Politics

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Another election-shattering event took place this week after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The right lost itself in another conspiracy cycle because of it, Silicon Valley megadonors started writing donation checks again in response, and Vice President Kamala Harris and her new presidential campaign embraced all the memes.

A would-be presidential assassin with no clear motive, shot dead at the scene; accounts from witnesses who’d warned police to no avail; video taken from a bewildering variety of angles. Minutes after Thomas Crooks came within an inch of killing Donald Trump, it was already clear what would happen next, and in the subsequent days a number of conspiracy theories indeed emerged, each more baroque than the last.

Tracing just one shows how easily and rapidly they proliferate. Famed hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wrote in a since-deleted X post, for example, that an anti-vaccine influencer’s video purporting to show that there were two shooters made “a powerful case.” Another anti-vaccine influencer, meanwhile, produced a chart tracing the paths of bullets from four shooters, and a third, affiliated with Alex Jones, asserted that his audio analysis showed there were three. (None offered a compelling explanation of how an entire team of assassins botched the job.)

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Today on WIREDPolitics Lab, how Democratic megadonors in Silicon Valley are showing their support for Vice President Kamala Harris now that President Joe Biden has dropped out of the race. Plus, why posts from the far-right and Republican lawmakers calling Biden’s exit a “coup” have exploded online.

Reproductive rights organizations have been quick to come out in support of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee after President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he would drop out of the presidential race and endorse Harris instead.

Harris could be an even stronger proponent for reproductive health care than President Biden, who has been hesitant to speak directly about abortion during his presidency. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has said that he isn’t “big on abortion” and even opposed it in his early days as a senator, but his views have evolved over the years.

In May, TikTok announced that it would automatically label AI-generated content on its platform. That’s not true, though, of all versions of the app. A new report from the Mozilla Foundation and AI Forensics finds that TikTok’s Lite-Save Data version, aimed at users in poorer markets, not only leaves AI-generated content unlabeled, but also lacks other, similar safeguards.

“Labeling is a very important tactic that platforms use to deliver some form of trust and safety,” says Odanga Madung, a Mozilla fellow and coauthor of the report.

Hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would be dropping out of the 2024 presidential race, Democratic megadonors in Silicon Valley were already lining up to support Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of their party’s ticket.

“This is what’s right for our country—and our democratic future,” wrote Reid Hoffman, cofounder and executive chair of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners, on X. Last week, Hoffman had endorsed a call between 300 democratic donors and Harris and encouraged members of his network to join the call, according to The New York Times.

GOP lawmakers, right-wing influencers, and far-right supporters of former president Donald Trump immediately claimed that President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election was the result of a coup perpetrated by Vice President Kamala Harris and other members of the Democratic Party.

In the days and weeks leading up to Biden’s announcement, right-wing politicians had already started pushing the narrative that efforts being made to persuade Biden to withdraw from the race were undemocratic. In the hours after Biden officially withdrew on Sunday, those accusations exploded online, according to a WIRED review and data provided by Advance Democracy, a nonprofit organization that conducts public interest research.

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign staff didn’t receive official communication that he was dropping out until nearly 20 minutes after the announcement went up on social media. When they finally did get an email, it directed them to Biden’s post on X.

“Team, sharing with you the letter from President Biden that was released just now. We will have more information later this afternoon,” Biden campaign managers Jen O’Malley Dillon and Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote in an all-staff email timestamped at 2:03 pm Eastern. “Look out for an invite to an all staff call. We are so grateful to be part of this team with you all. More soon.”

President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday following a nearly monthlong pressure campaign mounted by Democratic leaders and donors to oust him.

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” Biden wrote in a letter posted to X on Sunday. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

While Elon Musk officially endorsed former president Donald Trump in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt, Grok, the “anti-woke” AI chatbot integrated into Musk’s X platform, is boosting claims that Trump is “a pedophile” and “a wannabe dictator.” The chatbot also refers to Trump as “Psycho.”

This is based on an analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by Global Witness, a nonprofit that investigates digital threats, which looked at Grok’s responses to queries about the US election. Global Witness found that, in addition to referring to Trump as “Psycho,” the bot also appeared to invent racist tropes about Kamala Harris, surface widely-debunked election conspiracy theories, and recommend that users post biased hashtags such as #WeBackBidenHarris2024 and #VoteReform for engagement.