Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.

It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to back out of it. Only after he was sued and forced into legal discovery did Musk go through with the acquisition, which has been a financial disaster. He’s alienated advertisers and turned the app, now called X, into his personal playground, where he’s the perpetual main character. And for what?

Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.  

Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud. Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times, is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to educate yourself.”

[Read: Elon Musk has reached a new low]

Elsewhere in the Election Integrity Community, users have reposted debunked theories from 2020 about voting machines switching votes, while others are sharing old claims of voter fraud from past local elections. Since Musk promoted the feed last night, it has become an efficient instrument for incitement and harassment; more users are posting about individual election workers, sometimes singling them out by name. In many instances, users will share a video, purportedly from a polling location, while asking questions like “Is this real?” This morning, the community accused a man in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, of stealing ballots. Popular right-wing influencers such as Alex Jones amplified the claim, but their suspect turned out to be the county’s postmaster, simply doing his job.

The most important feature of the Election Integrity Community is the sheer volume of posts: dozens per hour, such that scrolling through them becomes overwhelming. It presents the viewer with fragmented pieces of information—more than any casual news consumer (or most election offices, for that matter) might be able to confirm or debunk. And so the feed is the purest distillation of what Musk’s platform wishes to accomplish. He has created a bullshit machine.

There are three major components to this tool. The first is that X exposes its users to right-wing political content frequently, whether they want it or not. To test this theory, I recently created a new X account, which required me to answer a few onboarding questions to build my feed: I told X that I was interested in news about technology, gaming, sports, and culture. The first account the site prompted me to follow was Musk’s, but I opted instead to follow only ESPN. Still, when I opened the app, it defaulted me to the “For You” feed, which surfaces content from accounts outside the ones a user follows. A Musk post was the first thing I encountered, followed quickly by a post from Donald Trump and another from an account called @MJTruthUltra, which offered a warning from a supposed FBI whistleblower: “Vote, arm yourself, Stock up 3-4 Months Supply of Food and Water, and Pray.” After that was a post from a MAGA influencer accusing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of “censoring patriots,” followed by posts from Libs of TikTok (a video from a school-board meeting about girls’ bathrooms), MAGA influencers Benny Johnson and Jack Posobiec, and Dom Lucre, a right-wing personality who was once banned from the platform for sharing an explicit image of a child being tortured.

[Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is]

X is also experimenting with other algorithmic ways to surface rumors and discredited election news. The platform recently launched a new AI-powered “stories for you” feature, which curates trending topics without human review and highlights them prominently to selected users. NBC News found five examples of this feature sharing election-fraud theories, including debunked claims about voting machines and fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona.

This algorithmic prioritization represents the second prong of the approach: granting far-right influencers and the MAGA faithful greater reach with their posts. A Washington Post analysis of lawmaker tweets from July 2023 to the present day show that Republican officials’ posts go viral far more often than Democrats’ do, and that Musk's right-wing political activism has encouraged Republican lawmakers to post more, too, “allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds.” According to the Post, “Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023—more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion.” Musk has effectively turned the platform into a far-right social network and echo chamber, not unlike Rumble and Truth Social. The difference, of course, is X’s size and audience, which still contains many prominent influencers, celebrities, athletes, and media members.

The third and final element of X’s bullshit engine is Musk himself, who has become the platform’s loudest amplifier of specious voter-fraud claims. Bloomberg recently analyzed more than 53,000 of Musk’s posts and found that he has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic, garnering roughly 10 billion views. Musk’s mask-off MAGA boosterism has also empowered other reactionaries with big accounts to shitpost in his image. When they do, Musk will frequently repost or reply to their accounts, boosting their visibility. Here’s a representative example: On October 23, the venture capitalist Shaun Maguire posted that he’d heard a rumor from a senator about more ballots being mailed out in California than the number of legal voters. “Can anyone confirm or deny this?” he asked his more than 166,000 followers on X. Musk replied to the post, noting, “I’m hearing one crazy story after another.”

[Read: Elon Musk says he would recognize a Harris election victory]

On this point, I believe Musk. The billionaire is inundated with wild election speculation because he is addicted to the rumormongering machine that he helped design. This is the strategy at work, the very reason the volume of alarming-seeming anecdotes about a stolen election work so well. Not only are there too many false claims to conceivably debunk, but the scale of the misleading information gives people the perception that there is simply too much evidence out there for it all to be made up. Musk, whether he believes it or not, can claim that he is “hearing one crazy story after another” and coax his bespoke echo chamber to proffer evidence.

