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Efforts to combat disinformation in retreat as voters head to the polls

Cat ZakrzewskiNovember 2, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

(Washington Post illustration/iStock)

“During the chaos after the 2020 election, tech companies erected unprecedented defenses to prevent misinformation from spreading on their platforms.

Twitter’s Trust and Safety team added fact-checking labels to false claims about the election and blocked some of then-President Donald Trump’s posts about vote fraud from spreading. Facebook peppered election posts with links to its voter information center, which was filled with reliable information about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and voting in general. Several weeks after the race was called, YouTube began removing videos that made claims of widespread election fraud.

Four years later, all those platforms are in retreat.

Under Elon Musk, Twitter — now X — eliminated most of its content moderation staff, replacing them with a crowdsourced, and flawed, fact-checking experiment. Facebook, now Meta, has scaled down its voter information center, and has decreased the visibility of posts about politics across Facebook and Instagram. And YouTube now allows claims of election fraud on the network.

Facing legal threats and political pressure, programs to combat the spread of disinformation have waned at social media giants; most companies have declined to update their policies to respond to the 2024 election. A once-thriving ecosystem of academic and government programs intended to monitor the spread of hoaxes and foreign interference online also has diminished, opening the door for threats against election workers and viral, unproven claims about voting irregularities.

This new environment has fostered a flood of exaggerated claims about irregularities in the voting process, which researchers say has escalated as Election Day approaches. Some election officials and researchers argue this ecosystem exposes voters to an information free-for-all, warping their perception of the results and potentially contributing to political instability.

“After 2020, the platforms really felt like ‘mission accomplished,’” said Color of Change president Rashad Robinson, whose digital civil rights group has pushed tech companies to adopt tougher rules against voter suppression. “And so [now] when you talk to them, they have moved a lot on believing that they know how to deal with the problem.”

Some experts argue the saturation of online conspiracies could translate into dangerous offline actions. A large quantity of voter-fraud propaganda might prime the public to distrust the outcome of the election, for example, laying the political groundwork for GOP leaders to challenge the results.

Individual pieces of election misinformation could inspire physical or digital attacks against poll workers, election officials or immigrant communities.

“We saw the dry run in 2020 of [election workers] being followed home and attacked, [facing] death threats online, [and] photos of them circulating on Facebook,” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel of the digital rights group Free Press.

Meta spokesman Corey Chambliss said in a statement that protecting the U.S. 2024 elections remains a top priority for the social media giant and “no tech company does more to protect its platforms — not just during election periods but at all times.”

“We have around 40,000 people globally working on safety and security — more than during the 2020 cycle — and have invested more than $20 billion in teams and technology in this area since 2016,” Chambliss added.

YouTube spokeswoman Audrey Lopez said in a statement that the company will “support elections with a multilayered approach to effectively connect people to high-quality, authoritative news and information.” A spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment.

The corporate retreat is fueled by several factors. A conservative legal and political campaign over allegations of censorship has successfully pressured government agencies, tech companies and outside researchers to stop working together to detect election falsehoods. Musk, who has dramatically reduced X’s misinformation programs, has inspired other companies to roll back safeguards against propaganda.

Some platforms aren’t just allowing false claims of election fraud to spread, they are actively soliciting them. X owner Elon Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, America PAC, last month launched an Election Integrity community page on X to encourage more than 58,000 members to post examples of potential voter fraud in the 2024 election, creating a database that includes many unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations.

“What is happening is much, much bigger than someone making a business decision to have less curated news sources and to have less content moderation,” said Eddie Perez, who once ran Twitter’s civic integrity team and is now a board member of the nonprofit OSET Institute. “Musk, in his support for Trump, is actually going to another extreme, which is to use the power of the platform in a proactive way, in favor of very specific antidemocratic viewpoints.”

The deluge of election denialism arrives as the unfounded claim that the 2020 election was rigged against former president Donald Trump has become a mainstream talking point among conservatives. In the months before the vote, these claims have ballooned into a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories.

