[In 2020, facilitated by self-serving social media companies,
fringe ideas became mainstream political discourse. Disinformation
won’t go away in 2021, and the propaganda machine Trump fueled
won’t grind to a halt because there’s a new president.]
[[link removed]]

2020 THE YEAR OF THE INFODEMIC, WHEN DISINFORMATION BROKE THE US  
[[link removed]]


 

Jane Lytvynenko
December 6, 2020
BuzzFeed News
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ In 2020, facilitated by self-serving social media companies, fringe
ideas became mainstream political discourse. Disinformation won’t go
away in 2021, and the propaganda machine Trump fueled won’t grind to
a halt because there’s a new president. _

Georgia Democratic state senator Elena Parent received threats of
sexual violence and death after a December 3rd election hearing where
she defended the integrity of the Georgia election. , Georgia State
Senate Press Office

 

DISINFORMATION AND ITS FALLOUT have defined 2020, the year of the
infodemic. Month after month, self-serving social media companies have
let corrosive manipulators out for dollars, votes, and clicks vie for
attention, no matter the damage.

After an initial showing of unity as the coronavirus
[[link removed]] pandemic hit
North American shores, people in the US became divided over basic
scientific facts about COVID-19. Then, after a horrified country
watched George Floyd take his last breaths
[[link removed]] as
a police officer pushed a knee into his neck, some members of the
right-wing media recast peaceful demonstrators
[[link removed]] exercising
their civil rights as violent thugs. And, as the year closed out, the
president and his enablers smeared the simplest, most fundamental
democratic act of counting a ballot as fraud.

To understand how the disinformation flywheel can catapult fringe
ideas from obscure corners of the internet into mainstream political
discourse, Philadelphia offers a lesson in civic breakdown.

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing right before my eyes,” said a
man in a viral video who identified himself as Brian McCafferty, a
Democratic poll watcher. “This has nothing to do with Joe Biden or
Donald Trump. This has to do with our democracy, and I will tell you:
There’s corruption at the highest level in the city of
Philadelphia.”

On Nov. 5, two days after Election Day
[[link removed]], McCafferty
stood inside the Philadelphia ballot-counting center as workers behind
him quietly filed paper after paper and guards circulated among them.
McCafferty wore a green-and-red hat with headphones placed on top, a
mask tucked under his chin, and he spoke in a conspiratorial tone that
implied grave wrongdoing was happening here, just out of reach.

“This is a coup against the president of the United States of
America,” McCafferty said, falsely claiming that election officials
had prevented him from coming close enough to watch the ballots being
counted.

There was no coup, of course. And McCafferty’s claims that he was
prevented from observing the count are bogus.

McCafferty’s tweet with the video received thousands of shares,
including from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz
[[link removed]],
who wrote, “Dem mayors are defying the law.” (It's not clear how
Cruz found McCafferty.) The tweet was later deleted — but the video
spread to Facebook and YouTube, where thousands more people viewed it.
By the end of the day, McCafferty was telling his story to Fox News
host Tucker Carlson and his audience of 5.3 million people.
[[link removed]]

On Carlson’s show, McCafferty no longer said he was Democrat nor
that he had evidence of voter fraud. Instead, the two talked in broad
strokes about corruption in Philadelphia, implying there was something
nefarious about how the ballots were being counted. What exactly, they
did not say.

“Tucker, I took a video of what I saw,” he said, “and that’s
why I got thrown out.”

That part was true. According to two local officials and another
observer, the people overseeing the counting asked McCafferty to leave
because he was breaking one of the only rules for observers: no
filming.

“He was removed from the room by security after refusing to stop
taking pix in the observer area,” Kevin Feeley, a spokesperson for
the Philadelphia City Commissioners, texted BuzzFeed News. “He was
told several times that he had to stop, there are signs in multiple
places saying no pix allowed, and he disregarded all of it.”

Lauren Vidas, an election law attorney who was there as a Democratic
observer, said the ballot counters continued their work through the
commotion. “They didn’t flinch. I don’t even know if they
noticed it,” she told BuzzFeed News. “This was him purposely
creating a scene.”

