“You’re not talking about grassroots activity so much anymore,” Stamos said. That amplification allows isolated or misleading claims to spread more widely. Many of the false claims seen on Election Day originated with American voters themselves, whose posts about baseless allegations of voter fraud were then reposted to millions more people by Trump allies. Together, those three tweets were reposted by other users more than 100,000 times and liked more than 430,000 times - leading the spread of mail ballot misinformation that day and helping Trump dominate the online discussion the entire week, according to Zignal’s analysis. One example: On July 30, Trump tweeted misinformation about mail ballots three separate times, including stating without evidence that mail ballots would be an “easy way” for foreign adversaries to interfere, calling the process inaccurate and fraudulent and repeating a false distinction that absentee ballots are somehow more secure than mail ballots when both are treated the same. Zignal Labs, a San Francisco media intelligence firm, identified and tracked millions of social media posts about voting by mail in the months before the election and found huge spikes immediately following several of Trump’s tweets. More broadly, he has helped drive the spread of inaccurate information through a disinformation machine that relies on social media, conservative radio and television outlets and the amplification power of his millions of followers. Trump retweeted a post that criticized the news media for not more aggressively covering the news conference. Giuliani has been central to Trump’s election attacks, arguing a Pennsylvania court case on Tuesday and appearing at a news conference on Thursday that was rife with debunked claims, including a fictitious story that a server hosting evidence of voting irregularities was in Germany. Intelligence officials warned in August that Russia was engaged in a concerted effort to disparage Biden and singled out a Ukrainian parliamentarian who has met with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. government has linked to Russia have amplified stories suggesting voting problems or fraud. For instance, English-language websites the U.S. That’s not to say Russia was entirely silent during the election, or in the immediate aftermath. Though Russian hackers had targeted state and local networks in the weeks before the election, Election Day came and went without the feared attacks on voting infrastructure, and federal officials and other experts have said there is no evidence voting systems were compromised or any votes were lost or changed. Stamos said that while there were some small indications of foreign interference on social media, it amounted to “nothing that has been all that interesting” compared with the flood of claims shared by Americans themselves. Public service announcements from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm warned of the ways Russia or other countries could interfere again, including by creating or altering websites after the election to spread false information about the results “in an attempt to discredit the electoral process and undermine confidence in U.S. 3, especially after a presidential election four years earlier in which Russian intelligence officers hacked Democratic emails and Russian troll farms used social media to sway public opinion. officials had been on high alert for foreign interference heading into Nov. “For quite a while at this point, the Kremlin has been able to essentially just use and amplify the content, the false and misleading and sensational, politically divisive content generated by political officials and American themselves” rather than create their own narratives and content, said former CIA officer Cindy Otis, vice president for analysis at the Alethea Group, which tracks disinformation.