On Sunday, Sen. Mark Kelly said that the federal government should do more to warn people about the huge amount of false information about the election that is being spread on social media sites like X, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.
“It is up to us, the people who serve in Congress and in the White House to get the information out there, that there is a tremendous amount of misinformation in this election, and it is not going to stop on Nov. 5,” Kelly told “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan .”
Kelly, a senator from Arizona, said that he has seen these operations spread false information not only in Arizona but also in other key states.
“There is a very reasonable chance I would put it in the 20 to 30% range, that the content you are seeing, the comments you are seeing, are coming from one of those three countries: Russia, Iran, China,” said Kelly.
Kelly showed screenshots of Russian-made websites with fake news stories that looked like they came from Fox News and The Washington Post at a committee meeting last month about foreign threats to the 2024 election. These websites were aimed at voters in close states.
Kelly told the meeting on September 18 that it was unacceptable for people in Arizona and other places to try to change the results of the elections. “We have got to do something about it.”
As of September 30, CBS News’ battleground tracking showed that 49% of Arizona voters agree with both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
In Pennsylvania, another battleground state, Trump held a gathering in Butler on Saturday, three months after someone tried to kill him. Some people in his own party and the billionaire Elon Musk agreed with him.
They said Trump was the only way to protect democracy and threatened a third election if he does not win in November.
Kelly called the social media mogul a liar on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“He is standing next to the guy that tried to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6, saying that this is somehow going to be the last election and they are going to take away your vote,” said Kelly. “And you know, it just does not pass the logic test.”
At the White House press conference on Friday, President Biden spoke from the podium for the first time since taking office.
He said he was confident in a free and fair election, but he drew comparisons to the 2021 uprising at the Capitol to show that he was not sure if it would be a peaceful handover of power.
“The things that Trump has said and the things that he said last time out when he did not like the outcome of the election were very dangerous,” Biden said. “If you notice, I noticed that the vice-presidential Republican candidate did not say he would accept the outcome of the election, and they have not even accepted the outcome of the last election.”