Later that day, Trump held a press conference
[[link removed]],
during which he gestured toward the incident and complained about
observers having to keep their distance. “They don’t want anybody
there. They don’t want anybody watching as they count the
ballots,” he said about Pennsylvania.

Two hours after Trump spoke, the Philadelphia Police Department
arrested
[[link removed]] two
men who allegedly drove a Hummer with QAnon stickers on it from
Virginia to “straighten things out” at the ballot-counting
facility. According to court filings, when they were intercepted, they
possessed two handguns, a semiautomatic rifle, and a samurai sword.

“One of them is on Facebook Live just prior to his arrest, basically
with a call to arms,” Andrew Wellbrock, the assistant district
attorney in Philadelphia, told BuzzFeed News. “They described their
work as being a ‘fire mission,’ which is a military term, like
where you direct your artillery and firepower.”

This is the power of disinformation seeded online by opportunists.

Maria Ressa, a member of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a watchdog
group for the social network, and the CEO of Rappler, a news outlet,
said that watching disinformation surrounding the US election was like
seeing “Silicon Valley come home to roost.” In her view, “The US
is the last country to have felt this.”

IN APRIL OF THIS YEAR, vaccine science denier Judy Mikovits had a
book to sell. She had been well known in the anti-vaccination
community for years; this was her second book, and she’s made
regular appearances at conferences dedicated to the topic.

In 2012, her career as a scientist ended
[[link removed]] after
the medical journal Science retracted a paper she coauthored on
chronic fatigue syndrome because the results could not be replicated.
Far from being chastised, Mikovits dug in. In 2014, she falsely
claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had personally barred her from the
agency’s premises. “I have no idea what she is talking about,”
Fauci told Snopes
[[link removed]] in
2018.

Despite being known in anti-vax groups, Mikovits had no luck with
mainstream audiences until May. That’s when she starred in a video
called “Plandemic,” a slick 30-minute production that blazed
across social media with breathtaking speed. Framed as if she were the
subject of a prestigious television sit-down interview, Mikovits
calmly and convincingly weaved new and old disinformation about the
coronavirus and vaccines.

“Now, as the fate of nations hangs in the balance, Dr. Mikovits is
naming names of those behind the plague of corruption that places all
human life in danger,” said narrator Mikki Willis.

For conspiracy theorists, “Plandemic” became an emblem; for people
on the front lines, “Plandemic” was a sucker punch.

Eric Sartori [[link removed]], who works as a
nurse in a hospital in Arizona, named “Plandemic” as one of the
most damaging pieces of disinformation he’s seen. Sartori is an ICU
nurse who’s regularly stationed in his hospital's “COVID
island,” which has room for 180 patients and has recently had to
expand. Misinformation, he said, has put himself and his colleagues
“in jeopardy.” Sartori runs a Facebook page where he attempts to
fight disinformation; as a result, he and other outspoken colleagues
have faced doxing and calls for their firing.

“We’re being ridiculed if we’re posting anywhere,” he said.

Sartori has been fighting vaccine disinformation since before the
global pandemic was declared, but the miasma of falsehoods and anxiety
swirling around COVID-19 meant that as people lost trust in medical
institutions, they took it out on frontline workers.

In the spring, people who believed the virus was a hoax targeted him
with death threats and anti-gay slurs, even as he cared for sick
patients. Usually, the discussion on his posts will start out civil
and interesting; then, two or three days later, people will drop in
comments against vaccinations.

"'Sit down and shut the fuck up' isn’t science," wrote one person on
Twitter. “Tik Tok dances from your fellow nurses aren’t science.
You’re not helping your cause.”

Sartori lives on an urban farm with his children, whom he was cooking
breakfast for as he spoke with BuzzFeed News. “I like chickens more
than people these days,” he joked.

“We are feeling like our community — at least a good section of
them — have turned on us,” he said. “It’s just amazing that
nurses have gone from the number one trusted profession in the United
States to now realizing that there’s this subsection of the
population that thinks we’re trying to kill everyone.”

Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at Stanford Internet
Observatory, thinks “Plandemic” was the defining disinformation
event of the year. Through DiResta’s research into the video’s
spread, she showed how vaccine science denial and groups on Facebook
that were calling for society to reopen helped Mikovits flourish —
and profit. After “Plandemic” came out, her latest book became a
bestseller on Amazon.

Key to the spread were reopen groups, which mushroomed on Facebook in
April. Those groups had a mix of people genuinely concerned about the
economic impacts of the lockdowns, people confused about the measures,
and those who were willing to bring their guns to anti-quarantine
protests. Some of those early protests were organized by a group
linked to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos
[[link removed]].
Others were grassroots copycats.

“When the reopen groups were founded, a lot of them were started by
people who were part of the libertarian slant of the anti-vaccine
movement, who found like-minded people who agreed with them about the
reopening piece,” DiResta said.

The data DiResta and her team compiled
[[link removed]] showed
how Facebook groups were essential to the success of “Plandemic.”
The vast majority of posts promoting it were in groups supporting
Trump or other right-wing causes, 125 of them reopen groups. From
there, the disinformation trickled into nonpolitical groups, like ones
used to trade knickknacks or gossip about the neighbors. But wherever
it flowed, the disinformation undermined public health messages, basic
scientific facts, and even Fauci, who has served the US for more than
50 years.

“They would seed the content into the anti-vaccine groups and then
share the content into the MAGA groups,” DiResta said. “Then
people in the MAGA group, who were not Q people, would share it into
other communities, oftentimes in more mainstream regional groups. That
was how there was this kind of chain by which something would make it
from an anti-vaccine echo chamber into your local Bridgeport community
Facebook group.”

Once the pandemic came to the US, conflicting messages bombarded an
already confused public. Some of the people behind it had political
motivations, like former White House strategist Steve Bannon and
exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who peddled the false claim
that the Chinese government was about to confess the virus had
originated in a lab
[[link removed]].
Others sought to make a profit on bogus miracle cures, like health
supplements or colloidal silver. Some just wanted online clout.

In March, as regions began to lock down, over 25 different pieces of
false information
[[link removed]] were
circulating online. One claimed hospitals were faking the numbers of
ill patients; another showed outdated photos of tanks in the streets.
Messages about breathing hot air or drinking hot water to kill the
virus flooded WhatsApp. The next month, conspiracy theories and
medical misinformation continued to grow, including that Microsoft
founder Bill Gates
[[link removed]] had
a hand in creating the virus and that herd immunity was a better
solution to COVID-19 than lockdowns, social distancing, and a viable
vaccine. In May, as the US president touted hydroxychloroquine
[[link removed]] as
a miracle cure (it wasn’t), causing people who need it to live
to ration their medication
[[link removed]],
“Plandemic” landed.

Although social media companies made attempts to combat the false
information — removing some posts, putting up warning labels, and
slowing the speed at which they could be shared — DiResta said that
enforcement gaps allowed “Plandemic” to amass some 8 million views
in just a few days. Believing the large platforms had censored a
whistleblower, the video’s audience brought it to smaller,
alternative sites that chose to leave it up.

“There was first the problem of the misinformation in the video,”
DiResta said. “But then, by allowing it to grow and spread so far
before taking it down, they gave it kind of a second lease on life as
this forbidden knowledge censorship story, which in many ways really
became kind of a case study in what not to do.”

In a premonition of what was to come, armed men began to protest
at local legislatures over coronavirus restrictions
[[link removed]],
beginning in April but stretching into May
[[link removed]],
after the debut of “Plandemic.” The protesters organized in reopen
groups and events on Facebook. In Michigan, authorities stopped a
plot to assassinate Gov. Gretchen Whitmer
[[link removed]] in
October. (The extremists coordinated using Facebook
[[link removed]],
according to case documents.)

In November, Sartori, the nurse in Arizona, said he had become
hardened to the effects of disinformation, even if the public
opprobrium had not subsided.

“We’ve had people come in, probably a handful, who were refusing
all of our treatments,” he said. “They’re angry with us. We've
had people swear at us, spit on us. These are very rare, but it’s
happened enough times that it’s troubling.”