Since 2021, tech companies have opened the door to politicians contesting the election results. Trump has returned to Meta platforms, YouTube and X after the companies suspended his account in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Meta started allowing politicians to put 2020 election rigging claims in political ads, though fraud claims about the 2024 vote remained barred.

Twitter once banned misleading claims that could undermine the public’s confidence in an election “including false information about the outcome of the election.” By 2023, a year after Musk took over the platform, that prohibition haddisappeared from the company’s civic integrity policy, according to its website.

“They all get to a point where they’re like ‘we can’t do this for every election in the past,’” said Katie Harbath, CEO of the tech consultancy Anchor Change and a former Facebook public policy director. “They might be more willing to take action for 2024 stuff than they are spending a ton of time constantly re-litigating 2020 and other past elections.”

Internet companies also have dramatically shifted how they promote accurate information about the election. Four years ago, Meta ran a voter information center with continuous updates about the election from outside groups, including the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank. The voter information center now directs users to static government websites, after Meta lobbyists complained that relying on the think tank could make them appear biased, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak on private deliberations.

A Twitter curation team, which included some seasoned journalists, pushed election-related articles from news outlets in Spanish and English to a dedicated election page on the platform’s Explore tab. Today, the program doesn’t exist. The company is directing users to a government voter registration page.

Both X and Meta have de-emphasized news stories in users’ news feeds, blunting the reach of mainstream journalists who share accurate updates about the election. Meta scrapped a news tab on Facebook promoting credible articles about elections and reduced the visibility of accounts that talk about politics and social issues.

While Meta has said shifting away from news and politics exposes users to less vitriolic content they don’t want, experts and activists have argued the move could lower the quality and diversity of information online, particularly for people who don’t actively seek out quality journalism from other sources.

“I think in many ways, the solution for companies in the election context is simply to remove the possibility of accountability,” Benavidez said. “And one way to do that is by depoliticizing feeds.”

Tech companies are also receiving less support from federal agencies this year to fight disinformation because the White House was mired in litigation with Republican state attorneys’ general. Their lawsuit, Murthy v. Missouri, alleged the Biden administration’s coordination with the tech companies to tamp down on election and vaccine falsehoods amounted to censorship. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the conservatives’ effort in June, but communication between internet platforms and government watchdogs is now more limited.

The Department of Homeland Security has pulled back from direct outreach to companies such as Meta, Google and X after years of holding joint meetings with them to discuss election threats including foreign influence campaigns, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The FBI said in a statement that it was sharing information with social media companies and recently updated its procedures so that the platforms are aware they “are free to decide on their own” whether to take action.

Meanwhile, federal programs that combat foreign disinformation are in jeopardy. The Global Engagement Center, which was founded in 2016 to combat propaganda campaigns that undermine the United States, is expected to shutter in December unless Congress votes to extend its authorization. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) have co-sponsored an amendment to let the program to continue, but it faces resistance from House Republicans, who accuse the agency of “mission creep” and say its work could violate the First Amendment.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken “has publicly made it clear that continuing this vital work overseas is a priority,” the State Department said in a statement.

Some disinformation research programs have also folded or shifted strategies to avoid being targeted by probes from House Republicans and conservative activists investigating allegations of digital censorship. Others are simply having trouble performing the research at all after both Twitter and Meta reduced or eliminated access to tools widely used to track viral misinformation on their platforms.

Now, researchers are waiting with trepidation to see how tech companies’ reduced defenses against misinformation and rising political propaganda will affect voters as they head to the polls.

“The world of misinformation and disinformation is much broader than it was in 2020,” said Tim Harper, who leads election work for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington nonprofit that advocates for digital rights and freedom of expression. “How this plays out will be difficult to determine until the election is over.”

A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles

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“An endorsement of democracy, solving problems, and Kamala Harris.

Nilay PatelOct 29, 2024 at 8:00 AM EDT

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

Donald Trump is a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even recognize the existentially threatening collective action problems facing our nation, let alone actually solve them.

Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests. The essential work of every government is making laws that balance the tradeoffs between shared benefits and acceptable restrictions on individual or corporate freedoms to solve this dilemma, and the reason people hate the government is that not being able to do whatever you want all the time is a huge bummer. Speed limits help make our neighborhoods safer, but they also mean you aren’t supposed to put the hammer down and peel out at every stoplight, which isn’t any fun at all.

Every Verge reader is intimately familiar with collective action problems because they’re everywhere in tech. We cover them all the time: making everything charge via USB-C was a collective action problem that took European regulation to finally resolve, just as getting EV makers to adopt the NACS charging standard took regulatory effort from the Biden administration. Content moderation on social networks is a collective action problem; so are the regular fights over encryption. The single greatest webcomic in tech history describes a collective action problem.

The problem is that getting people to set aside their own selfishness and work together is generally impossible even if the benefits are obvious, a political reality so universal it’s a famous Tumblr meme. 

You can sum up the history of civilization as a long fight about where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes from

This is such an intractable problem that you can sum up the history of civilization as a long fight about where the government’s authority to tell everyone what to do comes from. Ancient rulers just went ahead and considered themselves gods, which made things pretty easy — anyone who lives in a neighborhood with an overzealous HOA president can see this approach in action today. Quite a few European kings decided they’d operate one layer up the stack and announced that they were empowered by God with the divine right to absolute control, which also made things somewhat easy but caused several wars and assassinations by other kings who’d gotten drunk and high enough to see Jesus.

Every so often, the world gets some bozo who decides his desire for absolute control is justified because of an emergency, which inevitably leads them to spend a lot of time convincing people that the very existence of foreigners is an emergency so they can hold onto that power forever. This is basically a hack, but it’s an effective one — there are always foreigners, after all. You know why Trump has lately taken to standing in front of backdrops that read DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW? It’s because when you put this dude under any pressure at all, he reflexively creates a Brown People Emergency to justify his authoritarian instincts.

It is extremely frustrating that the Harris campaign keeps going on about Trump being a danger to democracy without explaining why his whole deal is so deeply incompatible with America, so here’s the short version: the radical founding principle of the United States of America is the idea that the government’s authority to make laws and solve collective action problems comes from the consent of the governed. A clean rewrite, replacing centuries of architectural debt with what was, at the time, a cutting-edge foundation mostly unproven at scale. We vote for our leaders, they are given the power to tell us all what to do so that we might help each other reach better outcomes and be happier, and if they are bad at their jobs, we can simply throw the bums out. We open-sourced the authority, in other words. It was a big bet, and so far, it’s paid off.

Like any large open-source project, American democracy is kind of messy, requires a lot of volunteer effort, and often uses way too much memory. But it enables everyone to submit requests for changes so that we might better direct the power of our communities at every level toward solving our problems, and the democratic process provides an essential stability which allows people to keep buying into our country as the platform on which to build their own big ideas.

Trump doesn’t give a shit about any of this because he only cares about himself. He generally does not care to solve problems unless it benefits him personally, and the intellectual foundation of the MAGA movement that’s built up around him is the complete denial that collective action problems exist at all. The MAGA worldview is now so batshit that it requires its proponents to look at obvious failures of collective action and declare them immutable features of modern life — or, in an even stupider twist — announce them to be good things.

For example, school shootings represent a complete failure to solve a collective action problem — a uniquely American failure because not only have we not solved the problem, we have actively made it worse. Just look at this chart:

Credit: American Enlightenment Project / K-12 Shooting Database

That’s the alarming increase in school shootings since the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which basically made any meaningful gun regulation impossible. With a bare 5–4 majority behind him, Antonin Scalia decided to fully reinterpret the Second Amendment and reset the balance of liberties in America to favor the rights of gun owners in what is now a clear tradeoff against the safety of our communities.

