolen Election” Myth Vastly Outperform Kari Lake’s Regular Posts
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This stolen election post received 17X more likes and 50X more comments than this regular post
Stolen election post
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This stolen election post received 17X more likes and 50X more comments than this regular post
Below is a post by Kari Lake about her border policy. It generated around 1K likes on Facebook.
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The next post, where she speaks about a stolen election, was significantly more popular. It generated 17K likes and 5K comments on Facebook.
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Other Republicans in Arizona — including state Representative Mark Finchem, the candidate for secretary of state, and Abraham Hamadeh, who is running for attorney general — collected significant engagement across Facebook and Twitter, Bloomberg’s analysis found. Hamadeh posted 30 times about a stolen election on Twitter in the past year, the third-most prolific tweeter about the topic among election-denying Republican candidates.
Finchem posted about a stolen election 43 times on Facebook — by far the candidate with the most posts about the topic on the social network — and 66 times on Twitter, becoming the second most-prolific poster after Kari Lake in the past year.
“All I want for Christmas is a few arrests of election fraud criminals,” Finchem said on Oct. 9. The post collected at least 22,070 likes and retweets.
Finchem, who if elected would be in charge of ensuring the integrity of the 2024 presidential race in the state, said on Monday that his Twitter account was suspended for “speaking the truth with one week left until the election.” A day later, he credited new Twitter owner Musk for restoring his account.
Finchem did not respond to inquiries from Bloomberg seeking comment. A Hamadeh spokesperson told Bloomberg that he had never stated the election was “stolen”; rather, Hamadeh “recognizes that the media, courts and tech giants worked in a concerted effort to place their fingers on the scale to affect the outcome of the 2020 election alongside officials that changed standard rules of election in the middle of the game.”
Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and Republican nominee for vice president in 2008, denied the results of the last presidential race 23 times in the last year, according to Bloomberg’s analysis. Her posts garnered the most interactions of all the “stolen election” talk on Facebook among the candidates — at least 116,060 likes, shares and comments. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Analyzing her social media presence also revealed an apparent engagement strategy Palin deploys on the platform: posting the same link multiple times, knowing each post will elicit a reaction — and more engagement — from her followers.
Between June and October, Palin posted the same story from her website eight times, describing how the state Republican Party in Texas had declared, during its convention in June, that President Joseph Biden was not legitimately elected. Though the link accurately covered the Texas GOP’s statement at the time, her followers shared the post widely to spread the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen. “We the people that love this country knew that he didn’t win!!” proclaimed one top commenter on Palin’s post.
The posts collected at least 57,600 likes, shares and comments across Facebook, and performed two to five times better than Palin’s average post on the platform, according to CrowdTangle’s “overperforming” metric, which calculates how well a certain Facebook post does compared to an average post on the same Facebook page.
Other Republican candidates, including Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis routinely saw their election-denying posts on Facebook collect more likes, shares and comments than their average post.
In February, Gaetz posted a video in which he interviewed Greene about Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “He can no longer deny that there was voter fraud on a widespread level,” Greene said in the video. “He can no longer deny that he lied to everyone in Georgia.” The video collected 20,000 views, with the comments calling for Raffensperger to be held accountable. “Steal. 🤡cheating 🤡 lies,” posted one commenter. “Enough damage.”
Gaetz, Greene and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment.
Even a candidate like Mike Collins, who has fewer followers and is running for Congress in Georgia, has been able to use the idea of a stolen election to boost his presence on Facebook. Collins has just shy of 7,000 followers on the social network. Given his audience size, his posts did not collect as much engagement as some of his other heavyweight Republican peers.
Still, Collins’s posts about the Big Lie did more than six times better than his average posts. Collins did not respond to a request for comment.