The NPR Politics Podcast - Why Is It Getting Harder To Fight Election Misinformation?

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

Between lawsuits, threats & difficulty doing research, both elections officials and researchers studying misinformation say their jobs are becoming more difficult — and it's not set to get better before the 2024 presidential vote.And, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., leaves the Republican presidential race. This episode: political correspondents Susan Davis & Sarah McCammon, voting correspondent Miles Parks, and disinformation correspondent Shannon Bond.The podcast is edited by Casey Morell. It is produced by Jeongyoon Han. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the presidential campaign. And the Republican presidential field continues to narrow. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, speaking to Trey Gowdy on the planet, have been really clear that they're telling me not now, Tim. I don't think they're saying, Trey, no, but I do think they're saying not now. And so I'm going to respect the voters and I'm going to hold on and keep working really hard and look forward to another opportunity.

Sarah, Scott entered this race in an interesting lane. He was running as a traditional, compassionate conservative. He ran on his faith. He ran on a more optimistic and kind kind of political rhetoric than we've seen from leading Republicans in the field. But it just never seemed to catch fire. Why not? Yeah, sort of a softer, gentler Republican. He didn't have a reputation for getting nasty or being especially pointed in the debates. And he did seem, you know, much like former Vice President Mike Pence, he seemed to be angling for the conservative Christian vote. Tim Scott would quote the Bible quite a bit.

He would talk about restoring Christian values just last week in the debate. We heard some language like that. But no, it just didn't seem to catch on. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First, it was a really crowded field, less so now, right? But very crowded. And there were, if you wanted, you know, if you're an evangelical voter, there were options like Mike Pence, which didn't take off. And I think that's a particularly difficult lane when you consider that Donald Trump has continued to have the overwhelming support of the evangelical vote. And once again, just so much competition, including from Nikki Haley, who's from his very own state. Yeah. You know, Scott, he remains a Republican senator from South Carolina.

He is very popular there. There's no reason to think he can't win another election in his home state. But it was notable to me that he said, not now, Tim, which kind of suggests that maybe he is still looking for political options in his future. I think it's hard for politicians to give up the dream. And you hear Tim Scott sort of leaving some room for something in the future. Now, what that something is, we don't know. But as you said, he's a popular senator from South Carolina. I noticed his campaign sent out a fundraising email late last night, just minutes really before he announced he was dropping out. So make of that what you will. Candidates have to raise money for whatever they're

running for ultimately. Or to pay off their debts. Or to pay off their debts. That is true. So yes, he seems to be clearly indicating he wants to have a future in politics if it's not this. It was notable to me, too, that he told Fox News he was not interested in being on the ticket. He said he was not running to be vice president. But this development also seems like it is good news for those that remain in the field and specifically good news for Nikki Haley, also from South Carolina. Yeah, I mean, every time somebody drops out, it's good news for everybody that's left. It has been such a big Republican field. And much like we saw in 2016, a big crop of candidates,

but nobody has been able to knock out the popularity of Donald Trump. That said, I do think this is probably the best news for Nikki Haley for a couple of reasons. One, if you look at the other remaining candidates who are not Donald Trump, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, neither of them are really appealing to the conservative Christian vote. I think Nikki Haley arguably would have some room to grow there. And she's from South Carolina. So, you know, she has the home state advantage in the South Carolina

primary, which is one of the early ones, of course. And had Tim Scott stayed in the race, she would have been vying for those voters against him. Of course, again, everybody appears to be running way behind Donald Trump at this moment. All right, Sarah, I'm gonna let you go. But thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. We're gonna take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about misinformation in the 2024 election. And we're back and NPR's Miles Parks and Shannon Bond are here now. Hey, guys. Hi, Sue. Hey, Sue. And Miles and Shannon, you both have been reporting on election misinformation and all the ways to combat it. But before we get there, can we just talk about the word misinformation for a minute, Miles? Because it seems like immediately this has become almost a dog whistle of a word for a certain element of voters. it seems like immediately this has become almost a

dog whistle of a word for a certain element of voters. It's like a buzzword and it has kind of come on rather immediately, I would say in the last year. So, you know, since 2016, really the time after the 2016 election and all the work that was done to understand how Russia interfered in that election, the entire elections community started using this phrase, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, to try to understand how, at that time, foreign adversaries, but as we know, the threat environment has expanded in the last few years in terms of people who are trying to spread false information around our elections. So the entire elections community was in agreement that they needed to do something about misinformation. And in the last year, year and a half, there's been this massive pushback from the right,

from conservatives, arguing that fighting against misinformation or what the elections community is deemed misinformation essentially amounts to censorship of conservative viewpoints. I was talking about this with Wesley Wilcox, who is a Republican. He's the Republican election supervisor in Marion County, Florida. And here's what he told me. In the 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 so we're seeing this backlash across every sector that basically touches on election information. We're going to talk about this more. But, I mean, researchers who focus on this stuff, the federal government, elections, this backlash against fighting misinformation is kind of pervading all of these fields. has become so polarized has really entangled every element of government and private sector

and researchers that try to exist in this space. That's right. I mean, as Miles said, when we're looking at this, this is a whole landscape of folks involved in this. So there are academics and researchers who study the way information, rumors, misinformation, foreign interference, you know, spreads online. There are the social media companies, of course, right, where it comes, you know, a lot of this is taking place on social media. And so, you know, over that same period of time, Miles has been talking about, you know, since 2016, you know, we saw companies like Facebook and what used to be known as Twitter and YouTube, you know, develop a whole set of policies around, you know, false information about elections and voting, which has then since expanded to other issues like public health, COVID. But, you know, they really were trying