You can argue about this chart, or this specific tradeoff, or even that Scalia failed to foresee the rise of a wildly irresponsible gun culture that should otherwise moderate these harms but which has instead produced tactical cosplay chuds and would-be lifestyle influencer Don Jr. That’s fine! All of that would be evidence of a rational political culture: one that makes policy choices, evaluates the outcomes, and accepts the reality of the results so as to make better tradeoffs in the future.

But Trump is not rational, and Trumpism cannot abide the idea of a collective action problem. You might think that Trump’s brain is mush, but JD Vance’s weasel-like mind is constantly, actively finding ways to sanitize the chaos, and the philosophical demands of MAGA required him to look America directly in the eye at a recent rally and say that school shootings are “a fact of life.”

It should be easy for Vance to imagine a world in which school shootings don’t happen — that is the pre-Heller world he grew up in! — but fixing the problem of school shootings requires admitting that a collective action problem exists. It requires admitting that the current policy solution — sending kids to school with fucking Kevlar in their backpacks — is less effective than restricting gun ownership in any meaningful way. He cannot do that. Trump cannot do that. Trumpism cannot allow that debate to happen.

Do you want to live in a country where the vice president refers to schools as “soft targets”? That’s a vote for JD Vance. That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school shootings chart to keep going up, forever.

That’s a vote for Donald Trump — a vote for the line on the school shootings chart to keep going up, forever

It’s the same with vaccines, which are a near-perfect collective action problem — they are generally only effective if almost everyone in a community gets them, which means either everyone has to agree to get them or the government has to mandate compliance. When everyone cooperates and gets vaccinated, our vaccines can be highly effective: the measles were effectively eradicated in this country nearly a quarter-century ago.

Then presumptive Trump health secretary RFK Jr. hit the scene to spew his dangerous anti-vax bullshit, convinced enough people to stop getting vaccinated, and the fucking measles came back. When this man visited Samoa in 2019, he contributed to a measles outbreak so bad that 83 people died, almost all of them children. But to see this failure of collective action would require a break with the MAGA worldview, so these dummies have fallen back to saying getting measles is actually good.

Do you trust Donald Trump to see this tradeoff and understand this outcome? To adjust to it and use the power of the Oval Office to convince Americans that the balance of harms favors vaccinations over a rise in measles cases? He couldn’t even do it for the covid vaccines his own Operation Warp Speed produced, and Vance is now blowing anti-vax dog whistles as loudly as he can in his public speeches. It is a near certainty that Trump will just blame the next measles outbreak on immigration because at least he can shoot at brown people.

Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid, too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media — too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.

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The list of massive collective action problems facing our nation is almost overwhelming to consider, and they threaten to tear us apart: our population is getting older, with a looming healthcare crisis to come. Education. Housing. Income inequality. There are so many more.

We are not doing well right now, and when I look at the problems The Vergespecifically covers and has covered for over a decade, the failures are blinding.

Solving climate change is the biggest collective action problem of our lifetimes — and nested within it, there are even more collective action problems like transitioning to EVs and rethinking our sources of power. Trump cannot concede that this problem requires collective action to solve, so the MAGA approach is to simply deny climate change exists while Trump blathers on about wanting to be a “whale psychiatrist.”

As a country, we have almost entirely failed to regulate the tech industry. There are almost no meaningful checks on its size or influence, or even requirements to be responsible with its power, even though American consumers express their clear preferences to rein in tech companies all the time. There is simply no other way to look at millions of Instagram users — including the company’s own celebrity influencers — enthusiastically posting legalistic incantations for over a decade commanding Meta to stop doing things with their content. Fundamentally, they are all trying to renegotiate the Instagram terms of service, which everyone signed without reading. But as individuals, they have no real leverage with which to drag Mark Zuckerberg to the bargaining table.

As a country, we have almost entirely failed to regulate the tech industry

This is a pure market failure. Despite this sustained, dramatic expression of consumer demand, there have been no policy changes, and there are no meaningful competitors differentiated by privacy. The industry has learned from this and imposed an ever more extractive set of platform policies with little meaningful consequence. Resetting all this is what the government is for — a functional federal privacy law would effectively provide a baseline terms of service agreement with every platform that would protect us all, and then we could see how well it’s working and adjust.

