Four years after ‘Stop the Steal,’ an organized army emerges online

Brandon Matlack, a coordinator for a group boosting former president Donald Trump’s election effort, was camped outside an election office in Pennsylvania’s Northampton County when he posted a video Tuesday on the social network X asking his 3,000 followers for help identifying a “very suspect” man he’d seen just drop off “an insane amount of ballots.”

Within minutes, his video had gone viral - cross-posted to Facebook groups, Rumble videos, Telegram channels and pro-Trump forums as visual evidence of election fraud. On X, the video raced to the top of a special “Election Integrity” feed newly promoted by its billionaire owner Elon Musk, where posts sharing the man’s face and license plate were viewed millions of times.

“A nervous operative of the Dem. cheating machine,” one X user wrote. On the social network Gab, another wrote, “Shoot him dead and figure it out later. Remember 2020 !!!”

But the man Matlack had recorded was actually a longtime U.S. Postal Service worker making a routine delivery, according to Lamont McClure, the county executive. The video ricocheting across X as proof of a conspiracy actually just showed the man doing his job.

The video’s near-instant virality was a victory for the organized network of conservative activists and conspiracy theorists who have spent years building online followings by promoting their belief in corrupt elections. On platforms controlled by Musk - and Trump, the majority owner of the online platform Truth Social - they have worked to stand up a preemptive infrastructure stronger than the “Stop the Steal” movement that grew after Trump’s 2020 loss.

The online movement that won national attention four years ago was driven by a small, disordered and slapdash group of right-wing fringe accounts echoing Trump’s claims of election fraud. Today, it is an army - organized, widely promoted and shored up by an ideology that has permeated the Republican base.

“People are much more concerned, they’re much more vigilant and back then they were not,” Matlack said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I’m very thankful for Elon Musk and the freedom of speech offered by X so … we can see what’s really going on.”

[Trump escalates false claims of election fraud, setting stage to cry foul if he loses]

Election deniers have in recent years developed a rapid-response system for amplifying rumors or exaggerating the impact of real voting irregularities, creating the impression of widespread voting fraud that is not backed up by the facts.

And by contesting the results of the election even before any votes for Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris have been tallied, they have set the stage for a national resistance plan that online observers worry could echo the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in support of his baseless claims that the election was rigged.

The viral claims could also help shape Republicans’ legal strategy to challenge election irregularities, as seen in the state lawsuits echoing Trump’s Truth Social posts about the purported risks of counting ballots from U.S. citizens or military service members stationed overseas. Last month, Musk shared a post saying Democrats planned to “steal elections using ‘overseas’ ballots”; two days later, Trump shared his post, adding, “Lawyers at RNC - STOP THIS FRAUD, NOW!!!”

Dean Jackson, a former investigative analyst on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection, remembers watching the “Stop the Steal” movement rapidly assemble in Facebook groups after the 2020 vote. But he now worries about the damage that could be caused by election deniers’ four-year head start.

Major social media companies have rolled back content policies they enacted around the 2020 election. Musk and right-wing influencers have lent the movement prominence and legitimacy. And many deniers have moved on to more opaque online networks, including encrypted channels and private group chats, that make it harder for law enforcement to track.

“They have had four years to prime the base to believe and take action around false claims of fraud,” he said. “It feels like open season. It feels like we didn’t learn any of the lessons of 2020.”

A spokeswoman for Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, declined to respond to specific assertions in this article about the company’s role in sharing election-denial content. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Anger, distrust, paranoia’

X has become a central gathering place for election deniers thanks in large part to Musk, the world’s richest man and a fervent Trump supporter who has routinely shared conspiracy theories to his more than 200 million followers.

But so, too, has Trump’s Truth Social, which launched after the former president lost his mainstream social media accounts in the aftermath of Jan. 6 and now hosts groups dedicated to promoting claims of voter fraud.

Election deniers also have gathered in Discord servers, Facebook pages, Telegram channels and video conference calls to share strategies to combat what they say is a secret “deep state” vote-stealing scheme.

They’ve also found a fruitful medium in podcasts, the freewheeling, hours-long video interview segments in which conservative commentators like Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk have sown doubt about the election in advance. More than two dozen nationally prominent podcasts have boosted the idea that the election will be rigged, according to a Post analysis.

On the country’s most popular podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Trump recently said that the United States’ vote-tabulating process was “very crooked” during a three-hour interview that has been watched on YouTube more than 40 million times.

After the 2020 election, Trump was booted off Twitter, now called X, due to fears of further incitement of violence. But under Musk’s leadership, X has restored Trump’s account and promoted him through interviews. (A Post analysis last month found that congressional Republicans now dramatically outrank Democrats in new followers and viral posts.)

X has also rolled out new features, such as its “Election Integrity Community,” the feed on which Matlack’s video of the mail worker gained viral attention. The feed, which has more than 50,000 members, promotes tweets showing “potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities,” regardless of their accuracy.

