Tony Romm

The campaign and its aides have tapped a network of new and existing Facebook pages, groups and events — some of which have hundreds of thousands of members — to rally people in public this week around the unfounded belief that Democratic candidate Joe Biden is attempting to "steal" the election

The false and misleading claims, which drew rebukes from Twitter and Facebook, were also echoed in approximately 9 million text messages sent by the campaign over the past 24 hours, according to an anti-robocall firm.

As mainstream news organizations urged caution and patience, social media swelled with confusion, conflict and, in some cases, outright fury in response to the president’s statement from the White House, a scenario that law enforcement officials and digital-threat analysts had warned about for months.

An unidentified robocaller has placed an estimated 10 million calls in the past several weeks warning people to "stay safe and stay home," spooking some Americans who said they saw it as an attempt to scare them away from the polls on Election Day.

Top Senate Democrats are calling on electricity, water and telecommunications giants to voluntarily halt all utility shutoffs for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, raising fears that millions of Americans are falling behind on their bills and have no easy way to catch up.

The Senate Commerce Committee’s hearing is set to discuss tech’s content-moderation practices.

Recent efforts targeting swing states with deceptive tactics show the problem is larger than social media.

Some of the staunchest critics of Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants are ramping up their efforts — and their donations — to try to convince former vice president Joe Biden to take a harder line against the tech industry if he wins the 2020 election.

In Utah, which has voted by mail for years, officials were busy responding to outlandish claims traceable to right-wing pundits and the president’s Twitter feed.

State and federal investigators are expected to file antitrust charges against Facebook as soon as November, according to four people familiar with the matter, embarking on a massive legal challenge against the tech giant and its perceived ironclad grip over social media.