Kang Muslim
The landscape of modern American politics has undergone a profound structural shift, one where the boundaries between verified truth and strategic fabrication have blurred into standard electoral practice. During the fiercely contested 2024 United States presidential election, political actors and anonymous online commentators weaponized false information not as a fringe tactic, but as an open, calculated campaign strategy. A comprehensive new study published in the academic journal American Behavioral Scientist sheds light on this phenomenon, offering an empirical dissection of the individuals who manufactured these hoaxes, the platforms they utilized, the specific targets of their campaigns, and the underlying mechanics of political deception.
Authored by Alba Córdoba-Cabús and Andreu Casero-Ripoll, communication researchers at the Universitat Jaume I in Spain, the research project titled "Actors of Disinformation: Issuers and Recipients of Hoaxes in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election" provides a meticulous look at how digital platforms and traditional media channels were leveraged to shape voter perception. By examining 374 verified false messages collected from the prominent fact-checking organization PolitiFact between January 2024 and the presidential inauguration in January 2025, the study moves beyond traditional academic inquiries that focus merely on content velocity or message virality. Instead, it places the spotlight squarely on the human agents behind the disinformation, mapping out a detailed ecosystem of political falsehoods.
The Evolution of Political Disinformation in Digital Ecosystems
False narratives in politics are inherently designed to distort public perception, polarize the electorate, and systematically erode trust in core democratic institutions. While historical electoral cycles have always featured elements of exaggeration, mudslinging, and propaganda, the advent of digital communications infrastructure over the past decade has fundamentally altered the scale and velocity of these operations. Disinformation, academically defined as the intentional and coordinated spread of demonstrably false content to secure a strategic advantage or inflict calculated harm, has found a fertile breeding ground in the architecture of modern social media.
Historically, academic research within media studies and political communication has predominantly concentrated on the textual or visual composition of fake news stories, or alternatively, on tracing the speed at which unverified information travels across global networks. However, Córdoba-Cabús and Casero-Ripoll recognized a critical gap in the existing literature: a scarcity of empirical data concerning the specific identities, motivations, and operational strategies of the individuals generating and fielding these falsehoods. By categorizing the issuers (those who launch unverified claims) and the recipients (the subjects of those hoaxes), the researchers aimed to construct a holistic profile of contemporary political communication during a high-stakes national referendum.
Methodological Framework and Chronological Scope
To capture the breadth of the disinformation landscape during the 2024 cycle, the research team established a rigorous methodological framework. They analyzed a curated sample of 374 false messages harvested continuously from PolitiFact, a non-partisan journalistic entity renowned for its rigorous verification of political claims. The chosen timeline spanned from the very beginning of the primary election season in January 2024, through the heated summer conventions and the November general election, culminating in the presidential inauguration in January 2025.
For every verified hoax within the dataset, the research team systematically coded and cataloged a multitude of variables. These included the specific communication channel where the message initially appeared, the thematic topic of the claim, and the exact taxonomic type of falsehood deployed. Furthermore, the researchers meticulously identified the partisan affiliations and public roles of both the issuers propagating the claims and the targets central to the narratives. This granular approach allowed the study to draw statistically significant correlations between actor types, chosen mediums, and underlying narrative objectives.
Open Campaigns: The Normalization of Fabricated Claims
One of the most striking findings of the study challenges the traditional assumption that political disinformation is largely clandestine, executed by shadowy operatives hidden behind proxies or sophisticated cyber-warfare apparatuses. According to the data, in more than 90 percent of the analyzed cases, the research team could readily identify the specific person or group issuing the false statement. This high rate of attribution suggests that the spreading of deliberate falsehoods has become a normalized, highly public political tactic rather than a covert operation.
Individuals and entities generating this content exhibited little to no hesitation regarding the concealment of their identities. The researchers argue that this brazen openness reflects a degraded political environment wherein public actors operate without any substantive fear of being penalized or punished by the electorate for sharing unverified or demonstrably false claims. Rather than facing immediate reputational damage, purveyors of hoaxes appeared to calculate that the short-term strategic gains of audience mobilization and narrative dominance far outweighed any potential accountability from voters.
Source Attribution: Anonymous Users, Influencers, and Political Candidates
A detailed breakdown of the issuers reveals a diverse coalition of actors, each commanding distinct segments of the communication pipeline. Anonymous online users emerged as the most prolific source of false information, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all analyzed messages. Operating primarily within the decentralized ecosystems of social media platforms, these users served as foundational nodes for grassroots rumor-mongering and viral narrative construction.
Meanwhile, political candidates and public officials, alongside internet influencers and prominent cultural celebrities, tied for the second most common sources of disinformation. Each of these latter cohorts was directly responsible for roughly 16 percent of the items in the dataset. However, a profound divergence emerged when the researchers analyzed the correlation between the type of person sharing the claim and the medium they employed to disseminate it.
Anonymous users and digital influencers relied almost exclusively on internet-based social media platforms to circulate their messages, exploiting algorithms designed to maximize engagement through emotional arousal. In stark contrast, political candidates and established public officials adopted a multimodal, omnichannel approach. These institutional actors distributed unverified claims across a diverse array of formats, including live campaign rallies, broadcast television interviews, and formal press releases. This deliberate strategy highlights an effort by political elites to penetrate various demographic segments across multiple media environments, ensuring their messaging reached voters regardless of whether those constituents actively engaged with internet algorithms.
