Social Media is very successful in Get Out the Vote campaigns for younger people - who typically vote for one party disproportionately.

This would be a point for sure, except this is a primary and the only people who can vote in it are registered party members. Young people actually registered already care enough to know it's the primary today.

This one is already decided though. Biden on the Democrat side, Trump on the Republican. If anything it might hurt the Trump side a bit, as people may not realize that the Supreme Court only yesterday ruled states can not block him.

There’s all the down-ballot elections, and states like Texas have completely open primaries.

And states like Texas often have nearly one-party rule, so the primary pretty much is the election.

Because of the party that currently owns the non-urban parts of Texas, I usually vote in that primary, despite not voting for its candidates in the general elections.

> This would be a point for sure, except this is a primary and the only people who can vote in it are registered party members

Can't you register the same day as the voting happens? Seems utterly stupid that you have to register to vote to begin with, but if it's a requirement, you should at least be able to register the day of the voting.

I used to switch my party back and forth to vote for who I thought mattered most when I cared about voting.

I thought Facebook was being used by old people nowadays

Facebook and other social media platforms have played somewhat of a role in the 2016 election, for example. Meta has been under a lot of pressure for that, compare e.g. this recent Instagram change: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-ou...

I can't get into the US-local conspiracy-mongering, but I'm not sure how you've missed social media becoming a hot-spot for election-day information/misinformation?

Shutting down social media has gone to the top of the list for regimes either "attempting to fabricate positive election results" or "attempting to combat the spread of misinformation about elections".

More sympathetically, for better or for worse (definitely the latter) there will be people trying to look up election information ("what are my local polling hours", "who is on my ballot") on social media websites, who will now not be able to be guided to the correct information.

Messenger is often used to coordinate logistics among friends. I would not be surprised if a Meta disruption lead to at least momentary confusion if someone was planning on carpooling. Not to mention it messes with "get out the vote" posting.

I'm not very conspiracy-minded but this does smell a little weird.

At the very least, "there's a big event in the country of one of our biggest userbases, maybe hold off on risky deploys until tomorrow"

The primaries are pretty well decided, so I suppose the conspiracy would be "trial run".

Actually I can see this morphing into a Russia interference conspiracy.

If the main social media used by liberals goes down, while the one used by Trump (forgot what it's called) stays up, surely that is an advantage for him?

In an election between the two parties I think that would be a very likely narrative but in this case it's the primaries. And (as others have mentioned) neither primary has really had anything resembling a competition at this point so it's more or less irrelevant to the result (most likely).

conspiracy theory get more imaginative.

For example, you can then pose the conspiracy that the fact it was Russian interference conspiracy was a conspiracy to justify more social media policing during the real election.

Perhaps but why would downtime increase policing? Something like a large scale fake news campaign (i.e. basic deep fakes or something) is easier (generally speaking) to pull off and would be more likely to cause increased policing that a short outage.

There are probably more MAGA's on Facebook platforms than TFG's Truth Social. Either way it's going to start a few conspiracy theories.