X’s current political project is clear: Musk, his PAC, and his legion of acolytes are creating the conditions necessary to claim that the 2024 election is stolen, should Kamala Harris be declared the winner. But the effects of that effort are far more pernicious. If you spend enough time scrolling through the Election Integrity Community feed and its unending carousel of fraud allegations, it isn’t hard to begin to see the world through the paranoid lens that X offers to millions of its users. It is disorienting and dismaying to have to bushwhack through the dense terrain of lies and do the mental calisthenics of trying to fact-check hundreds of people crying nefarious about things they haven’t even bothered to research. Worse yet, it’s easy to see how somebody might simply give in, beaten into submission by the scale of it all. In this way, even though X is Musk’s project, it may actually be built in the image of the MAGA candidate himself. A $44 billion monument to Trump’s greatest (and only real) trick, as he put it in a 2021 speech: “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.”

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The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election.

A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that “there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.” That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged.

As part of this strategy, right-wing activists and lawyers have organized initiatives under the auspices of election integrity, warping the meaning of those words to sow distrust. Through her Election Integrity Network, the right-wing activist Cleta Mitchell has been recruiting people—including election deniers who will likely continue to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories—to become poll workers and monitors, in an effort that was reportedly coordinated with members of the Republican National Committee. Poll watching in itself is a timeworn American practice, although it has been misused in the past; now, however, election-denial groups are sending participants to polling places under the presumption that fraud is taking place.

More recently, Elon Musk—in addition to his own brazen efforts to get Trump reelected—has invited X users to report activity they see as suspicious through an “Election Integrity Community” feed, an effort almost certain to trigger a flood of misinformation on the platform. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit has gone to great lengths to seek evidence of fraud; in one case, nine armed officers reportedly appeared with a search warrant at the door of a woman who had been working with a Latino civil-rights organization to help veterans and seniors register to vote.

The RNC, especially under the influence of its co-chair Lara Trump, has taken up “election integrity” as an explicit priority: As she said at a GOP event over the summer, “we are pulling out all the stops, and we are so laser-focused on election integrity.” Her team created an election-integrity program earlier this year and hired Christina Bobb, who was later indicted for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona (she has denied wrongdoing), as its lead election-integrity lawyer. As The New Yorker reported earlier this month, the RNC plans to staff a “war room” with attorneys operating an “election-integrity hotline” on Election Day. Such initiatives have helped inject doubt into a legitimate process. Despite the clear lack of evidence to suggest fraud is likely in this election, nearly 60 percent of Americans already say they’re concerned or very concerned about it, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll; 88 percent of Trump supporters said they were concerned about fraud (compared with about 30 percent of Kamala Harris supporters).

The “consistent, disciplined, repetitive use” of the term election integrity in this new context is “designed to confuse the public,” Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. A sad irony, she added, is that those who use this framing have done so to push for restrictions that actually suppress voting, including strict voter-ID laws and limitations on early ballots, or to threaten the existence of initiatives to ensure fair voting. Many of the same activists promoting “election integrity,” including Cleta Mitchell, organized a misinformation campaign to undermine a bipartisan state-led initiative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 to ensure that voter rolls were accurate. Multiple states eventually left the compact.

The term election integrity isn’t entirely new—Google Trends data suggest that its usage has bubbled up around election years in recent decades. But its prominence has exploded since 2020, and the strong associations with election denial in recent years means that other groups have backed away from it. “Like so much charged language in American politics, when one side really seizes on a term and uses it in a loaded way,” it becomes “a partisan term,” Clapman told me. Now groups unaffiliated with the right are turning to more neutral language such as voter protection and voter security to refer to their efforts to ensure free elections.

Election deniers are chipping away at Americans’ shared understanding of reality. And as my colleague Ali Breland wrote yesterday, violent rhetoric and even political violence in connection with the election have already begun. This month so far, a man has punched a poll worker after being asked to remove his MAGA hat, and hundreds of ballots have been destroyed in fires on the West Coast. Election officials are bracing for targeted attacks in the coming days—and some have already received threats. If Trump loses, the right will be poised—under the guise of “election integrity”—to interfere further with the norms of American democracy.

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