Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

The popular voice assistant says the 2020 race was stolen, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source — foreshadowing a new information battleground

By
October 7, 2023 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
An Alexa device cut in half with a string of words about the 2020 election winding between the two halves.
Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — Alexa says it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video streaming service favored by conservatives. (Emma Kumer/The Washington Post; iStock)
10 min

Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Asked about fraud in the race — in which Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.