JUST AS DISINFORMATION about the pandemic undermined medical workers
and scientists, disinformation about the protests undermined civil
rights. And it was delivered through the same pipelines
[[link removed]].

Facebook groups that were usually made for idle chatter started to
spread rumors of violent and shadowy activists infiltrating America,
causing small-town residents to take up arms against antifa,
[[link removed]] or
anti-fascist activists. Ressa, the CEO of Rappler, said, “Social
media is like fertilizer; it lays the ground and allows the worst to
flourish.”

By July, in the wake of massive protests spurred by the police
killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans,
some reopen groups had morphed to focus on the Black Lives Matter
movement, according to the Associated Press
[[link removed]].
One called “Reopen California” became “California Patriots Pro
Law & Order.” In others, people claimed systemic anti-Black racism
is a hoax while spewing hateful posts directed at protesters.

In the streets, Black protesters asked white people not to deface
property
[[link removed]]. On
social media
[[link removed]],
people opposed to the protests circulated videos of burning buildings
and broken storefronts to give the false impression that activists had
been violent.

“I think disinformation is playing a role in polarizing the
country,” Arisha Hatch, vice president of Color of Change, an online
racial justice organization, told BuzzFeed News. “We’re obviously
seeing a lot of organizing attempts by white supremacist groups in
connection with many of the protests.”

“It felt like the narrative became about the broader Movement for
Black Lives protesters — mostly peaceful protesters — being the
ones being violent or looting,” Hatch said. “When, in fact, what I
actually saw were right-wing militias being overtly violent and police
officers being incredibly violent with respect to the protesters.”

It took less than two weeks for far-right influencers to conflate
protesters with antifa, which has been the subject of Republican scare
tactics for years. (In 2017, for example, Fox News warned its viewers
about an “antifa apocalypse.”
[[link removed]])

“Many people walked away with the perception that most of the
protests were violent or destructive, when in fact the majority of the
protests that were happening around the country — tens of millions
of people — were actually peaceful protests about an injustice they
witnessed on Twitter,” Hatch said.

Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on
Media, Politics and Public Policy, told BuzzFeed News this type of
smear has a long history.

“When it comes to the Black Lives Matter protest disinformation
campaigns, there are many and they are varied and they are
hyperlocal,” she said. “There's a long history of narratives about
outside agitators and secret funders of movements that predate social
media, but nevertheless social media allows them to scale.”

Disinformation didn't just come through social media; it has been
authoritatively promoted by President Donald Trump’s reelection
campaign, which sought to tie perceived social unrest over the summer
to his opponent, Joe Biden. “There is violence and danger in the
streets of many Democrat-run cities throughout America,” Trump said
on Aug. 27
[[link removed]].
During the Republican National Convention that month, he and others in
the party demonized protesters, including in an ad that used footage
of a fire in Spain to illustrate “Biden’s America.”
[[link removed]]

“I think this was embodied most in the way in which the Republican
Party — especially Trump — represented Joe Biden and Kamala Harris
as kind of spokespeople for Black Lives Matter, which is entirely
untrue,” Donovan said.

That narrative emboldened not just Republican voters but also white
nationalist groups who rejected the democratic system. They didn’t
just undermine protesters and COVID-19 science; they tried to take law
enforcement into their own hands. Throughout the summer, rumors and
hoaxes of antifa invasions created rifts in communities
[[link removed]] —
and worse.

Kyle Rittenhouse, who allegedly killed two people and injured one in
Kenosha in August, obsessively shared Blue Lives Matter posts to
Facebook
[[link removed]].
That same month, a group of residents in Bedford County, Pennsylvania,
opened fire at civil rights activists marching from Milwaukee to
DC, the Pittsburgh City Paper reported
[[link removed]].

This violence translated to Election Day disinformation. One hoax
[[link removed]] falsely
claimed that Black Lives Matter protesters were blocking entry to a
voting station. In reality, the video showed the opposite: police in
North Carolina pepper-spraying and arresting
[[link removed]] peaceful
Black protesters who were marching to the polls.

“At the core of the disinformation we’re seeing across a number of
different issues is the desire to undermine institutions,” Hatch
said.

