“The Bucks County Board of Elections has asked state and federal law enforcement to investigate a fake video that circulated on social media Wednesday afternoon falsely suggesting county election workers were destroying ballots,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
Said the board in a joint statement: “This video is fake.”
“A Republican organization with ties to Elon Musk has produced an apparently fake manifesto meant to look like Vice President Kamala Harris’ version of the conservative policy initiative Project 2025,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
“The document, called Progress 2028, contains contradictions and distortions of Harris’ positions on issues such as gun control, fracking, and immigration.”
New York Times: “Smears, lies and dirty tricks — what we call disinformation today — have long been a feature of American presidential election campaigns. Two weeks before this year’s vote, however, the torrent of half-truths, lies and fabrications, both foreign and homegrown, has exceeded anything that came before, according to officials and researchers who document disinformation.”
“The effect on the outcome on Nov. 5 remains to be seen, but it has already debased what passes for political debate about the two major party candidates, Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. It has also corroded the foundations of the country’s democracy, undermining what was once a shared confidence that the country’s elections, regardless of who won, have been free and fair.”
“Prosecutors today charged two Readington Township women connected to a faction of the local Republican Party with planting a recording device at a local restaurant to record a private meeting of two elected officials who were their political opponents,” the New Jersey Globe reports.
One of the women was “captured on a security camera placing and retrieving the device near a table” at a local restaurant.
“Federal officials battling foreign interference in the coming election say they are entering what may be the most perilous period of the campaign: October, when the prospect for mischief runs high and the time to react runs short,” the New York Times reports.
“While the Russians make little attempt to hide their support for former President Donald Trump, the Iranians — among Moscow’s most important suppliers in the war in Ukraine — desperately want to stop him from returning to office, and are busy hacking into his campaign and dumping whatever they find, as well as plotting to assassinate him.”
New York Times: “While the once-staid think tank has received attention recently for Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a future Trump administration that the group funded, it has also made its mark with an aggressive effort to shape public opinion, seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.”
“Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agents raided the Millersville Police Department on Wednesday, executing a search warrant as the criminal investigation into the troubled agency enters a dramatic new phase,” WTVF reports.
The raid is likely part of a probe into “the possible use of sensitive law enforcement data to dig up dirt on potential political enemies.”
“For the third presidential election in a row, the foreign hacking of the campaigns has begun in earnest,” the New York Times reports.
“But this time, it’s the Iranians, not the Russians, making the first significant move.”
Washington Post: Experts warn of election disruptions after Trump says campaign was hacked.
Casey Newton: “Sharing weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes has quickly come to define the developing presidential campaign between Harris and Donald Trump. Across social networks, Democrats and Republicans are flooding the feed with obviously untrue statements about one another and calling it a joke.”
“Welcome to the shitpost election.”
“To shitpost, of course, is to attempt to derail online discussions by posting fake, outrageous, and often low-quality material. And it is not new to this election. Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey funded a group dedicated to creating shitposts about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election. In 2019, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom had to deny that she killed squirrels for fun after a shitpost on the subject went viral.”
“And if the past few days have made anything clear, it’s that political shitposting is not exclusively a province on the right. Anyone who has opened X over the past few days has likely seen dozens of posts ‘joking’ that vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance had sex with a couch.”
“Political candidates have a new campaign expense: Apple AirTags,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The button-size geotracking device has become a popular tool in the rough-and-tumble world of local elections, where lawn signs often end up stolen, vandalized or run over. Candidates who have grown tired of dirty tricks are hiding AirTags in their signs, leading to digital dragnets when they go missing.”
“Tracking the device’s pings has led to the doorsteps of alleged sign snatchers and, in some cases, candidates’ opponents. The stings have left snatchers dumbfounded. Some have faced charges of theft, criminal mischief and receiving stolen property.”
“More Americans may think President Joe Biden tried to sit on a nonexistent chair the other day than know the boring truth that there was, in fact, a chair,” NBC News reports.
“The chair-that-was-there was just one of many quick video clips the conservative media ecosystem willed into virality over the past two weeks, leaving fact-checkers and Biden’s team with little chance to catch up.”
“The Republican National Committee, major conservative media outlets and right-wing influencers have succeeded in blasting out videos that they claim show ‘proof’ of Biden’s wandering off, freezing up or even filling his pants with a substance commonly represented by a brown swirl emoji.”
Daily Beast: “Another deceptively cut video of President Joe Biden is being circulated by right-wing pundits and media outlets.”
Washington Post: “The 80th anniversary of D-Day quickly became the latest example of the fast spread of politically damaging manipulated videos, highlighting how the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the water’s edge — and seem certain to continue through November.”
“In edited videos, Republican officials and allies of former president Donald Trump repeatedly tried to turn Biden’s Normandy visit into a highlight reel of senior moments and missteps, aimed at showing the president as infirm, addled or out of his depth. Trump, who turns 78 on Friday, has also repeatedly attacked Biden over his age and fitness, and regularly shares videos of the president looking frail.”
New York Times: “Russian operatives are leaning into videos, many of them that falsely purport to be made by independent journalists or whistle-blowers. The videos, opposed to blog or social media posts, are more likely to spread beyond the conspiratorial fringes of America and become part of mainstream discourse.”
Los Angeles Times: “In the analog days of the 1970s, long before hackers, trolls and edgelords, an audiocassette company came up with an advertising slogan that posed a trick question: “Is it live or is it Memorex?” The message toyed with reality, suggesting there was no difference in sound quality between a live performance and music recorded on tape.”
“Fast forward to our age of metaverse lies and deceptions, and one might ask similar questions about what’s real and what’s not: Is President Biden on a robocall telling Democrats to not vote? Is Donald Trump chumming it up with Black men on a porch? Is the U.S. going to war with Russia? Fact and fiction appear interchangeable in an election year when AI-generated content is targeting voters in ways that were once unimaginable.”
“American politics is accustomed to chicanery — opponents of Thomas Jefferson warned the public in 1800 that he would burn their Bibles if elected — but artificial intelligence is bending reality into a video game world of avatars and deepfakes designed to sow confusion and chaos.”
“Conservative activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have agreed to pay $1 million to the New York attorney general’s office and others for running a voter suppression campaign targeting Black voters during the 2020 election,” CNN reports.
Wired: “As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the U.S. are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.”
“All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of ‘data elements’ on every single US citizen.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that he’ll serve out his full term even after he departs his post as party leader, Politico reports.
Punchbowl News: “Entering the final stretch of his 17-plus year tenure as Senate GOP leader, McConnell finds himself in an awkward spot. Both of his potential successors are telegraphing that they’ll implement significant changes to the way the Republican Conference does business. This can all be viewed as an implicit criticism of McConnell’s leadership style.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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