'Stakes are really high': misinformation researcher changes tack for 2024 US election

[Ford_Prefect]

A key researcher in the fight against election misinformation – who herself became the subject of an intensive misinformation campaign – has said her field gets accused of “bias” precisely because it’s now mainly right-wingers who spread the worst lies.

Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, added that she feared that the entirely false story of rigged elections has now “sunk in” for many Americans on the right. “The idea that they’re already going to the polls with the belief that they’re being cheated means they’ll misinterpret everything they see through that lens,” she said.

Starbird’s group partnered with Stanford Internet Observatory on the Election Integrity Partnership ahead of the 2020 elections – a campaign during which a flood of misinformation swirled around the internet, with daily claims of unproven voter fraud.

Starbird and her team helped document that flood, and in return congressional Republicans and conservative attorneys attacked her research, alleging it amounted to censorship and violated the first amendment.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/01/misinformation-trends-2024-election-right-wing

Not exactly new information re: RW lies and propaganda feeding the mythology of voter fraud and unreliable election processes.

[CrispyQ]

1. So much of the misinformation I read after the election on social media

was posted by people who had obviously never worked an election, either as a judge or as a poll worker. And apparently if they ever voted they didn't pay attention cuz one of them didn't know what a poll book was when I informed him what he was suggesting would get the voter in serious trouble cuz they would be caught. Didn't matter. He was still convinced millions of dems voted more than once.

Some of the doozies I read. 1) Democrats are going from precinct to precinct & voting multiple times. 2) Democrats who were sent mail-in ballots also voted in person. 3) Immigrants are voting illegally.

[yardwork]

2. I noticed the same.

People who have no clue how elections work "did their own research" and now believe all kinds of false things.

[Ford_Prefect]

3. Much of that was fed to them by specific disinformation sources with agendas such as Putin's troll farm.

One of the features of our current situation is that there is much taken as "common knowledge" and assumed to be true in some degree which has no basis in any facts at all. This is why the big lie lives. It was planted and spread by people who KNEW it was wholly false among people who had no reason to ignore the sources nor method to decide if it was true.