to keep their platforms free of interference. They're trying to make sure people aren't going to be manipulated or, you know, receiving very basic false information, like being told that they should be voting on Wednesday, right? Or being told that, you know, if they use a certain kind of marker on their ballot, it's not going to work. You know, all of this relies on a lot of communication, you know, with the federal government, with law enforcement when it comes to things like foreign interference or, you know, actual threats to the election process. And what we're seeing with this pushback that has arisen in the past few years is a lot of those efforts seem to be breaking down. A lot of that communication is breaking down, that coordination is breaking down. People are stepping back in a lot of ways across this field from this work. And that seems to be complicated

by the reality that there's now legal action to try and prevent governments from working with these social media companies to take down potential disinformation or misinformation. Can you walk us through that legal challenge? So the main thing we're talking about here, there's a lawsuit that's been brought by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana. It's known as Missouri v. Biden. And basically, the suit accuses the Biden administration of going too far when it pressed platforms to take down misleading posts about elections, as well as COVID-19. And I should say, even though this is targeting the Biden administration, some of the stuff that's

been described in this lawsuit actually happened under Trump, right? Like the stuff that happened in the 2020 election. But, you know, this is taking this frame that, you know, when agencies like the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI, you know, talk to social media companies, that is a form of unfair influence, pushing them to take down speech that would be otherwise constitutionally protected as political speech. And that's something the government shouldn't be doing. So that case has been going through the courts. This summer, a district judge issued this really broad injunction that essentially blocked much of the government from communicating with

social media platforms. There's been a lot of back and forth. It's gone up to the appeals court. Suffice to say, that injunction has been put on hold, and the Supreme Court is going to hear this case. But despite the fact that it's on hold, there is still this chilling effect. There's basically a big sense in this field, you know, folks in the government, folks at the social media companies, they're just not comfortable about like whether they can talk to each other or not. And we're seeing, you know, some real impacts from that. So they're just leaning out, basically. Yeah, I mean, and then you think about you add in the fact that Republicans took over the House in 2022. And Jim Jordan has basically made one of his missions for the House Judiciary Committee to look into a lot

of the same stuff that these lawsuits focus on. So we're seeing researchers receiving subpoenas, spending a lot of time talking to their lawyers instead of focusing on actually kind of tracking and fighting this misinformation. And so conservatives have kind of blanketed a lot of the people who've spent a lot of their life the last few years focusing on this misinformation with legal political trouble. So it's not just the trackers of misinformation, places like social media platforms, but the trackers of misinformation, places like social media platforms, but the trackers of the trackers, the people that do research in this space have also seen a chilling effect on their work? That's right. I spoke with one of them. Her name is Kate Starberg. She's at the University of Washington. She's somebody who's been for a

long time been studying the way rumors spread online. And she was involved in 2020 with this project called the Election Integrity Partnership. It was a group of several academic institutions. Basically, the idea is they were getting together, they wanted to, you know, share resources to be able to see what kind of false claims were proliferating on social media and what kind of impact they were having, you know, how far they spread, how much amplification they got. And they were also working with parts of the federal government, as well as local election officials. And there was also working with parts of the federal government, as well as local election officials. And the idea was it could be some back and forth. Local

election officials could flag, we are seeing this rumor spreading in our community. This is the ground truth here. And there was a way they could pass those concerns on, the posts that were being posted about this onto the social media companies. The researchers like Kate Starbird and others could study this. And all of that has now been cast as this sort of big collusion effort to suppress free speech. And speaking to Kate Starbird, she says, this is really impacting our ability to understand how information spreads on social media. Here's what she told me.

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, pretty large societal problem. But Miles, it's interesting to me because if big government and big tech are sort of leaning out and there's a chilling effect in research, All these things are real. All these things are happening. The pressure that exists for local election officials to oversee, to execute, to make sure that their elections are fair, it seems like the pressure on them just increases in the absence of action by all these other actors. I think that's exactly right. I think the word that I keep coming back to, as Shannon and I have been reporting this story, is isolation. And, you know, over the last five or six years, there have been all of these networks that have been created since 2016 and especially post-2020 to make election officials feel like emotionally, but then also logistically, that they're not alone, that they're able to share information and shared data. And these efforts are attacking all of those efforts at collaboration

and what you end up having. If these collaborators end up stepping back, you end up back in a place where your local election officials, you know, 30 percent or so of which don't have any full-time staff in these small counties across the country, are basically left to fend for themselves against what we know is a coordinated effort to spread false information around American institutions, the cybersecurity environment, you know, all of the developments we've been talking about the last few months with AI, the idea that a local election official can do all this by themselves is something I talked about with Wesley Wilcox, who's that election official in Florida we heard from a second ago. We're nearing capacity on people. You know, 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. There was a pretty big election day last week in this country, and it wasn't a national election, but there were some high-stakes contests with national implications, and things went pretty smoothly. So how concerned should all of these actors, you know, the government, tech companies, election officials, Joe Voter, be about the 2024 elections? It's a hard question to answer. I will say I've heard optimism as well from a number of people. But the thing I've heard a lot, too, is that the 2018 midterms went super smoothly as well. And then as we know, 2020 is a dumpster fire that has continued all the way through 2024. And so it's hard to take an election like that and say everything is going to be fine in a

presidential election, which specifically the thing that every expert we talk to comes back to is if Trump is on the ballot, we know that the former president has been the largest megaphone when it comes to lies around American voting systems. And so it's kind of apples and oranges to compare an election that did not have Trump on the ballot to one that may have him on the ballot, as well as in numerous court cases and all the other things that come along with that. So, yes, I think it's fair to say election officials are better prepared for 2024 than they were for 2020. Every election cycle, people are learning and understanding things, but it's kind of a whole different ballgame. All right. Miles Parks and Shannon Bond, thank you both so much.

Thanks, Sue. Thanks for having us. And we'll be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.