The tech industry is also racing ahead with AI, even though it’s shown no ability to restrain itself from causing the most obvious problems: our social networks choked to death with AI slop, the death of photographic truth, and sexualized deepfakes of teenagers. These problems were all predicted and warned against in the most dire ways, and yet they have all come to pass. Solving these problems will require creative and flexible lawmaking that considers a huge balance of interests, benefits, and harms, and a rigorous approach to thinking through the tradeoffs over time.

There is no shortage of proposed legislation to solve these problems floating around, and there are other countries making laws that we might look at to evaluate the tradeoffs. But the Republican Party is so resistant to solving collective action problems that Meta has spent years saying it welcomes regulation because it knows half of our government will never allow it to happen. Hell, one of the very first tech bills passed during the first Trump administration was a rollback of rules preventing ISPs from sharing your data, and Trump signed it immediately — pure ghoul shit.

In most normal circumstances, America would slowly, incrementally figure this stuff out. States would pass some laws, there’d be some litigation, maybe some Supreme Court decisions, maybe some federal legislation in the end. But the absolutely fucked thing about the United States in 2024 — the looming dread that keeps me up at night — is that a bunch of tech billionaires have decided it would be easier if they were simply in charge of remaking society and have fallen in line behind a man they clearly despise because it’s easier for them to get what they want by manipulating the addled mind of a narcissistic monster than by winning people’s dollars in the market or votes in the ballot box.

Let’s just name some important ones: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos — they have all decided to kiss the ring in various ways and sell out the very concept of America. They’d rather fly their helicopters over the burned-out husks of our cities to their private beaches and secure bunkers than participate in our democracy. They would prefer to remake our country into a broken oligarchy where they have finally ended the free market and privatized our lives into an overlapping series of enshittified subscription monopolies, and they have taken to openly wishcasting what they would do with unchecked power. “Competition is for losers” is not just a thing Peter Thiel says — it’s a worldview that’s produced the monarchy-curious JD Vance arguing that the purpose of antitrust is to regulate the speech Google distributes and Trump himself saying the company has to be careful or get shut down.

Our Silicon Valley billionaires don’t actually believe in this sloppy gloss on competition law. Rather, these men are all trying to protect or create their very own empires, and they are funding, supporting, or at least accepting of Trump’s strongman instincts because they each understand how it will benefit them individually, even though it will cost us all much more. These would-be oligarchs are a collective action problem, personified: they cannot curb their individual greed so we must all endure their furious attempts to prop up a madman who might end the American experiment.

Let’s not fool ourselves.

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Kamala Harris is not a perfect candidate for president. It is possible to pick apart her policy ideas and extremely easy to criticize her unusually circular speaking patterns — she often sounds like she’s vamping until her internal search algorithm finds the right keyword and issues a preloaded response. Did you know she prosecuted transnational criminal organizations? You will.

But look beyond the locked-in message discipline to her approach to campaigning, and it is clear Harris is deeply, meaningfully committed to solving collective action problems. She has assembled a politically diverse group of people to support her that range from AOC to Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban, and most of her claims about how she’ll run the country differently than Biden come down to putting Republicans in her Cabinet and reaching across the aisle more. She has, for better or worse, made approaches to the crypto community while championing restrictions on price gouging and regulations on banks. She had antimonopoly Senator Elizabeth Warren onstage at the Democratic National Convention while having Google antitrust defense lawyer Karen Dunn serve as her debate advisor.

You might not agree with some of the depressingly averaged-out policy positions produced by this unnervingly big tent. You might have some serious problems with, say, her proximity to the current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what happens when the other party in our two-party system can only generate policy ideas that amount to AI-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on X. Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

It is time to stop denying the essential nature of the problems America faces. It is time to insist that we use the power of our democracy the way it’s intended to be used. And it is far past time to move beyond Donald Trump. 

