How Misinformation ‘Superspreaders’ Seed False Election Theories
Researchers have found that a small group of social media accounts are responsible for the spread of a disproportionate amount of the false posts about voter fraud.
By Sheera Frenkel
11.24.2020
On the morning of Nov. 5, Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, asked his Facebook followers to report cases of voter fraud with the hashtag, Stop the Steal. His post was shared over 5,000 times.
By late afternoon, the conservative media personalities Diamond and Silk had shared the hashtag along with a video claiming voter fraud in Pennsylvania. Their post was shared over 3,800 times.
That night, the conservative activist Brandon Straka asked people to protest in Michigan under the banner #StoptheSteal. His post was shared more than 3,700 times.
Over the next week, the phrase “Stop the Steal” was used to promote dozens of rallies that spread false voter fraud claims about the U.S. presidential elections.
“Because of how Facebook’s algorithm functions, these superspreaders are capable of priming a discourse,” said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz. “There is often this assumption that misinformation or rumors just catch on. These superspreaders show that there is an intentional effort to redefine the public narrative.”
Across Facebook, there were roughly 3.5 million interactions — including likes, comments and shares — on public posts referencing “Stop the Steal” during the week of Nov. 3, according to the research. Of those, the profiles of Eric Trump, Diamond and Silk and Mr. Straka accounted for a disproportionate share — roughly 6 percent, or 200,000, of those interactions.
While the group’s impact was notable, it did not come close to the spread of misinformation promoted by President Trump since then. Of the 20 most-engaged Facebook posts over the last week containing the word “election,” all were from Mr. Trump, according to Crowdtangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. All of those claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact checkers.
The baseless election fraud claims have been used by the president and his supporters to challenge the vote in a number of states. Reports that malfunctioning voting machines, intentionally miscounted mail-in votes and other irregularities affected the vote were investigated by election officials and journalists who found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
The voter fraud claims have continued to gather steam in recent weeks, thanks in large part to prominent accounts. A look at a four-week period starting in mid-October shows that President Trump and the top 25 superspreaders of voter fraud misinformation accounted for 28.6 percent of the interactions people had with that content, according to an analysis by Avaaz.
“What we see these people doing is kind of like setting a fire down with fuel, it is designed to quickly create a blaze,” Mr. Quran said. “These actors have built enough power they ensure this misinformation reaches millions of Americans.”
In order to find the superspreaders, Avaaz compiled a list of 95,546 Facebook posts that included narratives about voter fraud. Those posts were liked, shared or commented on nearly 60 million times by people on Facebook.
Avaaz found that just 33 of the 95,546 posts were responsible for over 13 million of those interactions. Those 33 posts had created a narrative that would go on to shape what millions of people thought about the legitimacy of the U.S. elections.
A spokesman for Facebook said the company had added labels to posts that misrepresented the election process and was directing people to a voting information center.
“We’re taking every opportunity to connect people to reliable information about the election and how votes are being counted,” said Kevin McAlister, a Facebook spokesman. The company has not commented on why accounts that repeatedly share misinformation, such as Mr. Straka’s and Diamond and Silk’s, have not been penalized. Facebook has previously said that President Trump, along with other elected officials, is granted a special status and is not fact-checked.
Many of the superspreader accounts had millions of interactions on their Facebook posts over the last month, and have enjoyed continued growth. The accounts were active on Twitter as well as Facebook, and increasingly spread the same misinformation on new social media sites like Parler, MeWe and Gab.
Dan Bongino, a right-wing commentator with a following of nearly four million people on Facebook, had over 7.7 million interactions on Facebook the week of Nov. 3. Mark Levin, a right-wing radio host, had nearly four million interactions, and Diamond and Silk had 2.5 million. A review of their pages by The Times shows that a majority of their posts have focused on the recent elections, and voter fraud narratives around them.
None of the superspreaders identified in this article responded to requests for comment.
One of the most prominent false claims promoted by the superspreaders was that Dominion voting software deleted votes for Mr. Trump, or somehow changed vote tallies in several swing states. Election officials have found no evidence that the machines malfunctioned, but posts about the machines have been widely shared by Mr. Trump and his supporters.
Over the last week, just seven posts from the top 25 superspreaders of the Dominion voter fraud claim accounted for 13 percent of the total interactions on Facebook about the claim.
Many of those same accounts were also top superspreaders of the Dominion claim, and other voter fraud theories, on Twitter. The accounts of President Trump, his son Eric, Mr. Straka and Mr. Levin were all among the top 20 accounts that spread misinformation about voter fraud on Twitter, according to Ian Kennedy, a researcher at the University of Washington who works with the Elections Integrity Partnership.
Mr. Trump had by far the largest influence on Twitter. A single tweet by the president accusing Dominion voting systems of deleting 2.7 million votes in his favor was shared over 185,000 times, and liked over 600,000 times.
Like the other false claims about voter fraud, Mr. Trump’s tweet included a label by Twitter that he was sharing information that was not accurate.
Twitter, like Facebook, has said that those labels help prevent false claims from being shared and direct people toward more authoritative sources of information.
Earlier this week, BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook employees questioned whether the labels were effective. Within the company, employees have sought out their own data on how well national newspapers performed during the elections, according to one Facebook employee.