Topical Divergence and the Mechanics of Deception
The thematic focus of the hoaxes was similarly dictated by the identity and role of the issuer. Politicians and institutional actors naturally gravitated toward substantive public policy matters. Their false statements predominantly centered on macro-level issues that traditionally dominate national debates, such as economic indicators, immigration enforcement, and public safety or crime rates.
Conversely, anonymous online users and internet influencers focused heavily on the mechanics of the electoral campaign itself. Their digital content frequently targeted the administrative voting process, shifting polling numbers, and the intimate private lives of political figures. This division underscores a functional specialization within the disinformation economy: elites focus on policy-framed grievances to justify legislative or executive positions, while decentralized actors focus on procedural skepticism and personal sensationalism to maximize viral engagement.
The study also uncovered distinct variations in the mechanical construction of the deception itself. Political actors frequently employed misleading content—a tactic that involves taking real, verifiable statistics, official data points, or historical records and deliberately twisting or misinterpreting them to fit a predetermined partisan narrative. On the other hand, anonymous users and influencers relied more heavily on false context. This technique occurs when authentic images, unedited videos, or legitimate direct quotes are stripped of their original circumstances and shared alongside entirely fabricated background details to completely alter their initial meaning and impact.
Partisan Disparities and the Direction of Attacks
When examining the partisan affiliations of the actors within the sample, the researchers documented a significant asymmetry in the production of false claims. Political actors and commentators aligned with the Republican Party were found to have issued approximately 73 percent of the hoaxes captured in the dataset. In comparison, Democratic actors and their associated surrogates were responsible for roughly 22 percent of the unverified claims analyzed.
This partisan imbalance translated directly into the targeting of political rivals. The vast majority of the fabricated content was engineered as an offensive weapon designed to disparage opponents. Consequently, political candidates served as the primary targets of these operations, appearing as the central subject in 38 percent of all analyzed items. When looking at the partisan breakdown of the recipients, Democratic figures were on the receiving end of roughly 57 percent of the falsehoods, while Republican figures were targeted by approximately 22 percent of the recorded hoaxes.
The Rise of Constructive Disinformation
Perhaps one of the most innovative and revealing insights generated by the study is the identification of a growing trend termed "constructive disinformation." Traditionally, political false claims have been conceptualized purely as negative, offensive attacks directed outward at adversaries. However, the data revealed that political actors are increasingly utilizing fabrication for positive reinforcement.
Specifically, Republican actors directed nearly 20 percent of their false claims inward toward their own party, movement, or candidate in an explicitly positive manner. These supportive messages were crafted to inflate past accomplishments, exaggerate policy successes, or artificially bolster public support and morale, rather than to tear down a political opponent.
Democratic actors exhibited a similar behavioral pattern, utilizing this supportive tactic for their own candidates, albeit at a lower rate of roughly 7 percent. This evolution in political deception demonstrates that fake news is no longer confined to the role of an adversarial weapon. Instead, it increasingly functions as an artificial booster shot, engineered to enhance a candidate’s desirability, competence, and appeal within the electorate.
Methodological Limitations and Contextual Caveats
While the study provides a robust empirical foundation for understanding the dynamics of the 2024 U.S. presidential election disinformation ecosystem, the authors acknowledge certain inherent methodological limitations. Because the research relied entirely on data collected by a single prominent fact-checking organization—PolitiFact—the sample inherently cannot capture every questionable or false statement uttered throughout the entirety of an intense national election cycle. Fact-checkers operate under resource constraints and prioritize claims that reach a certain threshold of public visibility, meaning the study reflects a specific subset of verified falsehoods rather than the totality of the internet’s vast political discourse.
Furthermore, the scope of the research is strictly bounded within the geographical and institutional context of the 2024 United States presidential election. The communication tactics, platform behaviors, and partisan dynamics observed in this unique American political environment may not necessarily translate directly to other sovereign nations or localized political races. Future academic research will be required to examine elections across different global regions and governmental systems to determine whether these patterns of issuer-recipient dynamics remain consistent on an international scale.
Broader Implications for Democratic Discourse
The findings compiled by Córdoba-Cabús and Casero-Ripoll carry profound implications for the future of democratic communication and electoral integrity. By demonstrating that disinformation has been normalized as a public campaign strategy—freed from the shadows of anonymity and increasingly utilized for both aggressive attacks and constructive self-promotion—the study signals a permanent transformation in how political actors interact with the electorate.
As political elites and decentralized digital networks continue to refine these techniques, traditional journalistic fact-checking and platform moderation face unprecedented structural challenges. The reliance on omnichannel dissemination by political candidates ensures that falsehoods transcend the digital filter bubbles of social media, embedding themselves deeply into mainstream public discourse. Ultimately, understanding the precise mechanics of who spreads hoaxes, who they target, and why they do so is an indispensable first step for society as it grapples with the ongoing erosion of shared objective reality in democratic governance.
