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 rightwingers 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.
Her work now focuses on election processes and procedures.
She says she now refers more to “rumors” than to “misinformation” – both because “rumor” has more historical context, and because “misinformation” is a much more politicized term, co-opted by people outside the field, similar to how the legitimate phenomenon of “fake news” on social media before the 2016 election got twisted by Donald Trump into an insult to journalists.
Her team will probably not flag content to social media platforms, either.
“That piece of the work has been so effectively twisted into a censorship narrative that it becomes hard to help out in that way,” she said.
While she had hoped to work with local and state elections officials – the experts on how elections work, who have themselves been subject to harassment – for context and help assessing viral rumors, “it’s increasingly hard for us to think that we’ll be able to communicate with them in a way that would be helpful for them, helpful for the world, and not cause more damage because it becomes fodder for these false claims”.
With misinformation research under fire and social media platforms less willing to factcheck viral posts, 2024 could see a flood of voter fraud lies, making for an even more contentious election than in 2020.
Even if social media platforms, which are optimized to spread the most attention-getting posts, did more work to address misinformation, they would still be accused of bias and censorship, Starbird said.
She fears that the election fraud narrative has now “sunk in” so deeply for so many Americans on the right that it could end up creating worse laws and procedures – and actually increase the possibility of a successful foreign interference campaign in US elections.
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