Fake News Bombards Voters – Will it Disrupt Midterms?
The upcoming Mid-term elections which will shape politics at local, state and national levels, come as voters are bombarded with disinformation and fake news that sows distrust in the political process, promotes false narratives and targets ethnic communities in their own language.
There is little push-back to challenge the daily barrage of fake news — be it the “big lie” about stolen elections, distortions about immigrants or messages that target ethnic communities in their own language.
At an Ethnic Media Services briefing, held Oct. 7, experts – Mekela Panditharatne, Counsel, Brennan Center’s Democracy Program; Tamoa Calzadilla, Managing Editor, Factchequeado.com; Rong Xiaoqing, Reporter, Sing Tao Daily; and Vanessa Cardenas, Deputy Director, America’s Voice – covered a variety of angles regarding disinformation and how it is likely to affect these elections and the future of democracy in the United States.
Mekela Panditharatne, Counsel, Brennan Center’s Democracy Program shared results and ideas from her report.
“When we talk about election misinformation and disinformation one of the most troubling forms of that is directly false or misleading information about the voting process itself and election administration and that’s really the kind of misinformation that we’re focused on at the Brennan Center.
“Election misinformation as a concept is something we’re starting to see people focus on more and more but in some ways it’s important to remember that it’s been a long-standing problem in American elections.
“Unfortunately, there have always been that actors who try to trick people out of voting by disseminating inaccurate or misleading information about how to vote, when to vote, and where to vote, and unfortunately voters of color and voters who speak languages other than English are often the target for these kinds of nefarious efforts.
“Misinformation can thrive in elections for number of reasons but one catalyst for election misinformation that we focus on in our recent report is when the demand for accurate information in the electorate is greater than the supply of information so that can create information gaps, and when information gaps like that occur, misinformation can sort of seep in and fill the voids that result.
“One stark example of this was in the 2020 election when many states expanded male voting because of the pandemic and many members of the public really didn’t have adequate knowledge about that voting process.
“At the time election officials were grappling with unprecedented challenges and were struggling to fill the gaps in the public’s knowledge quickly enough and didn’t really succeed in staving off what became a deluge of misinformation and disinformation around meal voting.
“Fast forward to this year, and we’re again seeing unprecedented challenges in part because of the spread of the big lie of a stolen 2020 election which is a false claim that has infected our politics and has been endorsed and amplified by number of political figures including former president Trump.
“One important thing to note is that we’ve also seen an extraordinary wave of restrictive voting laws that have passed since 2020.
“The Brennan Center, as an organization, has tracked laws that both restrict and expand access to the vote for over a decade and that’s really to help give people the accurate information they need to exercise their right to vote.
“We published our most recent voting laws roundup count recently, and we found that since the beginning of 2021 at least 21 States passed 42 restrictive voting laws. Of those laws, 33 laws in 20 states are currently in effect for the midterm elections or had at least one restrictive provision that had not been stopped by courts as of Sept. 12.
“These laws run the gamut in terms of restrictive measures. Some laws impose harsher ID requirements for voting; some make it substantially more difficult to vote by mail; some have dramatically reduced drop box numbers or make it harder to register to vote; and some increased challenges for voters who are voting in person on Election Day.
“These laws directly restrict access to the vote but they can also indirectly restrict access to the vote and damage our democracy by augmenting the misinformation risk.
“The laws have the potential to bolster false doubts about election integrity and also create opportunities for people to misdate requirements or even invent false limits on voting.
“We have said that these laws sort of perpetuate a disinformation feedback loop. They’re fueled by misinformation, and they also create added risk for misinformation.
“In many cases, these laws target or disproportionately impact Latino and Black voters, and we found that newly registered voters are most likely to be Latino, so we’re at special risk for misinformation and particularly Spanish language misinformation.
“Texas, last year passed a law, a restrictive voting law that contains several fairly egregious provisions, among other things, the law constrains the ability of election officials to educate voters about changes to mail voting and at the same time it makes it more challenging to vote by mail by introducing complicated new ID requirements for mail ballots and mail ballot applications.
“We saw the results of this in the Texas primary earlier this year, in March, mail ballot rejection rates surged by astronomical numbers in the Texas primary. They jumped more than 1,100 percent from the 2020 general election, and a lot of that was due to confusion caused by the new law. In many cases it was because voters failed to list any of the newly required ID information on their mail ballot carrier envelope,” said Panditharatne.
Tamoa Calzadilla, managing editor of https://factchequeado.com/, a new fact checking platform that serves the Latino community in the United States, spoke next about her platform and invited Spanish language media to join forces in combating misinformation.
Rong Xiaoqing, Reporter, Sing Tao Daily, spoke on monitoring Chinese language disinformation. “A general picture about the social media platforms Chinese in America usually use are Twitter, Facebook, TikTok. Everyone uses them but the most popular one among Chinese is WeChat, and WeChat is also I think the most elusive platform in terms of tracing misinformation because a lot of discussions happen in the chat groups which are all private and also subject to censorship of the Chinese government,” said Xiaoqing.
Vanessa Cardenas, deputy director of America’s Voice, said, “There’s a difference between what we know as disinformation, which is intentional and which is not only developing and disseminating incorrect information that is intended to harm, then misinformation which is when you unintentionally distribute both information, and then there’s mild information and in many cases this is actually the most of the examples that we see when we’re talking about disinformation.
“Broadly, mal-information, normally has a kernel of truths but it is disseminated with the intent to harm. Disinformation has always existed. What’s different now is just that the social media platforms have created this incredible and rapid way of information to a spread that comes right to our phones and sometimes even to different countries because there’s a global phenomenon so that’s what’s different.
“The way in which we are consuming information has changed and that has created this monster that you are not able to control and many times the platforms are not able to control but immigration has always been a constant theme of disinformation.
“In the right-wing ecosystem, especially this year, even though immigration is not a top issue for voters, when you look at the goals for the last couple of weeks and months you see that the economy takes top place and immigration has fallen at voters’ radar.
“Even though immigration has fallen down in terms of priority for voters, you have seen that the right has really made a focus of immigration as an issue to agitate its voters and in fact back in August Dr Carlson on Fox News pretty much gave a directive to his audience and said that Republican candidates should be talking more about immigration and crime, and several weeks later, we see that that’s what the GOP political class is doing. They’re talking about immigration and crime because they have no other answers to the urgent issues that Americans care about.
“We see these as a political strategy to agitate voters and create fear and hate because it is about escapable in immigrants and about sort of all the rising immigrants in the United States,” said Cardenas, adding multiple examples of disinformation that is being nurtured recently.
A word of caution to all readers, please do not blindly fall prey to disinformation, particularly on Social Media, chat groups, as we head into the midterms.
