As ex-President Donald Trump was on his way to an election victory yesterday, we at Pyrra saw a significant change in rhetoric coming from unmoderated social media platforms. In the year or so leading up to the election, many of those websites had been rife with increasing levels of incendiary political rhetoric but, suddenly, it appeared the taps had been shut on the flow of the most outrageous messaging. On election day, platforms favored by users of all political stripes were full of exhortations to vote, and we saw partisan sniping that was more offensive and violent than it was in the pre-Trump era of American politics, but the temperature had nevertheless been noticeably lowered, at least for the day.
Through last weekend, we were tracking thousands-upon-thousands of incendiary posts peddling election-fraud falsehoods, claims that all Democrats are evil, calls for political violence, and more. While such posts featured more prominently on platforms favored by far-right users, many could also also be found on platforms popular among centrists and the left.
The most extreme rhetoric quieted yesterday as it became apparent that the former President would be returning to the White House. (Simultaneously, prominent users on mainstream social media platforms, such as X, are reporting that they have lost hundreds of followers overnight from accounts that some of these users suspect were bots designed to influence the US election.)
Yet overnight and into today, we observed an increase in election denialism coming from users on mainstream platforms such as Reddit, while users on other platforms with lax moderation saw Trump's victory as evidence that the 2020 election was not stolen and exhorted other users to stop saying it was. The so-far moderate amount of election-fraud talk appears to be coming from centrist and left-leaning users, albeit in a tone that is markedly less incendiary than what we saw in the runup to yesterday’s vote.
“Given the tallies we have, quite a few mail-in ballots don’t seem to have been counted,” wrote a Reddit user who went on to ask whether Trump fraudulently won this election. “There’s now a question whether, in addition to genuine issues in the populace, Trump accomplished election fraud. The Repubrigands will obviously throw everything they have at keeping this unproven/unprovable, but it is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if we’d see a secession movement somewhere out of wanting nothing to do with an obvious usurper who definitely isn’t a Well-Intentioned Extremist.”
It’s reasonable to imagine that this narrative could gain steam and that, as this happens, the fraud rhetoric becomes increasingly vitriolic, stoked by both domestic and foreign actors who want to cause chaos in the United States. Such chatter could be used to, for example, incite the far-left into taking actions that will provoke reactions from Trump operatives and supporters, setting the stage for a downward spiral.
Again, the discourse around these claims is relatively calm, with users on platforms popular among the far-right deploying the counterargument that election-fraud has been incredibly rare in modern US history.
“Why won’t democrats accept the results of a free and fair election,” reads a comment on 4chan in response to an X post demanding that Democrats don’t concede victory to Trump. “Don’t they know no evidence of systemic election fraud has ever come to light and many studies have found that it is extremely rare?”
Pyrra, as always, will continue monitoring these online spaces to see how this situation evolves.