On the #StoptheSteal hashtag, they found that both The New York Times and The Washington Post were among the top 25 pages with interactions on that hashtag — mainly from readers sharing articles and using the hashtag in those posts.
Combined, the two publications had approximately 44,000 interactions on Facebook under that hashtag. By comparison, Mr. Straka, the conservative activist who shared the call to action on voter fraud, got three times that number of interactions sharing material under the same hashtag on his own Facebook account.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/technology/election-misinformation-facebook-twitter.html?fbclid=IwAR2tkMO6uwVdQ_qks-GUkZzg8aztOaUtdeIczzb49JbwL7czBCsXMnXngpY
“Austerity economics,” i.e., drastic budget cutting and regulatory cuts, combined with large tax cuts, has been touted since 1980 as having magic salutary effects that will supercharge an underperforming economy. Almost 40 years later, the verdict is in on “austerity economics” and the judgment is grim.
There is no question that drastic spending and tax cuts, coupled with large scale regulatory cuts, yield significant financial rewards for the very wealthy, but the middle and working classes are left both out in the cold as far as the benefits go and left holding the bag for the cost of government as the financial burden gets shifted off the wealthy, who could easily afford it, and on to the middle and working classes, who can’t afford it. And the poor, as always, get virtually no assistance at all; in fact, their situation, often already dire, gets dramatically worse.
Sadly, the economic evidence to support “austerity economics” was always highly questionable right from the start, and it was charged, correctly as it turns out, that “austerity economics” was less an economic program for growth and prosperity, and far more a moralistic ideological program that saw virtue in wealth and vice in poverty. “Austerity economics” proponents called for the government to stop “coddling” the poor and adopt a program of economic “tough love,” requiring that welfare recipients work for their benefits or be cut off. It might sound good in the abstract, but in practice “austerity economics” led to heartless, unfair and unreasonable work requirements of disabled people resulting in, at a minimum, a lot of bad press for the politicians pushing these policies, and at the maximum, suicides by disabled people distraught over work requirements they could not possibly fulfill.
In short, the drastic tax, spending, and regulatory cuts of “austerity economics” are a sure fire way to propel an already faltering economy quickly down the path to recession or even depression. “Austerity economics” yields big benefits for the rich, basically allowing them to “strip mine” the national economic patrimony, while yielding no real benefits for the middle and working classes, just an increased cost burden for supporting the government and significantly lower job and prosperity prospects. And the poor take it on the chin in benefit and program cuts.
You simply cannot tax cut, spending cut, and regulatory cut your way to an economy of widespread prosperity. Only the rich benefit, everyone else suffers.
We non-partisan seniors who massively helped blue voters defeat Trump see yet another warning sign: "Whether or not Bruce Reed gets a White House job will be such a big indicator of whether or not the Biden presidency will break from the deficit hawk wing of the Democratic Party."
"In this time of national crisis with millions struggling to get by, we cannot afford to grant positions of power to austerity hawks."
With a mission to defend Social Security against all threats, progressives in the U.S. sounded the alarm Thursday in response to reports that President-elect Joe Biden is considering senior campaign advisor and deficit hawk Bruce Reed for a top job in the Democrat's White House.
At particular risk should Reed, also a former chief of staff to the former vice president, get the job, said Social Security Works, is the protection of Social Security—a program Biden has pledged to defend, despite his record of proposing cuts to it.
"Joe Biden ran for president on a promise to protect and expand Social Security," Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, said in a statement. "Seniors listened, and delivered his margin of victory in key states like Arizona and Michigan."
"Appointing Bruce Reed to head the Office of Management and Budget would betray that promise," Lawson added.
Detailing some of Reed's background giving driving progressives' worry, The Intercept reported in January:
"Reed, a longtime Biden aide, played a central role in advocating cuts to the New Deal-era program as a co-founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, as the top staffer for a controversial commission dedicated to slashing the deficit, and then as Biden's chief of staff during the Obama administration. In Washington, D.C., he would be the last high-level staffer a campaign would bring aboard if it was genuinely intent on expanding, not cutting, Social Security."
That commission refers to the Obama-era Bowles-Simpson Commission, which proposed an austerity package including cuts to Social Security.
"As executive director of the Bowles-Simpson Commission," Robert Kuttner wrote at The American Prospect Wednesday, "Reed was not only an austerity advocate himself. He brought on unpaid staffers from leading austerity organizations funded by Pete Peterson," a longtime deficit fearmongerer.
"If Biden has his head screwed on, he'll keep this guy far away from White House policymaking," wrote Kuttner.
Lawson, in his statement, concurred with that assessment. Reed "has a decades-long obsession with austerity, at a time when we need massive government spending to bring us out of the worst national crisis since the Great Depression."
"Biden must keep his promises to seniors by keeping Reed far away from the White House," he continued.
There's plenty more evidence to back up that demand.
In a Wednesday tweet, The Revolving Door Project noted that Reed "was a lead architect of the draconian 1996 welfare reform law. In this time of national crisis with millions struggling to get by, we cannot afford to grant positions of power to austerity hawks."
As Justice Democrats spokesperson Waleed Shahid framed it, Reed's presence or absence in the next administration will be very revealing.
"Whether or not Bruce Reed gets a White House job will be such a big indicator of whether or not the Biden presidency will break from the deficit hawk wing of the Democratic Party," Shahid tweeted.
~ by Andrea Germanos, staff writer
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