A vote for Harris is a vote for the future. It is a vote for solving collective action problems. It is a vote for working together, instead of tearing our world to shreds.“

The Problem with Religious Belief | Neil deGrasse Tyson

Has SpaceX Done Anything NASA Hasn't?

Apple releases AirPods firmware update for almost all models

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José Adorno

“Ahead of new hearing aid features being made available for AirPods Pro 2 on Monday, Apple has released a new firmware update for AirPods 2, 3, Pro 1, and Max with Lightning port. At this moment, it’s unclear what’s new with this build. However, it’s likely about stability improvements.

That said, all of these AirPods, except for the original model, AirPods 4, AirPods Pro 2, and AirPods Max with USB-C, are jumping from version 6A326 to 6F21.

These are the latest firmware available for each AirPods model:

• AirPods Pro (2nd gen) with MagSafe charger (USB-C): 7A305
• AirPods Pro (2nd gen) with MagSafe charger (Lightning): 7A305
• AirPods Pro (1st gen): 6F21
• AirPods (4th gen): 7A304
• AirPods (3rd gen): 6F21
• AirPods (2nd gen): 6F21
• AirPods Max (Lightning): 6F21
• AirPods Max (USB-C): 7A291
• AirPods (1st gen): 6.8.8

How to update AirPods firmware

AirPods Pro 2 with USB-C port. Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR Image source: Christian de Looper for BGR

There isn’t an official method to update your AirPods firmware. Since Apple says the new versions install when AirPods are connected via Bluetooth to your iPhone, the best option is to let both devices charge together for at least 30 minutes.

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To check your AirPods firmware version, you need to open the Settings app, open the Bluetooth menu, find your AirPods or Beats earbuds, and tap the “i” next to them to see the current version number.

If this process doesn’t work, you’ll have to wait until they update on their own, as Apple doesn’t let you manually install these firmware updates.

Interestingly, a few days ago, Apple accidentally released a beta firmware for AirPods Pro 2 to all users. Still, the hearing aid features are only available for users in the US and Canada using iOS 18.1.

If we discover anything new with this build, we’ll update this article.“

Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite business is set to boom if Trump wins

“The cutting-edge satellite system stands to gain billions of dollars more in contracts and subsidies as Trump favors space investment.

Eva DouOctober 24, 2024 at 5:51 p.m. EDT

Elon Musk speaks during a campaign event with former president Donald Trump on Oct. 5 in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Elon Musk’s fast-growing satellite business Starlink could be poised to gain billions of dollars more in federal contracts and subsidies under a Donald Trump presidency, industry experts say, in a reflection of the world’s richest individual’s deepening financial stake in Washington politics.

Trump has cast himself as a space patron, pledging to unleash funds for national-security installations in orbit and slash red tape for Musk. Other Republicans have also telegraphed business upsides for Starlink, including pushing for the company to get a slice of a $42 billion pot of federal internet subsidies.

A presidential vote of confidence could help the standing of Starlink and its parent company, SpaceX, as they vie for billions of dollars in national-security contracts against rivals like Amazon in the coming years. Musk has struggled to reassure parts of the defense community that he is a trustworthy partner, even as industry experts say Starlink is rapidly building out an advanced satellite surveillance system on track to be the most powerful one in history.

Starlink, which is managed day-to-day by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, currently has some 6,400 working internet satellites in orbit, 10 times morethan its nearest rival, and separately a quiet but fast-growing surveillance satellite business.

One former SpaceX executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters involving a onetime employer, said a Trump administration would also be disposed to assist in green-lighting new launch sites for SpaceX, helping Starlink to continue rapidly expanding its satellite network to stay ahead of rivals.

“I think that’s one area where a Trump administration will be a little more sympathetic,” the executive said.

Musk’s shift to supporting Trump appears to be driven largely by conviction on social issues, according to people familiar with him who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss his thinking. But the tech executive’s business empire also stands to benefit if Trump wins the election — potentially by a far larger amount than the billionaire has splashed out to support Trump’s campaign.