WITH DWINDLING TRUST in their scientific and civic processes,
Americans tumbled into the presidential election.

“Anybody who studies this knew it was coming, right?” Donovan
said. “You didn't need a crystal ball to know that Trump was going
to contest the election, no matter what the results were, if he didn't
win.”

That’s exactly what happened, and he used online disinformation to
do it.

Zignal Labs, a media intelligence company, found that of all the swing
states, Pennsylvania faced the most online disinformation both before
[[link removed]] and during
[[link removed]] the
election. When told of that fact, Andrew Wellbrock, the assistant
district attorney who runs the Philadelphia Election Task Force,
chuckled. He was not surprised. “Good to know they all came for
us,” he joked.

Wellbrock said disinformation about the election has mangled the
democratic process. “It’s certainly frustrating, but I also think
it’s damaging to our process and faith in the process,” he said.
“Democracies only exist because people allow them to exist. We’ve
put together a set of rules that Americans are supposed to follow, so
when it’s actually a concerted campaign to undermine our faith in
that system, it starts to scare me.”

Following the election, Trump's legal team relied on such
disinformation to justify lawsuits it filed to overturn the results,
which the courts resoundingly rejected.

But newsfeeds aren’t a courtroom.

On Nov. 7, Trump tweeted
[[link removed]], “I
WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” Despite the warning label Twitter
stuck on it, that message garnered 1.1 million likes.

Trump has also made false claims about Dominion Voting Systems, a
Canadian company that provides technology for elections. “DOMINION
DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES WORLDWIDE,” he posted
[[link removed]],
citing One America News Network, a far-right cable channel.

The Dominion conspiracy has led to threats of death and violence. In
an angry, impassioned speech on Dec. 1
[[link removed]],
Gabriel Sterling, a voting system official in Georgia, described how
one staff member has had to deal with an image of his name on a noose.

“It has to stop,” Sterling said. “Mr. President, you have not
condemned these actions or this language.”

On the same day Sterling gave his speech, Trump again undermined
medical institutions; he retweeted a post
[[link removed]] that
falsely claimed Nevada was faking the number of patients who were ill
and dying of the coronavirus. “Fake election results in Nevada,
also!” he posted.

The president's campaign to spread distrust has touched all parts of
the US government.

On Nov. 17, Trump fired Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of
Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency, whose job it had been to safeguard the election, including
from online rumors. Donovan painted Krebs as standing apart from
politics and decried the effort to bring him into it.

“Those who work in government, especially election security and
integrity, now have a clear reason to worry about retaliation, simply
for doing their job,” Donovan said.

Writing in the Washington Post on Dec. 1
[[link removed]],
Krebs explained how his agency had worked with states to secure the
election system, and the consequences he’s faced for opposing the
president.

“On Monday, a lawyer for the president’s campaign plainly stated
that I should be executed,” he wrote. “I am not going to be
intimidated by these threats from telling the truth to the American
people.”

In Philadelphia, assistant district attorney Wellbrock is now
prosecuting the men he called “internet extremists” who allegedly
brought weapons to the city’s ballot-counting center. Both men cited
disinformation as their motivation, he said.

“One was in a veterans’ group for one of the candidates, and the
other was QAnon,” he said. “They both became susceptible to the
same message that illegal activity is occurring in Philadelphia. They
were self-deputized to do something about it.”

Wellbrock thinks social media companies bear some of the blame.
“We’re here because of Facebook,” he said. “Or Twitter.”

Disinformation is not going away. It will dissuade people from taking
the vaccine. Protesters will be lied about as police brutalize them.
And the propaganda machine Trump fueled won’t grind to a halt just
because there’s a new president.

Eric Sartori, the nurse in Arizona, is now thinking about how he will
try to combat skepticism around the upcoming vaccines, separating real
anxieties from the disinformation that’s already circulating.

“I think it’s the subtle things that chip away at reality that are
the most troubling,” he said. ●

[_Jane Lytvynenko is a BuzzFeed News Reporter. This story is part of
BuzzFeed News' series on the year 2020.__ TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE
[[link removed]]._]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]