ONLINE MISINFORMATION SURGES; POLICIES TESTED
Twitter flags claims without sources; outlets keep watch
Social media companies faced their first tests of policies put in place to prevent early declarations of victory late Tuesday, when the Trump campaign and Florida’s governor started tweeting that the president had won states before most media outlets had called those races.
Twitter slapped a label on a Trump campaign tweet that claimed victory in South Carolina without linking to an official news source, as well as one by Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., claiming victory for the president in his state. The Twitter labels said “official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted,” and provided a link to results from the seven news outlets the company says it considers to be authoritative sources, two of which need to have called the race to avoid a label.
Another tweet by the campaign, which cited one of those sources to declare victory in Florida, was left untouched.
In an email to supporters, the campaign said that President Donald Trump
would win and alleged that the media would refuse to call the election in an attempt to prevent that.
“The Left will try to manipulate the results,” the email said. “FIGHT BACK” by donating.
Those early signs election night followed a fresh barrage of misinformation earlier Tuesday targeting voters, the latest development in a voting period that has been marred by misleading narratives
across social media.
Twitter removed a post, shared from a screenshot on Instagram, in which a person falsely claiming to be a poll worker in Erie, Pa., said he had thrown out hundreds of Trump ballots. A far-right inf luencer falsely claimed on Twitter that the National Guard had been deployed to Philadelphia and other cities to prevent unrest in the case of a Trump victory.
#StopTheSteal, a hashtag associated with alleged
voter fraud and a Democratic theft of the election, was shared more than 50,000 times. It was driven largely by right-leaning inf luencers including Donald Trump Jr. and Ann Coulter amplifying isolated incidents that were taken out of context, according to researchers. One video, in which a pro-Trump poll watcher was mistakenly prevented from entering a Philadelphia polling location, racked up more than 287 million likes, retweets and views across Twitter by the afternoon, where it was framed in some cases as evidence of efforts to steal the election, according to researchers.
Late Monday, in a tweet Twitter restricted with a label, President Trump said the Supreme’s Court’s recent decision about Pennsylvania mail-in ballots will “induce violence in the streets.” He added, “Something must be done!”
The narratives that spread across social media contrasted with what many observers described as a largely peaceful day of voting nationwide.
Many of the attempts appeared specifically targeted at voters in swing states, particularly in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Some of the messaging, like the president’s, intimated that violence could take place. Trump’s statements echoed concerns among elected officials and businesses, which boarded up storefronts before Election Day.
“My biggest fear is the potential for physical violence that we didn’t have in 2016,” said Alex Stamos, head of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former Facebook chief security officer, said on a media call Tuesday morning from the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of misinformation researchers that examined the #StopTheSteal hashtag.
Referring to the campaigns in Pennsylvania, he said some of the isolated incidents have been distorted significantly online. “They have been turned into the idea that there is a vast conspiracy or some tip of the iceberg of election fraud,” he said.
In an email, Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy said the company labeled Trump’s election tweet because the race had only been called by one source, The Associated Press, and needed a second citation per company policy.
The lead-up to the 2020 election has been uniquely inf luenced by social media, particularly because in-person campaigning has been more limited by the global pandemic. Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s campaigns have spent millions of dollars on social media and other targeted advertising in recent weeks.
But researchers have cautioned that domestic disinformation has also taken on an increased power this election cycle, as groups attempt to spread lies online and even the president uses his Twitter account to share misinformation to his more than 87 million followers.