Paris, France (AFP) Social media was flooded with unfounded claims of voter fraud in the final hours of the US presidential election, until Donald Trump claimed victory.

Key states Pennsylvania and Georgia were the subject of allegations of ballot tampering and non-citizen voting, including videos of U.S. intelligence officials linked to Russian-backed disinformation campaigns.

Despite claiming for weeks that this year’s election was marred by widespread voting irregularities, the former president declared a victory “like no other” and vowed to “heal” the country in a surprising return to the White House.

Reporting fraud “has become a classic mobilization technique for populist or far-right leaders like Donald Trump,” said Julien Giry, a French expert on American disinformation.

Leaders will claim that a loss was due to fraud, or they will claim that “there was no fraud because we reported it beforehand,” he said.

Posts on X, the platform owned by Trump’s fellow billionaire and cheerleader Elon Musk, were instrumental in sowing doubt about the integrity of the voting process.

The so-called “Electoral Integrity Community” that Musk created to “share possible incidents of fraud or electoral irregularities” spread multiple claims refuted by AFP, including that voting machines were changing votes from Trump to Kamala Harris.

Other posts falsely shared images of fraudulently discarded ballot boxes in hurricane-hit North Carolina.

But Trump’s decisive victory appears to have silenced the online frenzy.

Hundreds of thousands of mentions of “fraud,” “voter fraud” and “cheating” peaked on social media on Election Day before falling sharply after Trump’s victory, according to a network analysis tool from the French company Visibrain.

“There is almost certainly more calm today on this front than there would have been if Trump had lost or narrowly won,” said Ethan Porter, a professor and researcher at George Washington University’s Misinformation/Disinformation Laboratory.

-‘A very fine line’-

The former president never admitted defeat in the 2020 election, a denial that culminated in a violent attack by his supporters on the US Capitol weeks later in an attempt to block the certification of the vote.

Taking advantage of an already tense political climate, disinformers also stoked fears of physical violence during this year’s presidential race, culminating in false bomb threats at multiple polling locations that authorities have attributed to a Russian interference campaign.

In the hours before polls closed, Trump claimed there had been “a lot of talk about mass cheating” in Pennsylvania’s largest city and said authorities would “come.”

A city official quickly denied the claim, calling it “yet another example of misinformation,” while Philadelphia police and the district attorney’s office rejected the baseless allegation.

Trump won the state’s 19 electoral college votes, considered the biggest battleground prize in this year’s voting, helping him reach the necessary minimum of 270 electoral votes.

Before polls closed, online researcher Renee DiResta posted on the social platform Threads that the influencers she was monitoring took a more measured approach to allegations of fraud on Election Day.

“There’s a fine line between laying the groundwork for claiming fraud if you lose and not wanting to look like a fool if you complain loudly and your man wins.”