A recent article in the New York Times recounts how the paper asked its readers to send in examples of election-related misinformation online. The Times’s readers responded, sending in more than 4,000 examples of misinformation from social-media feeds, text messaging apps and e-mail accounts. Reading through those examples, I felt a nauseating wave of déjà vu, as I recognized things that had been done here in 2016, and are currently being done in preparation for the midterm elections in 2019.
Hoax floods
The Times article reports that “misinformation coalesces around major news events.” When something dominates the news cycle, hyper-partisan misinformation—most of which amount to outright fabrication—bubbles up to flood people’s social-media timelines. The article cites as an example a picture of bloodied policemen who, according to the accompanying caption, had been beaten up by a caravan of invading migrants. As it turned out, the photos were old and entirely unrelated to the migrant caravan currently making its way to the US border. Nevertheless, the photo has been shared thousands of times on social media.
Recycled pictures of dead or injured people, being used to illustrate —dare I say “symbolize?”—a political agenda or partisan talking point. Sounds familiar?
Misleading campaign ads
“Campaign” ads can be either positive (you’re trying to get someone elected) or negative (you’re trying to get someone to lose). Ordinarily, there really isn’t anything inherently objectionable about negative campaigning—especially if the allegations being made are factual, such as when an ad claims that a candidate has been previously found guilty of a criminal offense. But negative ads stray into the realm of misinformation when facts have been relegated to irrelevance, as in the cases of ads that simply smear (in one example juxtaposing pictures of the candidates with Nazi imagery) or make outrightly false claims about a candidate—such as saying that a candidate wants to place public schools under Shariah law.
Manipulated images and video
And then there are those instances when the misinformation comes in the form of manipulated photos. In one particularly disturbing example—disturbing because it’s so easy to do the same kind of manipulation—text was inserted into the blank spaces of a placard being held up by a candidate, which made it appear that the candidate enjoyed the support of a group already being portrayed as violent and extremist.
Again, does any of this ring a bell with you yet? For me, it’s already like the freaking carillon.
In roughly the same vein, the Times also reported receiving grossly misleading video where a candidate
was portrayed as being a thug through some creative editing. Sadly, we’ve got that beat. Here, in 2016, we were seeing videos of people speaking in dialects, where the attached “translation” was the exact opposite of what was actually being said; videos of people loudly proclaiming voter fraud before voting even began; and animated videos claiming to show how the automated election system could be defrauded. All of those were debunked, but that didn’t stop those videos from being rapidly shared through social media.
Offline operations
The skullduggery isn’t contained to the Internet either. Offline, the Times reported that people were receiving questionable text messages. Some were supposed to have come from a candidate’s campaign, purporting to be instructions to do something illegal—like driving undocumented immigrants to the polls—in order to ensure the candidate’s win; others allege that a candidate is under criminal investigation; and yet others purport to be from big name personalities, telling people to vote a certain way. Now tell me that you’ve never encountered or at least heard local versions of these stories about any of these strategies before, I dare you.