The 2025 midterm elections were, by most conventional measures, a significant electoral event: a strong Democratic performance in key states, a series of closely watched gubernatorial races, and several ballot initiatives on issues — reproductive rights, voting access, drug policy — that generated intense public interest. But alongside the organic civic engagement that such elections produce, Rolli IQ's monitoring infrastructure documented an information environment around the elections that was more saturated with coordinated narrative activity than any previous electoral cycle in the platform's operational history. This case study documents the patterns we observed, the analytical distinctions that mattered most, and the broader implications for how researchers and communicators should think about information integrity in future electoral contexts.
The scale of the coordinated activity around the 2025 cycle was not uniformly distributed across time. Rolli IQ's timeline data shows three distinct surge periods. The first occurred 18–22 days before election day, when narrative clusters focused on electoral integrity concerns — specifically, claims about voting machine vulnerabilities and early-vote fraud — showed injection signatures that our models scored as high-confidence coordinated. The second surge began 72 hours before election day and was dominated by turnout-suppression messaging, with authenticity scores below 20 on the clusters driving the highest volume. The third surge came in the 36 hours following the close of polls, when results in competitive races were still being counted — the period of highest vulnerability for narrative manipulation, and the period when Rolli IQ's real-time coverage proved most operationally significant.
Pre-Election: Integrity Narratives and Turnout Suppression
The integrity narrative cluster that appeared 18–22 days before the election followed a pattern Rolli IQ has documented in multiple previous electoral contexts: the deployment of technically plausible but unverified claims about voting system vulnerabilities to seed doubt about the legitimacy of results before votes are cast. What distinguished the 2025 deployment was the sophistication of the cross-platform coordination. Rolli IQ's account correlation analysis identified network fingerprints appearing simultaneously across Twitter/X, Telegram, and Facebook-linked groups — the same account clusters, operating with different apparent personas on each platform, pushing the same core narrative frame with platform-appropriate surface variation.
The turnout suppression cluster that appeared in the final 72 hours was more direct in its operational goal. Coordinated messaging in competitive districts included fabricated reports of long lines, closed polling locations, and identification requirement changes. Authenticity scores on this cluster were among the lowest Rolli IQ recorded during the entire cycle — below 15 in most cases — reflecting near-total saturation by coordinated accounts with organic amplification minimal or absent. The cluster achieved limited mainstream media breakthrough, in part because several news organizations with Rolli IQ access were able to verify the social media signals before reporting on them, choosing to characterize the reports as unconfirmed when authenticity scores indicated high coordination probability.
The Post-Election Results Window: Highest-Risk Period
The 36 hours following the close of polls in competitive races represents the highest-risk window in any electoral information environment — and the 2025 data confirms this. When results are uncertain and public attention is intense, coordinated actors have the maximum opportunity to inject false narratives about counting irregularities, procedural violations, or preliminary results that can be framed as evidence of fraud before official tallies are certified. The cost of false narratives in this window is high: social media amplification during results uncertainty can force election officials to issue defensive statements that, by acknowledging the claim, inadvertently lend it credibility.
In three competitive races where results remained unclear 12–24 hours after polls closed, Rolli IQ documented coordinated narrative injection around counting processes. In two of the three cases, the injected narratives achieved mainstream media coverage — not because journalists believed the claims, but because the social media volume was sufficient to make coverage of 'claims circulating online' defensible as journalism. In the third case, a news organization with access to Rolli IQ's real-time authenticity data chose not to cover the social media volume, citing the platform's finding that over 80% of the volume was generated by accounts with authenticity scores below 25. The claims dissipated without mainstream amplification within 18 hours.
What Genuine Civic Engagement Looked Like
It is important to document what organic engagement looked like during the 2025 cycle, because the picture is not one of comprehensive manipulation. Genuine civic engagement was high — voter registration content, candidate comparison posts, ballot initiative explainers, and get-out-the-vote organizing all generated substantial authentic engagement across platforms, with authenticity scores consistently above 70. The challenge for communicators and researchers was not that all social activity was suspicious, but that the coordinated layer was operating simultaneously and was deliberately designed to be difficult to distinguish from the organic layer without behavioral analysis.
The practical implication for communications teams is that a blanket skepticism of social media signals around elections is as analytically counterproductive as blanket credulity. Not all high-volume signals are manufactured. The discipline required is the ability to apply authenticity analysis to distinguish the coordinated layer from the genuine layer — and to respond to each with appropriate calibration. Rolli IQ's election monitoring data for 2025 shows that the organic civic engagement deserved attention and response; the coordinated manipulation deserved documentation and refusal to amplify.
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Conclusion
The 2025 electoral information environment represents the current state of the art in coordinated narrative operations around democratic processes. The actors responsible for the coordination we documented are learning from each cycle — improving their cross-platform synchronization, refining their bridge techniques, and calibrating their messaging more precisely to target audiences. The research community, platform trust-and-safety teams, and communications professionals responsible for information integrity around elections need to be learning at least as fast. Narrative intelligence infrastructure — the ability to detect coordination in near-real-time, across platforms, with evidence that can be audited and shared — is no longer optional equipment for election integrity work. It is the baseline.
Related to this topic: Case Studies · Methodology
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About the Author
Policy Research Director
Harvard Shorenstein Center affiliate. PhD in Political Communication from MIT. Dr. Patel's research on disinformation and democratic resilience has been published in the Harvard Kennedy School Review and the Journal of Political Communication.