A curious set of claims has recently emerged from the right-wing corners of the social-media platform X: FEMA is systematically abandoning Trump-supporting Hurricane Helene victims; Democrats (and perhaps Jewish people) are manipulating the weather; Haitian immigrants are eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio. These stories seem absurd to most people. But to a growing number of Americans living in bespoke realities, wild rumors on X carry weight. Political influencers, elites, and prominent politicians on the right are embracing even pathologically outlandish claims made by their base. They know that amplifying online rumors carries little cost—and offers considerable political gain.

Unverified claims that spread from person to person, filling the voids where uncertainty reigns, are as old as human communication itself. Some of the juiciest rumors inspire outrage and contradict official accounts—and from time to time, such a claim turns out to be true. Sharing a rumor is a form of community participation, a way of signaling solidarity with friends, ostracizing some out-group, or both. Political rumors are particularly well suited to the current incarnation of X, a platform that evolved from a place for real-time news and conversations into a gladiatorial arena for partisan fights, owned by a reflexive contrarian with a distaste for media, institutions, and most authority figures.

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When Elon Musk bought the platform, then known as Twitter, in 2022, he argued that it had become too quick to censor heterodox and conservative ideas. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” he said in April 2022, shortly after initiating his purchase, “which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” But Musk quickly broomed out most of the Trust and Safety team that addressed false and misleading content, along with spam, foreign bots, and other problems. As Musk has drifted to the right—his profile picture now features him in a MAGA hat—the platform he rebranded as X has become the center of a right-wing political culture built upon a fantastical rumor mill. Although false and misleading ideas also spread on Facebook, Telegram, and Trump’s own platform, Truth Social, they move faster and get more views on X—and are likelier to find their way into mainstream political discussion.

Many political rumors on social media begin when people share something they supposedly heard from an indirect acquaintance: The false narrative about pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield started when one woman posted to a Facebook group that her neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost their cat and had seen Haitians in a house nearby carving it up to eat. Others picked up the story and started posting about it. Another woman shared a screenshot of the Springfield post on X, to bolster her own previous claim that ducks were disappearing from local parks.

Unbound by geography, online rumors can spread very far, very fast; if they gain enough traction, they may trend, drawing still more participants into the discussion. The X post received more than 900,000 views within a few days. Others amplified the story, expressing alarm about Haitian immigrants. No substantive evidence of the wild claims ever emerged.

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Rumors alleging that FEMA was abandoning Trump voters after Helene followed the same pattern: Friend-of-a-friend posts claimed that FEMA was treating Trump supporters unfairly. These claims became entangled in misinformation about what kinds of financial recovery resources the government would provide, and to whom. Claims about abandonment or incompetence were sometimes enhanced by AI-generated images of purported victims designed to tug on the heartstrings, such as a viral picture of a nonexistent child and puppy supposedly adrift in floodwaters. The image spread rapidly on X because it resonated with people who are suspicious of the government—and people who share misleading content rather than question it.

The amplification of emotionally manipulative chatter is a familiar issue on social media. What’s more disconcerting is that Republican political elites—with Musk now among them—are openly legitimizing what the X rumor mill churns out when it serves their objectives. X’s owner has claimed that FEMA is “actively blocking citizens” who are trying to help flood victims in North Carolina, and that it “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives.” J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, elevated rumors of pet-eating Haitians to national attention on social media for days; Donald Trump did the same in a presidential debate. Influential public figures and political elites—people who, especially in times of crisis, should be acting as voices of reason—are using baseless, often paranoid allegations for partisan advantage.

History shows that the weaponization of rumors can lead to devastating consequences—scapegoating individuals, inciting violence, deepening societal divisions, sparking moral panics, and even justifying atrocities. Yet online rumormongering has immense value to right-wing propagandists. In the 2020 election, Trump and his political allies set the narrative frame from the top: Massive fraud was occurring, Trump claimed, and the election would be stolen from him. The supposed proof came later, in the form of countless online rumors. I and other researchers who watched election-related narratives unfold observed the same pattern again and again: Trump’s true believers offered up evidence to support what they’d been told was true. They’d heard that impersonators were using other people’s maiden names to vote. A friend of a friend’s ballot wasn’t read because they’d used a Sharpie marker. These unfounded claims were amplified by influencers and went viral, even as Twitter tried to moderate them—primarily by labeling and sometimes downranking them. None of them turned out to be true. Even so, today, 30 percent of the public and 70 percent of Republicans still believe the Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump. This simmering sense of injustice is powerful—it spurred violence on January 6, 2021—and continues to foster unrest.