Musk has donated $75 million to his own super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection efforts and about $1 million more to another pro-Trump PAC. He also announced over the weekend that he would give away $1 million a day to a registered swing-state voter who signed a petition. Federal satellite contracts often run in the hundreds of millions of dollars or higher.

There is further revenue potential in the broader space contracting boom that Trump has promised, which could bring billions of dollars to SpaceX’s rocket business. Musk’s other companies, Tesla and X, could also benefit if Trump follows through with appointing him to lead a new “government efficiency commission.”

The satellite sector is notorious for thin margins, so it is unclear how profitable any new contracts would be for SpaceX. And Democrats and Republicans tend to be more aligned on space policy behind closed doors than public bluster would suggest. Still, the difference in tone on space and Musk has been marked.

Trump vowed at a rally over the summer to “make life good” for Musk, while President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been cool toward the entrepreneur. And while the Republican candidate’s election platform includes a pledge to promote investments in “near earth orbit” — the satellite realm dominated by Starlink — Harris’s campaign and the Democratic Party have not highlighted space policy beyond a general commitment to NASA and the International Space Station.

Space defense booster

Musk’s Starlink bloomed under Trump’s presidency. Republican officials took a chance on the mercurial tycoon and his newfangled satellites, which promised not only a new internet option for consumers but also a military and intelligence-gathering edge for the government.

As president, Trump was a booster for the space defense industry, signing the Space Force — a new military branch specializing in space operations — into existence in 2019 and elevating security hawks who urged the United States to militarize space ahead of rival nations. He also expressed personal admiration of Musk, trekking out to Cape Canaveral to watch a SpaceX rocket launch, and praising Musk as “a brilliant guy.”

Musk, for his part, initially expressed mixed views of Trump’s presidency. The SpaceX founder, who had leaned Democratic, quit two of Trump’s advisory councils in 2017 to protest the president’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. But he praised Trump’s establishment of the Space Force as “sensible,” saying it would help civilization expand into space.

Trump’s Federal Communications Commission authorized a fledgling Starlink in 2018 to launch a first tranche of 4,425 internet satellites, despite protest from rivals that such an unprecedented number would clutter the skies. It was an audacious decision: Starlink, an untested vendor, got a green light to nearly double the total number of satellites orbiting Earth.

“We were pushing the envelope,” said Evan Swarztrauber, a policy adviser to then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. “We were just trying to create the conditions for various technologies to be able to be rolled out. We didn’t know exactly how things would go.”

A satellite system like Starlink was revolutionary. Satellites were traditionally large and expensive, with the world’s largest constellations consisting of only a few hundred satellites. SpaceX’s breakthrough in developing rockets that could be reused for multiple launches made it possible to create a much larger network.

While Starlink was marketed as an affordable internet option for rural residents, defense officials appreciated its military utility from the early days. A strong data connection in previous dead zones opened new capabilities like streaming battlefield drone video back to headquarters or course-correcting missiles midflight.

“It doesn’t take a wizard to understand the military implications,” remarked the former SpaceX executive, who said Musk sometimes invoked China’s competitive threat in meetings with Pentagon officials.

The Pentagon was soon a customer, and before long Starlink was given the opportunity to dip its toe into surveillance work.

The Space Development Agency, a newly formed defense office, awarded SpaceX a $149 million contract in 2020 to build a first generation of tracking satellites that could detect hypersonic missile launches. SpaceX also began working on prototype spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, the Pentagon’s spy satellite division, during the Trump administration, Reuters reported this year. The Wall Street Journal reported the classified contract was valued at $1.8 billion.

The NRO declined to confirm the contract, citing national security considerations. Troy Meink, principal deputy director of the NRO, said in a public talk this month that the agency does not procure directly from Starlink, but did not say whether it works with the company indirectly.

Meink said rockets like SpaceX’s have made it feasible for the agency to build its largest spy satellite fleet ever, with more than a hundred payloads launched in the past 18 months.

