Account
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.
Credit...Guillem
Casasus
Sheera
Frenkel
By Sheera
Frenkel
Nov. 23,
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.
New
research from Avaaz, a global human rights group, the Elections Integrity
Partnership and The New York Times shows how a small group of people — mostly
right-wing personalities with outsized influence on social media — helped
spread the false voter-fraud narrative that led to those rallies.
That group,
like the guests of a large wedding held during the pandemic, were
“superspreaders” of misinformation around voter fraud, seeding falsehoods that
include the claims that dead people voted, voting machines had technical
glitches, and mail-in ballots were not correctly counted.
“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.
(People sharing the articles could have been intending to debunk the campaign.)
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.
Sheera
Frenkel covers cybersecurity from San Francisco. Previously, she spent over a
decade in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, reporting for BuzzFeed,
NPR, The Times of London and McClatchy Newspapers. @sheeraf
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