In Ohio recently, claims about supposed Haitian pet-eaters led to dozens of bomb threats, according to state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who has attempted to correct the record. Local Republican business leaders who praised their Haitian workers received death threats for their troubles. Similarly, fire chiefs and local Republican elected officials pushed back on Helene rumors after FEMA workers were threatened.  

What of left-wing rumors? They exist, of course. After the assassination attempts on Trump, some commentators insinuated that they were “false flag” attacks—in other words, that his camp had staged the incidents to gain public sympathy for him. But mainstream media called out left-wing conspiracism and fact-checked the rumors. The people expressing them were overwhelmingly censured, not encouraged, by fellow influencers and elites on their side of the political spectrum.

In contrast, when social-media companies stepped in to address false claims of voter fraud in 2020, the political influencers who most frequently spread them clamored for retribution, and their allies delivered. Representative Jim Jordan, one of the House’s most powerful Republicans, convened a congressional subcommittee that cast efforts to fact-check and label misleading posts as “censorship.” (Full disclosure: I was one of the panel’s targets.)

Conservatives have reframed fact-checking as a censorship technique by “woke” tech companies and biased journalists. Musk abandoned the practice in favor of Community Notes—which, in theory, allow fellow users to add their own fact-checks and context to any post on the platform. Musk once described Community Notes as a “game changer for combating wrong information”—he understood, correctly, that opening up the fact-checking process to many different voices could better enable consensus about what the truth is. But Community Notes cannot keep up with the rumors roiling X. Notes are absent from some of the most outrageous claims about pet-eating migrants or FEMA malfeasance, which have millions of views. Even as Musk himself has become one of the most prominent boosters of political rumors, Community Notes on Musk’s own tweets have a way of disappearing.

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Musk’s original vision for Twitter may have been just to nudge the platform a bit to the right—toward a more libertarian approach that would bolster it as a free-speech platform while preserving it as the best place to go for breaking news. Instead, figuring out what’s really happening is harder and harder, while X is becoming ever more useful as a place for powerful people to source outrageous material for political propaganda.

Many people across the political spectrum are still on X, of course. The platform has a reported 570 million monthly users, on average. However much Musk’s changes annoyed people on the center and the left, network effects have kept many of them on the platform; those who don’t want to lose friends or followers are likely to keep posting. Yet the market is providing alternative options. Bluesky and Mastodon absorbed some of the extremely online left-leaning users who got fed up first. Threads, an offshoot of Instagram, quickly followed; although the others are still small, Threads has more than 200 million monthly active users. People have other places to go. So do advertisers.

Still, today’s emerging alternative platforms are not a replacement for the Twitter of the late 2010s; real-time news is harder to find, and communities on each of the new entrants have gripes about curation and moderation.

Users who miss the golden age of Twitter still have the option of counterspeech—trying to push back against rumors with good information, and hoping that X’s algorithm will lift it. The question is whether doing so is worth the potential personal cost: Why spend time refuting rumors if your efforts are likely to go largely unseen or bring the wrath of an (unmoderated) mob?

Without a concerted push to defend truth—by leaders, institutions, and the public—the rumor mill will continue to churn, and its distortions will become the foundation of an irreparably divided political landscape. As Hurricane Milton roared across Florida, social-media users were fantasizing, absurdly, about government control of tropical cyclones and making death threats against weather forecasters. Whether Milton-related conspiracy theories will enter the national political discussion isn’t yet clear. But the broad cycle of rumors and threats is becoming depressingly familiar.

Rumors have always circulated, but the decision by Republican politicians and Musk to exploit them has created a problem that’s genuinely new. In the modern right-wing propaganda landscape, where facts are recast as subjective and any authority outside MAGA is deemed illegitimate, eroding trust in institutions is not an unfortunate side effect—it is the goal. And for now, the result is a niche political reality wherein elites on the right, including the world’s richest man, amplify baseless claims without legitimate pushback.