A video taken last Tuesday at the Northampton County Courthouse in Easton, Pennsylvania, and posted to the social media platform X, stirred up suspicion of voter fraud.
But the man being videotaped was a postal worker dropping off mailed-in ballots.
Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure told the Longview News-Journal that the worker has received death threats because of the video.
Similar videos are appearing in a dedicated group titled "Election Integrity Community" on X, owned by entrepreneur and Donald Trump supporter Elon Musk, including a video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant with multiple Georgia IDs who claimed to have voted multiple times.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Thursday asked Musk and the leadership of other social platforms to take down the video, saying it was false.
"This is false and is an example of targeted disinformation we've seen this election. It is likely foreign interference attempting to sow discord and chaos on the eve of the election," Raffensperger said in a statement on Thursday night.
"In the meantime, we ask Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to take this down. This is obviously fake and part of a disinformation effort. Likely it is a production of Russian troll farms," Raffensperger added in the statement.
McClure told the Longview News-Journal that the incident of the postal worker being harassed was "unfortunate, because a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed. And they were essentially lying about what was going on there."
Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University and an expert on election disinformation, told NPR that X "is hosting the communities where this sort of effort at sense-making is taking place."
"Most of the people who are responding to the posts are convinced that the election is being stolen and so feels a little bit more like a place where they're trying to just gather evidence to prove the thing that they've already decided has happened," said DiResta. "And they're concerned about that because they keep hearing it from political elites that they trust — people like Donald Trump and people like Elon Musk."
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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