In one representative post, a user declared it fraudulent that a sign outside a polling location showed Harris’s name bubbled in on a ballot. The promotional flier, from a local Democratic group, resembled a sample ballot - the kinds distributed by members of both parties in many elections.

The feed is run by America PAC, Musk’s $118 million pro-Trump super PAC, which shared a since-deleted digital ad calling Harris “a big ole C-word” - they said it meant “communist” - and has boosted claims that Trump’s opponents have tried to “take him out for good.”

The super PAC has also paid door knockers to canvas in battleground states. In New Berlin, Wisconsin, a woman named Kim Teschan, 64, told a canvasser accompanied by a Post reporter that she was fired up to vote after learning about how “corrupt” the 2020 election was from videos on Facebook.

If Trump “doesn’t win, we’re never going to vote again,” she said.

[Musk PAC tells judge its $1M sweepstakes winners are not chosen by chance]

The feed’s often-unchecked misinformation has included posts singling out election officials by name, Jackson said, raising concerns about Musk’s “recklessness” and willingness to “stoke anger, distrust [and] paranoia.”

Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman who was vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee, warned during a George Washington University panel on Wednesday that Trump, Musk and their allies had launched a premeditated effort to undermine the vote and repeat Trump’s 2020 playbook in the real world and online, including on the “cesspool” of X.

“They are planning to flood X with claims of the stolen election,” Cheney said. “The people who want to tear down our democracy have had practice.” (One night later, in Arizona, Trump called Cheney a “war hawk” and said, “Let’s see how she feels about it - you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”)

‘They’re watching everything’

As the violence of Jan. 6 unfolded, tech giants that had once been leery of overstepping on political speech made some attempts at corrective action. They added disclaimers to election-denial claims, banned rule-breaking “Stop the Steal” groups and - in the most aggressive move yet - suspended Trump’s multimillion-follower accounts.

But in the years since, many of those defenses have eroded. Meta - which, like X and YouTube, ended Trump’s suspension - reversed a policy to ban 2020 election-fraud claims in political ads. YouTube stopped removing videos claiming the 2020 election was rigged. And X watered down its civic-integrity policy, allowing election-fraud claims to spread freely.

The infrastructure put in place to handle election claims has “largely dissolved,” said David Harris, a former Meta research manager who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. “We are in a much worse position today as a society and as an electorate than we were at the time of Jan. 6.”

Russian propagandists have seized on the opportunity to sow doubt in America’s democratic system. Election-denier groups in recent weeks have shared a video showing ballots being ripped up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and another purporting to show Haitians claiming they voted illegally in Georgia. Intelligence officials have said that both videos were “manufactured and amplified” by Russian operatives as “part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election.”

But American-made claims of stolen elections have also taken off online, bouncing between mainstream platforms and more fringe sites such as the video streamer Rumble and the message board Gab, both of which have catered to right-wing audiences and vowed only to remove extreme or illegal content.

About 12 hours after the Northampton video started exploding on X, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. … Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” The top comment on it, from a user named “Patriotic Marine,” showed the postal worker’s face and license plate and urged viewers to find him and “prosecute him for Treason.” It was liked more than 1,000 times.

Matlack, who is 34 and runs a small eBay business, got interested in election rules when he started working as a coordinator for Early Vote Action, a pro-Trump group created by Scott Presler, a conservative activist and influencer who led “Stop the Steal” demonstrations in 2020 and has called Jan. 6 “the largest civil rights protest in American history.”

Matlack said he has no regrets about sharing the video of the postal worker, which he said warranted a full investigation, and that a fact-check report by NBC had not convinced him the episode was aboveboard.

A Postal Service spokesperson confirmed to The Post that the man in the video is an employee who had appropriately delivered the ballots. When The Post told Matlack that the man was a verified employee carrying a post office basket, Matlack responded, “Anybody can obtain those baskets.” Later, he added, “So working for the post office means you’re incapable of committing any sort of election fraud?”

An X spokesman told The Post that Matlack’s tweet now has a fact-check “community note” on it, and added that the company wants to “be the most accurate source of information on the internet.”

Matlack said he was encouraged that the allegation of fraud had spread so much quicker than in the last election and credited Musk and others for helping support the work. He also dismissed concerns that sharing the man’s face alongside false allegations he was a criminal could put him at risk.

“I don’t think any one of our supporters would resort to physical violence over something like this,” he said. “Our supporters are very in tune. They’re watching everything that’s going on.”

On Thursday night, two days after posting the video, Matlack added an update: “This is indeed a postal worker,” he wrote on X.

The original video, which remains online, has 5.9 million views. The corrective tweet has about 3,000.

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Trisha Thadani, Aaron Schaffer, Amy Gardner and Colby Itkowitz contributed to this report.