After the election, a new theory spread rapidly on TikTok that a heroic presidential candidate was quietly investigating the corrupt actors in the deep state who rigged the results, waiting in the wings until those corrupt actors could be arrested and tried for their crimes.

If this theory sounds familiar, it’s because it’s reminiscent of QAnon. But the new conspiracy theory, which emerged after the 2024 presidential election was called for Donald Trump, features Kamala Harris as the vengeful criminal prosecutor and has been spread by liberals. He promises that Harris will make things right soon – that she was the real winner of the election, that she will still take office in January, and that the real plans behind her loss and concession will soon be revealed..

Welcome to “BlueAnon,” a set of conspiracy theories that mirror right-wing narratives about Donald Trump across the partisan divide. The phenomenon was very visible after the first assassination attempt against Trump, which many online accounts theorized had been staged. But it became even more ascendant after this month’s election, and is particularly notable for adhering so closely in structure to the “Stop the Steal” narratives presented by Trump’s supporters four years ago.

The claims were widespread on X, Reddit, Instagram, natureand elsewhere, to many thousands of likes and millions of views. In some cases, social media users shared claims that they had evidence of invalid ballots or ballots that did not appear in the system. Others speculated that the Russians or other groups could have hacked the voting machines and changed Harris’ votes.

Some have questioned how swing state Democrats could have been successful elected certain candidates to the Senate but not Harris. Others pointed to an incorrect chart—made with incomplete data—that showed there were 18 million fewer Harris voters this year than there were Biden voters in 2020. (Ironically, conspiracy theorists on both sides used this particular chart to to back up their claims: Harris voters suggested it was evidence the 2024 election was rigged, and Trump voters suggested it was evidence of rigging in 2020. “Where did the 20 million Democratic voters go?” Dinesh D’Souza posted the day after the election, about the top is that they never existed.”

More recently, Harris voters have latched onto a theory that Elon Musk swung a massive vote to swing the election for Trump using his SpaceX company’s Starlink internet satellites. On November 10, a decommissioned Starlink satellite fell to earth and burned up on re-entry – something it is designed to do. But for the skeptics, the satellite was intentionally destroyed to cover up evidence of election interference.

Voting machines generally operate on a closed network and are not connected to the Internet; Musk could not have altered the votes via Starlink or any satellite. But the theory is powerful because it takes its cues from some of the very real and powerful influences that made it form the result of the 2024 election. Moscow it was heavily involved in Trump’s victory; he is the richest man on Earth and poured funds into Trump’s campaign. His political advisers ran a fraudulent campaign with dark money microtarget already disgruntled Democratic voters. In addition, Musk controls one of the largest social media platforms in the world and has no problem pushing vile rumors and misinformation, which are also out of control (even without his help) in our political environment modern. But his actions, experts say, did not add up to active interference in the outcome of the election.

The Starlink conspiracy theory is interesting because it shares its contours with the Italygate voting conspiracy theory of the 2020 cycle. According to this theory, people working in the US Embassy in Rome used satellites to remotely switch votes from Trump to Biden. (Similar conspiracies have proposed this supercomputers could have changed the ballots.)

“This all feels very familiar,” said Sam Howard, the US political editor for NewsGuard, a media watchdog.

According to Howard, NewsGuard found that mentions of “Starlink” were seven times higher on the Sunday after the election than before, with 281,644 mentions on X that day. And that was just X, which has easier-to-track values; conspiracy theories may have been more prevalent on other social media platforms.

Many people who shared these claims did so while insisting that they were different from the Trump supporters who supported Stop the Steal. “This isn’t even a conspiracy theory,” said one person on Reddit, laying out their reasoning. “It’s a logical assumption based on past evidence.”

According to Robyn Caplan, a professor of technology policy at Duke University, the behavior of these users can be explained in part by something called the “third-person effect,” a widespread belief that others are more influenced by media—advertisements, articles, hoes of internet, but also misinformation.

Liberals often convince themselves that they are less susceptible to misinformation because they see themselves as siding with institutions like journalism and academia that value facts and fact-check information, Caplan said. The left, she noted, prided itself on “more of a claim to truth and knowledge.” (The right believes it is more resistant to misinformation than the left because it is not brainwashed by liberal educators, she said.)

In reality, these experts noted, the drive to challenge election results from both directions comes from the same place: an individual view of political affairs that doesn’t align with reality. This is only exacerbated by our information bubbles: algorithms and social circles have made virtually everyone believe they are more representative of the electorate than they turn out to be.

The truth is that the left is not immune to the same factors that create conspiracy theories on the right. But there are some crucial differences between the two camps. NewsGuard’s Howard said the BlueAnon claims he saw appeared to come mostly from accounts he classified as “obscure” or “fringe.” “They might have a big following,” he added, “but they don’t seem to hold as much offline.” (He said there was no evidence of substantial foreign interference in the discussion.) The claims, he said, also appear to be waning already.

AJ Bauer, a professor of journalism and media at the University of Alabama who researches conservative news, argued that every election leads to “a subset of people who are skeptical of the results” simply because they are surprised and confused by they. “A lot of the early stuff that seemed to be electoral skepticism around the Liberals is mostly fog of war stuff,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong or unusual about people filling uncertainty with conspiratorial uncertainty. I think it goes with the election time.”

What matters, he said, is that no one in any leadership position has taken up the doubt. Unlike Trump, Harris conceded. And neither journalistic outlets nor Democratic leaders are fanning the flames by claiming these conspiracy theories are real.

“You’ll forever be able to find examples of people making mistakes on the Internet,” Bauer said. “The real question is how these ideas are used by people in power.”