After the election, a new theory spread quickly on TikTok that a heroic presidential candidate was quietly investigating corrupt deep state actors who rigged the results, waiting in the wings until these corrupt actors could be arrested and tried for their crimes.

If this theory sounds familiar, that’s because it’s reminiscent of QAnon. But the new conspiracy theory, born after the 2024 presidential election was called for Donald Trump, features Kamala Harris in the role of the vengeful criminal prosecutor and has been propagated by liberals. He promises that Harris will make things right soon — that she was the real winner of the election, that she will still take office in January, and that the real plans behind her loss and concession will soon be revealed..

Welcome to “BlueAnon,” a collection of conspiracy theories that reflect right-wing narratives about Donald Trump across partisan divides. The phenomenon was very visible after the first assassination attempt against Trump, theorized by many online accounts. had been staged. But it has become even more ascendant in the wake of this month’s election, and is particularly notable for its structure adhering so closely to the “Stop the Steal” speeches presented by Trump supporters four years ago.

Complaints spread on, Reddit, Instagram, Topicsand elsewhere, to several thousand likes and millions of views. In some cases, social media users claimed to have evidence of invalidated ballots or ballots that did not appear in the system. Others have speculated that Russians or other groups could have hacked into voting machines and flipped Harris’ votes.

Some wonder how swing state Democrats could have succeeded elected certain candidates to the Senate but not Harris. Others pointed to an incorrect chart — made with incomplete data — that showed there were 18 million fewer Harris voters this year than 2020 Biden voters. (Ironically, conspiracy theorists on both sides have used this particular chart to support their claims: Harris voters suggested it was proof that the 2024 election was interfered with, and Trump voters suggested it was proof of the interference of 2020. “Where did these 20 million Democratic voters come from?”, posted Dinesh D’Souza the day after the election, about the painting “The truth is that they never existed.”)

Most recently, Harris voters have focused on a theory that Elon Musk changed a massive number of votes to swing the election in Trump’s favor using his company SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites. On November 10, a decommissioned Starlink satellite fell to Earth and burned up upon re-entry – which is what it is designed to do. But suspects believe the satellite was deliberately destroyed to hide evidence of election interference.

Voting machines generally operate on a closed network and are not connected to the Internet; Musk couldn’t have tampered with votes via Starlink or any satellite. But the theory is powerful because it draws on some of the very real and powerful influences that have shape the result of the 2024 elections. Musk was heavily involved in Trump’s victory; he is the richest man on the planet and has invested funds in the Trump campaign. His political advisors ran a deceptive dark money campaign to The micro-target has already disappointed Democratic voters. Additionally, Musk controls one of the largest social media platforms in the world and has no problem spreading vile rumors and misinformation, which are also out of control (even without his help) in our modern political environment . But according to experts, his actions do not constitute active interference in the election outcome.

The Starlink conspiracy theory is interesting because it shares contours with the Italygate election conspiracy theory from the 2020 cycle. According to this theory, people working at the US embassy in Rome used satellites to remotely transfer votes from Trump to those of Biden. (Similar plots proposed that supercomputers could have changed the ballot.)

“This all sounds very familiar,” said Sam Howard, U.S. political editor for NewsGuard, a media monitoring organization.

According to Howard, NewsGuard found that mentions of “Starlink” were seven times higher on the Sunday after the election than before, with 281,644 mentions of the X that day. And that was just X, which has easier metrics to track; conspiracy theories were perhaps more prevalent on other social media platforms.

Many people sharing these claims did so by insisting that they were different from Trump supporters who supported Stop the Steal. “It’s not even a conspiracy theory,” one person said on Reddit, explaining their reasoning. “It’s a logical assumption based on past evidence.”

According to Robyn Caplan, a professor of technology policy at Duke University, the behavior of these users can be explained in part by the so-called “third-person effect,” a widely held belief that other people are more influenced by mass media (advertising, articles, Internet screeds, but also disinformation.

Liberals often convince themselves that they are less susceptible to misinformation because they see themselves as being on the side of institutions such as journalism and academia that value facts and fact-checking information, Caplan said. The left, she noted, prides itself on “claiming more truth and knowledge.” (The right feels it is more resistant to misinformation than the left because it is not brainwashed by liberal educators, she said.)

In reality, these experts note, the desire to quibble with election results in both directions comes from the same place: an individual conception of political affairs that does not correspond to reality. This is only exacerbated by our information bubbles: algorithms and social circles have led virtually everyone to believe that they are more representative of the electorate than they actually are.

The truth is that the left is not immune to the same factors that create conspiracy theories on the right. But there are crucial differences between the two camps. NewsGuard’s Howard said the BlueAnon claims he saw appeared to come largely from accounts he classified as “obscure” or “fringe.” “They may have a lot of followers,” he added, “but they don’t seem to have as much influence offline.” (He added that there was also no evidence of substantial foreign interference in the discussions.) The claims, he added, also already appear to be weakening.

AJ Bauer, a professor of journalism and media at the University of Alabama who researches conservative news, argued that every election leads to “a subset of people who are skeptical of the results” simply because that they are caught off guard and confused. “A lot of the early stuff that seemed like election skepticism toward the Liberals was mostly due to a fog of war,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong or unusual about humans filling uncertainty with conspiratorial thinking uncertainties. I think it goes hand in hand with election time.

What matters, he says, is that no one, regardless of leadership position, has grasped the doubt. Unlike Trump, Harris conceded. And neither journalistic institutions nor Democratic leaders are fanning the flames by pretending that these conspiracy theories are real.

“You’ll always be able to find examples of people being wrong on the Internet,” Bauer said. “The real question is how these ideas are used by those in power. »