How a post falsely claiming migrants are registering to vote spread to millions in four weeks

The post published in early April misrepresented federal data from the Social Security Administration to falsely suggest that hundreds of thousands of migrants may have registered to vote in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Texas. One hour later, the tweet got the rocket fuel it needed to take off: X owner Elon Musk reposted it with the comment, “extremely concerning.”

In less than four days, the false narrative was widely shared on X, Facebook and Instagram. Donald Trump and Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene soon joined in, respectively proclaiming, “What is going on???” and “Are migrants registering to vote using SSN?” By the end of the month, the original tweet and Musk’s had generated more than 125 million views.

All the while, election officials in the three states publicly debunked the claims, and multiple news organizations and a news literacy nonprofit published fact-checking articles providing accurate context. Yet the rumors continued spreading — showing how virulent misinformation is and how casually it can spread on social media.

Under federal laws, only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections, and states are required to regularly update their voter rolls, or voter registration lists, to remove anyone ineligible.

The X post that triggered this latest wave of migrant voting misinformation used publicly available federal data from the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) program, which shows the total number of times Texas, Pennsylvania and Arizona requested the Social Security Administration to verify a voter’s identity using their Social Security numbers.

While verification requests are not necessarily a one-to-one tally of people registering to vote, the X post falsely presented such numbers as if they were, suggesting that nearly 1.9 million individual voters registered in such states without a photo identification, only using the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.

The post then states that people present in the U.S. illegally can get Social Security cards with a work authorization. That is not widely the case. In 2021, about 587,000 noncitizens, most of whom were  lawful permanent residents or were granted work permits, received a Social Security number. Noncitizens with Social Security numbers are still banned from voting. A study of the 2016 election conducted by the Brennan Center the following year found “that of 23.5 million votes cast, election officials only found about 30 cases of potential noncitizen voting,” according to The Associated Press.

Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, has researched the connections between false claims of noncitizen voting and “rigged election” allegations for the past several years.

Bayar has found that falsehoods connected to these narratives often gain more traction when “there’s a real crisis behind it,” such as the increasing number of migrants seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. They also often include “misleading cuts of evidence to put [in] some sort of a grain of truth,” he said.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

Once the falsehoods hit social media, moderators face a difficult game of Whac-A-Mole to keep up with the spread, even after a claim has been fact-checked.

Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit media watchdog, provided NBC News with 10 examples of social media posts published on Meta’s platforms, most of them from Facebook, that amplified the false claim from X. Nearly two weeks after the claims in the posts had been publicly debunked, the social media company had only labeled one of the 10 posts as containing false information and included a hyperlink to a fact-checking article.

NBC News sent links for the 10 posts to a Meta representative. Hours later, Meta labeled all the posts as false.

According to a Meta spokesperson, when one of its fact-checking partners determines a post contains false information, it kicks off an automated “similarity detection” process to identify other posts duplicating the same debunked content and label them as false. But when misinformation is shared through screenshots, as it was in the Facebook posts, it can often remain undetected by the automated methods and would require a content moderator or a fact-checker to manually find and flag the posts.

The false information label not only signals to Meta users that they may be receiving misinformation, but it also helps the company reduce the distribution of that content on their platforms, the spokesperson added.

Kadida Kenner, CEO of the New Pennsylvania Project, a voting rights organization that has helped register 40,000 new voters in the state over the past three years, said her team often encounters people who believe misinformation “as it relates to the safety of our elections,” she said.

Kenner said she believes “there’s bad actors that are absolutely putting bad information” on social media to cast doubt over the electoral process “with the intent to suppress votes.”

And while her organization hadn’t come across the falsehood about migrants being able to vote, the conflicting stories and prevalence of questionable information about voting in the election has contributed to potential voters feeling disengaged, Kenner said, adding that countering such feeling is “a big part of our job at this moment.”

Bobby Arena, the outreach director for the Lehigh County GOP in Pennsylvania, got a text message from someone who came across the false social media claims suggesting hundreds of thousands of migrants may have registered to vote illegally.

Arena said he later fact-checked the information and realized the numbers were off — they were “just too extreme” — and responded to the person who had initially texted him about it.

But that still didn’t appease Arena’s underlying concerns over “a potential problem with the voter rolls.”

Republicans in Pennsylvania and in other states have been scrutinizing voter registration lists through lawsuits and legislation as the party increasingly seizes on the rolls as a focus of their election activism, even when there’s no evidence that bloated voter rolls lead to voter fraud.

Bayar said that while correction is the best response available to combat misinformation, it still falls short on addressing the sets of beliefs tied to such false narratives.

“You are dealing with people’s anti-immigration attitudes, people’s partisanship, people’s ideology, people’s grievances toward the system,” Bayar said. “So, what you’re trying to correct is not just one belief, but a mindset that is distrustful of the U.S. elections.”