Elon Musk's Starlink company accused of rigging the election

After Donald Trump's victory, allegations from the American right of suspected electoral fraud disappeared from social networks. But the left in turn shared conspiracy theories, expressing doubts about the reliability of the electoral process.

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The vote count manipulated?

Some anti-Trump Internet users have also spread a false theory according to which Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, owner of X and Donald Trump's right-hand man, would have used his system for providing Internet access by satellite Starlink to rig the presidential election by manipulating the vote count.

These claims appeared to multiply in the days following the November 5, 2024 election and continued to surface in the week that followed. A social media monitoring tool used by the NewsGuard site shows that the trend reached its peak on November 10, 2024, with 281,644 mentions of Starlink on X, the social network of which Elon Musk is co-owner. NewsGuard also spotted this false claim on Reddit, Facebook and Threads.

Voting machines not connected to the Internet

The U.S. election security agency quickly said there was no evidence of voter fraud for the 2024 election. Additionally, election officials in swing states said their voting machines did not 'were not connected to the Internet, which means that this equipment is not likely to be the target of a cyberattack by Starlink.

Nonetheless, these claims persisted when Donald Trump on November 12 nominated Elon Musk to co-lead a “Department of Government Effectiveness.”

“Disinformation techniques do not belong to a single political ideology”

“What we are seeing today is a rise in allegations of voter fraud from the left, particularly in the days following the election – stories amplified by a network of bots,” accounts powered by computer programs, analyzes Dan Brahmy, director of the security company against disinformation Cyabra.

“It is a reminder that disinformation and manipulation techniques do not belong to a single political ideology: they are used systematically to influence public perception,” he added.