Our social media platforms and government have had four years to get this right. Instead, they’ve thrown up their hands.

In the days following January 6, Meta, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch suspended former president Donald Trump over posts the companies said glorified the violence at the Capitol. It was the most extreme moderation decision these companies had ever made. Platforms also took sweeping actions to remove thousands of accounts belonging to militias, conspiracy theorists, and the content they shared that led the US to that moment.

But that didn’t last long.

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After the 2022 midterms, the balance of power shifted in Congress. Republicans now had a majority—albeit a slim one—in the House of Representatives and used that sliver of power to go after the researchers and trust and safety workers who did the dizzying work of debunking election myths. Jim Jordan was elevated to chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and immediately launched investigations stifling the work of academics at best and launching harassment campaigns against entire moderation teams at worst. As a result of these attacks, the Stanford Internet Observatory, one of the top disinformation research groups, shut down for good over the summer.

Now, much of the social media infrastructure built to protect our democratic systems in the months and days after the deadly riot has collapsed—either by inattention or force. There are only five days left until Election Day and a chasm has formed in what little foundation remains.

To start with what we all know: Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, a conspiratorial wasteland where professional disinformation purveyors earn thousands of dollars peddling lies. Musk reinstated accounts belonging to Alex Jones and Andrew Tate, both of which were banned years before the 2020 election cycle even began. And, to bring us to the present day, Musk has spent the last few weeks campaigning for Trump and spreading election lies.

These fissures in platforms have happened across the board. Last year, Alphabet, Meta, and X reduced the size of their trust and safety teams and Meta completely abandoned a project building a new fact-checking tool as a result of cuts. Not only has Meta cast a blind eye to the militias currently organizing on its platforms, it is auto-generating militia-related groups.

Not only are these big tech CEOs revising their moderation policies to allow more trash to find an audience, Trump has recently said that many of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest tech executives have called to suck up to him.

“Social media platforms have by and large stopped moderating such content and just as worryingly have cut off researcher access to data streams that allowed us to objectively report on the scale of these campaigns, all due to political pressure on disinformation researchers and social media platforms,” Nina Jankowicz, the Biden administration’s former disinformation czar, told my colleague David Gilbert this week when he wrote about election conspiracy theories and falsehoods already spread unchecked online. Far-right agitators are laying the groundwork for violence and election denial. Fears over noncitizens voting may have led to eligible voters being removed from Virginia’s voter rolls.

“The work of studying election delegitimization and supporting election officials is more important than ever. It is crucial that we not only stand resolute but speak out forcefully against intimidation tactics intended to silence us and discredit academic research,” Renee DiResta, former director of the Stanford program, wrote in The New York Times in June.

Under the Biden administration, the Democrats fashioned themselves a bastion for deplatforming online bullshit. While a majority of election lies are spread by far-right influencers and activists, the Democrats are beginning to take their role less seriously as well. The Harris campaign rewrote news headlines and ran them as ads on Google, deceptively edited TikTok content, and spent $11 million on a Facebook page to boost positive coverage of the campaign. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em I guess.

If you thought 2020 was bad, all of these decisions have led to an internet that’s worse off than in prior elections. The same bad actors are using the same playbook as before, but the tools to address it have disappeared.

The Chatroom

After a winner is declared, if that’s next week or months into the future, the next big question will be who will accept the results of the election. WIRED reached out to every senator and member of the US Congress asking if they would accept the final election results as called by the Associated Press (AP).

Have your representatives agreed to certify the election come January? Click this link to open our tool. There, you can look up your zip code or state with our search bar to find your representatives and their responses to our question of whether they will accept the AP’s results.

What did your rep say? Are you surprised? And what about you? Are you prepared to accept the election results? Please tell me the answer is “yes.” Send your thoughts to [email protected].

WIRED Reads

• US Intel Says Insider Threats Are ‘Likely’ During the Election: The Department of Homeland Security recently issued a memo warning that “insider threats” will “likely be an issue” at polling centers leading up to the election.
• Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk’s Get-Out-the-Vote Effort: Jake Lahut brought us this bonkers scoop revealing that door knockers for the Elon Musk–backed America PAC are being shuffled around Michigan in U-Hauls to canvass. And they were told that they would have to pay their hotel bills unless they met unrealistic quotas.
• Facebook Is Auto-Generating Militia Group Pages as Extremists Continue to Organize in Plain Sight: Anti-government militias are recruiting and training new members on Facebook pages that Meta hasn’t shut down. In fact, Meta is even auto-generating pages for these groups.

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What Else We’re Reading

🔗 The Grievance-Driven Blueprint for the Next Trump Administration: This week, The Verge put out an extensive explainer on how Project 2025, deployed by a new Trump administration, would affect tech and climate policy at nearly every level of government. (The Verge)

🔗 How Social Media Video Clippers Have Become Some of the Most Powerful Outlets of the 2024 Campaign: Brian Stelter writes that video clippers, like Acyn and Aaron Rupar, have created some of the most viral election moments this year simply by recording them and reposting them in small bites on platforms like X and TikTok. (CNN)

🔗 On Elon Musk’s X, Republicans Go Viral as Democrats Disappear: Republican influence on X has grown tremendously since Elon Musk took over in 2022. According to new analysis, GOP users are posting more and gaining more followers and engagements compared to their Democrat counterparts. (The Washington Post)

The Download

For our last WIRED Politics Lab pod before election day, Leah is joined by the politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams to talk about voter suppression, election conspiracy theories, Elon Musk’s influence, Joe Rogan, and so much more. Listen here.

That’s it for today. Thanks for subscribing. Get the hell out and vote. You can get in touch with me via email, Instagram, X, and Signal at makenakelly.32.