News Clips

“I expect to see what we saw in 2020,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a nonpartisan voter education and advocacy group. “Election officials will be counting votes, some results will come in late and bad actors will be trying to play political games to undermine people’s confidence in the outcome.”

"What we're seeing now is a trend towards policing other people's voting behavior," said Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst at the nonpartisan group Common Cause. "It's basically an endless template for taking a picture of someone or a video and saying, 'Oh, actually what they're doing here is criminal and you can trust me on this, and we need to find out who this person is and report them to the authorities.'" ... Common Cause's Steiner said "2,000 Mules" serves a different purpose. It gives people who've already bought into the fiction of election fraud a satisfying story – and a way to participate. "People feel like, I can do my part by watching this movie, keeping an eye out for these ballot mules and attempting to ensure that these people are not voting where I'm voting," she said.

Jill Greene, the state representative for Common Cause, the national good-government organization, said that the many unfounded and untruthful claims posed a challenge for voters. “They don’t really know what to believe,” she said.

Yosef Getachew, director of the media and democracy program at Common Cause, said there’s a significant risk that misinformation spreading so soon before the election could confuse or frighten voters, or lead to more polarization or even acts of violence. “Rather than cave in to conspiracy theorists and propaganda peddlers, we urge Musk to ensure Twitter’s rules and enforcement practices reflect our values of democracy and public safety,” Getachew said.

"(Musk's acquisition) could certainly create a much bigger pathway for disinformation agents to spread harmful information on the platform," said Yosef Getachew, the director of the media and democracy program at Common Cause, the nonpartisan public interest organization. "Content moderation policies are only effective if there are people there to enforce them and systems in place to ensure they are being enforced. If those rules are going to be out the window, that is going to be incredibly harmful."

“Americans deserve more than lip service and half-measures from the platforms,” said Yosef Getachew, director of Common Cause’s media and democracy program. “These platforms have been weaponized by enemies of democracy, both foreign and domestic.”