New York Times: Misinformation Flowed During Election, but Less Seemed to Stick
New York Times: Misinformation Flowed During Election, but Less Seemed to Stick
On the morning of Election Day, Charlie Kirk, the conservative talk show host from Arizona, shared a video on Twitter about broken voting machines in Maricopa County, followed by a series of posts suggesting that the problems were intentional.
“This is manufactured chaos,” he wrote, calling for those responsible to be arrested.
The video was shared nearly 20,000 times and liked by more than 30,000 users, including many prominent accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. The post and others like it on a dozen online platforms kindled a false narrative of widespread voting shenanigans among those predisposed to believe that the country’s elections are rigged.
And yet as Election Day unfolded, that narrative’s momentum seemed to wane.
Former President Donald J. Trump made a series of posts on his own platform, Truth Social, about voting issues on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan. Later, though, he shifted his ire to candidates who did poorly, including ones he had endorsed, like Don Bolduc and Joe O’Dea, the Republicans who lost Senate races in New Hampshire and Colorado.
The major social media platforms all struggled to combat misinformation and disinformation online as the results were tabulated, but researchers who study the problem said efforts to stoke doubt about the outcome of the American democratic process had — at least so far — failed to take root.
Some saw it as a hopeful sign of the political system’s resilience, though few declared victory in the fight against misinformation.
In a briefing on Wednesday, leaders of Common Cause, the nonpartisan government accountability group, said the election had gone more smoothly than many had feared despite “small administrative issues” in some polling stations that were being framed online as evidence of conspiracies. The big turnout of voters was evidence that they had rejected “election denialism based on falsehoods,” said Khalif Ali, the director of Common Cause Pennsylvania.