Candidate Donald Trump insists that the votes of noncitizen immigrants will skew the 2024 U.S. presidential election. He repeats his claim in his rallies and focused on this anti-immigrant rhetoric in the 2024 presidential debate.

 

“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.” said Trump in the September debate broadcasted by ABC. “They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country,” he said charging Kamala Harris, his democratic challenger, without evidence as being part of a voting scam.

 

These claims follow a pattern of Republican-led misinformation about voter identification and election interference. Trump’s denial of the 2020 election results was rooted in claims around the unreliability of mail-in ballots and dead people’s votes skewing election results. During this election cycle, misinformation around noncitizen voting is uniquely rampant due to voter polarization and distrust of traditional media, shifting toward alternative sources of news like social media says Laura Feldman.

 

“People are not as trusting of legacy and mainstream news outlets, whether it’s the New York Times, the Associated Press, or CNN,” says Feldman, professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. “Republicans are much more likely to distrust news media than Democrats, which can be connected to elite rhetoric about liberal media bias.”

 

Misinformed anti-migrant and racist messaging has defined Republican rhetoric during past presidential election cycles. Trump, before he was a presidential candidate, spread birtherism conspiracies about candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 election, falsely claiming that Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to serve as US president. Fox News and GOP leaders amplified the “great replacement” theory—that immigrants are coming into the US to replace white Republican voters—to a mass audience following the Republican loss of the 2020 election.

 

“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate [with] more obedient voters from the third world,” said Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Fox News Primetime in April 2021, supporting the great replacement conspiracy. “But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually.”

 

Trust in traditional news media steadily declined since the 1990s amidst a media environment that became more sensational and tabloid-driven, intensifying upon Trump’s claims about mainstream outlets broadcasting fake news, according to Feldman. As a result, audiences turned to alternative media sources.

 

Algorithmic changes and the misinformation policies of social media companies have affected the dissemination of information and conspiracies on these platforms. Elon Musk, who acquired X (formerly Twitter) in 2022 has been an outspoken endorser of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, fueling doubts about noncitizen election interference in his posts.

 

“The goal all along has been to import as many illegal voters as possible,” said Musk in July on X, to his over 200 million followers. His post garnered 45.8 million views. Musk’s posts about noncitizen voting conspiracies have been viewed over 200 times more than fact-checking posts correcting those claims published on X, reported NBC news.

 

“He bent the algorithm around his own account so he can draw attention to specific topics in a way that literally no other user on social media can,” said Andy Guess, an associate professor at Princeton University, who studies polarization and misinformation in politics. “He’s totally fixated on this noncitizen issue and can elevate these baseless claims in a way that gets people talking about them.”

 

Musk’s amplification of noncitizen voting conspiracies follows a wave of a right-wing media boom on social media platforms characterized by xenophobia.

 

In the past year, YouTube and Rumble livestreamers made money filming and harassing migrants at the US southern border, and TikTok videos claiming that refugees have entered the US as an “invading army of sleeper cells” quickly gained virality. Anti-migrant content is one of the leading narratives on TikTok says Lucy Cooper.

 

“People could be led to anti-migrant content from consuming news about what was happening at the time, and in that way, immigration is one of the issues that’s the most opportunistic. There’s a lot of pathways into it,” says Cooper, a digital research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) who researched TikTok and anti-migrant content.

 

As a growing population of Americans that rely on social media as a news source, social media platforms have transitioned to a hands-off approach to managing political misinformation says Guess.

 

“One side said, ‘You’re not doing enough to remove hate speech.’ The other said, ‘You’re censoring people.’ There was no way to satisfy both so the platforms generally try to pull back on politics altogether,” Guess says.

 

Unlike public health misinformation that was widespread during the pandemic in 2020, social media platforms lacked a uniform approach to political misinformation.

 

“When it comes to viral misinformation about migrants, there’s just no such playbook. An individual case or anecdote that might be based on something real can turn into sweeping statements. It is ambiguous at what point it becomes misinformation.” says Guess.

 

Young viewers are increasingly getting news from social media platforms as opposed to professional journalism outlets. In the past four years, the share of young adults who regularly get news from TikTok has grown nearly fivefold, up to 45% in 2024, revealed a Pew Research study.

 

Older demographics encounter different challenges around navigating a changing news media landscape. “They still don’t have crystallized perceptions of the orientation of the platform. That means they’re able to build trust in these platforms because they’re more novel,” said Guess.

 

Amidst a fragmented social media landscape, with users consuming content on various platforms, the ability to tailor content and reinforce echo chambers further entrenches the noncitizen voting conspiracy according to experts.

 

“Social media removes the gatekeepers, it’s completely unregulated. It’s increasing the scale in which information and misinformation can spread,” says Feldman. “Within those platforms, everybody is seeing different stuff, so it’s very easy for us to surround ourselves with the information that echoes back to us our existing world views.”