Consider This from NPR - Fighting False Election Claims Could Get A Lot Harder In 2024

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Researchers, election officials and former tech executives are concerned the federal government, fearful of kicking up a storm, has pulled back from its rumor fighting efforts that were effective in 2020 and 2022. NPR correspondents Miles Parks and Shannon Bond joined our co-host Ailsa Chang to discuss their reporting on misinformation. Email us at [e-mail] Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

No sitting president has ever gotten a number of votes that I got. That is former President Trump repeating the big lie during an interview with my colleague Steve Inskeet back in January 2022. The interview took place a little over a year after rioters who were motivated by that lie stormed the U.S. Capitol in order to stop lawmakers from certifying the election results. The sitting president, nobody believes. You think Biden got 80 million votes? How come when he went to speak in different locations, nobody came to watch? But all of a sudden, he got 80 million votes. Nobody believes that. If you'll forgive me, maybe because the election was about you. When Trump was challenged with the actual facts of the 2020 election, he cut off the interview. Mr. President, if I may. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

One more question. I want to ask about a court hearing yesterday on January 6th. Judge Amit Mehta, he's gone. Okay. Despite lots of clear, nonpartisan evidence that Joe Biden did indeed win the 2020 election and that voter fraud is extremely rare, misinformation and outright lies about our country's election process continue to spread. And right now it's happening during a moment where election misinformation watchdogs, fact-checkers, and researchers find themselves under attack, not just by anonymous online trolls, but by lawsuits that claim efforts to eliminate misinformation can infringe on First Amendment rights. And the ability to fight the spread of misinformation on social media has run into great

challenges. For example, platforms like X, formerly Twitter, are removing guardrails that used to help limit false information. These efforts to target us are having a chilling effect. Kate Starberg is a computer scientist who works to identify misinformation online. They are limiting our ability just to do the research, but also limiting our ability to have conversations with the people who need our work the most, whether that's, you know, election officials or whether that's social media platforms. Consider this. The fight to counter false election claims may get a lot harder in 2024 because more obstacles are now getting thrown in the way of people trying to weed out false claims about the election system.

That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Monday, November 13th. It's Consider This from NPR. We're now a year out from the next presidential election, and the people working to safeguard voting are worried. They say a campaign of legal and political pressure coming from the right is stifling efforts to fight back against false claims about the country's voting systems, lies that haven't stopped spreading since 2020. Joining us now to talk about all of this are NPR correspondents Shannon Bond and Miles Park. Say to both of you. Hi there.

Hi, Elsa. So what have you been hearing from election officials as they look ahead to 2024? Since 2020, really since 2016 with Russia's interference in that election, the whole elections community has been focused on fighting election lies. That's not new. But what is new is that that fight has gotten a lot more complicated recently. Over the past year, year and a half, many conservatives have started pushing back on those efforts, arguing that they amount to censorship of free speech. I was talking about this with Wesley Wilcox, who's a Republican election supervisor in Marion County, Florida. And he said starting last year, he literally couldn't use the word misinformation around Republican voters anymore. In Republican circles,

misinformation is a dog whistle. You know, it blew up and all of a sudden, man, you got skewered if you even mentioned the word. And our reporting found this backlash is being felt everywhere that is connected to election information. It's research. It's affected the federal government. It's affecting the social media companies. They're all gun shy, as Wilcox put it, due to a real fear that they'll be targeted. Targeted.

When you say targeted, who is doing the targeting? Well, there's a couple of different things going on here, Elsa. So first of all, there are Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana who have brought a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of going too far in pressing platforms to take down misleading posts about elections as well as about COVID. And this summer, a district judge in that case issued this really broad injunction blocking the government from communicating for the most part with platforms. Now that has been put on hold. The Supreme Court is going to hear that platforms. Now, that has been put on hold. The Supreme Court is going to hear that case.

But that definitely has had a chilling effect. There's also a private lawsuit targeting outside researchers who studied election lies and rumors in 2020. And then there's also pressure coming from Congress. Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio is leading an investigation into alleged collusion between the Biden administration and tech companies and researchers, which Jordan argues is unconstitutionally targeting political speech. I mean, Shannon, it does seem kind of fraught to have the government weighing in on what people can or cannot say online, right? Yeah. I mean, and there is, of course, this open question about what role the government should take when it comes to, you know, pushing back against rumors or outright lies about, you know, high profile issues like elections and public health. There's also legitimate skepticism

of the role that social media companies play, you know, with all this power they wield over online speech. And those are important debates. But government officials and platforms and researchers say the allegations being made in these lawsuits and in this investigation are really mischaracterizing their work. They say there is an important public interest in identifying and mitigating false or misleading claims and potential foreign interference that could have real impacts in elections, right? Eroding trust in the electoral process, disenfranchising voters. You know, things like suggesting votes won't count if they use a certain kind of marker on their ballots. I spoke with Kate Starbird, who's a researcher at the University of Washington. She's been targeted by the congressional probe, and she's received harassment and threats over

her work. And she says all of this has a big impact on the democratic process. Weaponized criticism of research on misinformation is having a negative impact on the democratic process. Weaponized criticism of research on misinformation is having a negative impact on our ability to understand and address what many of us feel to be a pretty large societal problem. Okay. I hear her saying that there's a negative impact, but I'm just wondering, Miles, what sort of concrete examples are election officials pointing to? Are they? Yeah. I mean, we saw one this week.

There were election days in a number of states across the country. And on past election days, the Department of Homeland Security really touted a closer working relationship with the social media companies to the point where if a local election official saw something misleading online, they could report it to this partnership that was funded by DHS. And then it would get funneled to the social media companies for review to see if it broke their rules. That is not happening now. DHS told me they had no contact with any social media companies on Tuesday. Instead, they're working to amplify local election officials and give them the tools to fight back themselves. But as we know, those local election officials are tasked with a lot of responsibility. I talked to Wilcox, the Florida election official we heard from a second ago, and he told me it's hard to ask local election officials to understand a rapidly changing online environment.

We are nearing capacity on people. You want me to be a cybersecurity expert. You want me to be a database expert. You want me to be. Now I've got to be an AI expert. I'm like, I'm sorry. So at some point I got to tap out. And many of those election officials are tapping out. You know, study after study has found an alarming turnover rate for people who are working in the local election space. Man. Well, Shannon, Miles was just talking about social media platforms. Are those platforms being affected by this environment? What are you seeing?

They are, Elsa. They're taking a step back, to put it bluntly. Tech layoffs across Silicon Valley have hit teams working on trust and safety. Some of these platforms have become more reticent to police some false claims, including the false claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Now, many of the platforms say they are still committed to keeping elections safe. But certainly the sense among folks working in this field is that they are being far quieter about this work. And then, of course, there is X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, where Elon Musk, right, who now owns it, he has undone years of work. He's eliminated the election integrity team entirely. And he's made changes to the platform that just make it a lot harder to find credible information.

Exactly. Okay, so if all of these different players, like the tech platforms, the researchers, the federal government, if they are all sort of stepping back, I guess where does that leave us heading into a presidential election year? Well, Elsa, we know when there is a vacuum of information, you know, that opens the doors for even more rumors, conspiracy theories and lies to proliferate. And those lies have real world effects. I mean, we saw that on January 6th. We also know that they are driving a continued threat environment for local election officials. Just this week, election officials in a number of states reported receiving suspicious letters, some containing fentanyl. So all of this is connected.

That was NPR's Miles Parks and Shannon Blunt. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.