Actors of Disinformation: Issuers and Recipients of Hoaxes in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election

Disinformation in the political arena poses a serious threat to democracy, especially during electoral periods. These are critical moments when citizens are highly engaged with public discourse—and when disinformation tends to surge. By distorting facts and manipulating narratives, such falsehoods can undermine informed decision-making and erode trust in democratic institutions. Our main objective is to analyze the activity of actors involved in electoral disinformation. We distinguish between the actors who spread disinformation (called ‘issuers’) and their targets (called ‘recipients’) to identify their characteristics (typology and political party), their connection to the hoaxes they disseminate, and their relationship. The sample (N = 374) comprises the false information verified by PolitiFact on the 2024 U.S. presidential elections. The results show that issuers openly use disinformation as a deliberate communicative strategy during electoral campaign. However, those who spread disinformation are more readily identifiable than those who receive it. While the dissemination of false messages is not exclusive to any one party, there are significant variations in its intensity—most notably with greater prevalence among Republican actors. Second, disinformation is predominantly used to discredit and undermine political opponents. Innovative uses are also emerging. One of them is the use of falsehoods to bolster support for one’s own candidate, especially in the case of Donald Trump. Finally, there is a statistical relationship between the issuer and the type of channel, topic, and type of disinformation. This research contributes to advancing our understanding of how actors involved in electoral disinformation operate, a topic that has received scarce attention until now.