“Why didn’t you do this earlier?” Meink said people sometimes asked him. “Well, launch costs were high, right? … Now it’s just come way down.”

Globe-girding surveillance

There’s been much hushed discussion in the space industry this year over Starlink’s plan to supplement its satellites for the internet with a second type in its secretive “Starshield” unit dedicated to surveillance.

Five industry experts told The Washington Post that Starlink appears to be the front-runner in building the first satellite system able to see all places on Earth continuously in high-definition, even as many details of the project remain unclear.

“You’re approaching a near real-time capability to see any spot on Earth,” said Michael Brown, former director of the Defense Innovation Unit, a Pentagon technology unit, of this next wave of satellites led by Starlink.

Alexandre Najjar, a consultant at Novaspace, forecasts that Starlink’s new earth-observation system will become the world’s largest next year.

Chris Quilty, founder of the research firm Quilty Space, estimates that state-of-the-art satellite systems today have a roughly 15-minute lag time — still long enough for a military target to relocate completely after being photographed.

If Starlink can build a system that provides closer-to-real-time global surveillance in the next few years, it could become an irreplaceable federal contractor. Its rivals fear SpaceX has the deep pockets to accept short-term losses until it runs them out of business.

“He could sustain a deficit for ages,” Najjar said. “They could do that long enough until the competition is gone.”

Such a reliance on Musk unnerves officials across party lines.

There’s been debate across the U.S. government over Musk’s reliability as a federal partner since 2022, when he declined a request from Ukraine to activate Starlink over Crimea to support an attack on a Russian fleet, saying it would make his company “explicitly complicit in a major act of war.” While Musk has since come around to more vigorous support of Ukraine’s military, U.S. defense officials ever since have foregrounded a goal of “diversifying” their satellite supply.

There’s a political dimension to the debate as well. After Musk endorsed Trump in July, the Harris campaign called Musk one of the “arrogant billionaires only out for themselves” and said such tycoons were “not what America wants or America needs.” One of the people familiar with Musk said he developed something of a “persecution complex” after repeated attacks and snubs from prominent Democrats.

Despite Starlink having no close rival right now in low-earth-orbit satellites in terms of technical capabilities, the Space Development Agency announced Wednesday that it has picked 18 other satellite makers along with SpaceX for its next military project. One of them is Kuiper, Amazon’s satellite division, which has not yet launched a functional network. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Clare Hopper, head of the U.S. Space Force’s Commercial Satellite Communications Office, said the Pentagon is working to put another $12 billion in low-earth-orbit satellite contracts on the table, up from her office’s current authorization of $1 billion. She said these contracts would not only go to Starlink but to a range of companies.

“We anticipate there to be more diversity of business,” Hopper said.

As for consumer internet, Starlink’s bread and butter, the company is fighting to be considered for tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies alongside established internet providers. The Biden administration has been wary, saying they must be judicious with taxpayer dollars and that Starlink has yet to reliably meet FCC-defined “broadband” speeds.

Republicans have accused the Biden administration of being biased against Musk. House oversight committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) has launched a probe into whether the FCC withheld a grant from Starlink improperly. Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr called his Democratic colleagues’ decision to keep Starlink from the grant “nothing more than regulatory lawfare against Elon Musk.”

Swarztrauber, the former FCC official, said Starlink is more likely to land federal internet subsidies under a Trump administration. Democrats traditionally view broadband more like a utility in which everyone deserves the same service, he said, while Republicans are more willing to let an eclectic patchwork of technologies shake out through market competition. The largest of these federal subsidy programs, the $42 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program, has only just begun, with the next administration getting a say in fund distribution.

“I think there would be more willingness to incorporate Starlink into broadband expansion initiatives” under Trump, Swarztrauber said.

In a move that would ready the company for such an opportunity, Starlink this month filed another request with the FCC to expand its fleet to 29,988 satellites. There are around 10,000 satellites orbiting the Earth right now. Most of them are Starlink’s.“