With Facebook and Instagram down nationwide Tuesday morning, Texas Attorney General and high-profile election denier Ken Paxton wasted no time in suggesting to his far-right base that dark forces were at play.
“National outage of Facebook and Instagram on this Super Tuesday,” Paxton tweeted around 10 a.m.
Although Paxton didn’t directly connect any dots in his tweet, the mention of Super Tuesday hints the outage might be more than a coincidence. The META-operated social media platforms’ twin nosedives occurred on the morning when 15 states and one territory will vote in Republican and Democratic primaries.
After all, Paxton — a longtime Trump ally — isn’t beyond spinning election-related conspiracy theories and outright fantasies.
After the 2020 election, Paxton filed a widely mocked suit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the results of four swing states, and as Trump’s followers ransacked the U.S. Capitol, the Republican AG falsely claimed “These are not Trump supporters” in Facebook and Twitter posts. Beyond that, Paxton has been a close ally of key 2020 election denier Catherine Engelbrecht.
Perhaps because of that track record, right-wing social media users were quick to pick up on Paxton’s post, some even claiming the “deep state” pulled the plug on Facebook and Instragram.
“Realistically, this is probably something done by our intelligence agencies they’ll blame on some foreign actor as an excuse to take greater control over the internet,” X user @JRobnFreedom wrote.
“It’s a trial run for November,” user @wrongsideofcom chimed in.
Meanwhile, user @ MeJuBrun wrote, “And nothing can go wrong with computer voting, right?”
More than 500,000 Facebook users reported that they were unable to access the social media platform as of midmorning Tuesday. However, reported outages dropped to a little over 23,000 as of press time, according to Downdetector.
Although it’s unclear what caused the outage, there’s been no reporting by reputable sources that suggest the timing is related to the primary elections.
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This article appears in Feb 21 – Mar 5, 2024.
