Jack Doppelt
May 5, 2020
What balloting will be acceptable? Will attempts to open up voting be stymied by contrived concerns of vote fraud? Will the elections be held? On Nov. 3? If so, will the losing part of the electorate accept the results?
Our committee took on these questions immediately before the pandemic set in. They resonate now, as the election looms six months off, and because of the pandemic, are barely on the edge of the media radar.
To many, that’s just as well. Campaigns had become all encompassing, grotesquely expensive, and driven by negative, divisive strains of the body politic.
All true but what lurks beneath the surface, regardless of the duration of the campaigning, is disinformation that has overtaken our elections.
Disinformation, from the Russian term dezinformatsiya, is designed to stick and spread through word of mouth, social media and unwitting news outlets. It is used by government intelligence agencies, in the negative advertising of political campaigns, and recently by foreign governments, such as Russia obviously. Representatives of Facebook, Twitter and Google have testified in Congress that disinformation leading up to the 2016 election and planted by Russian operatives alone reached more than 125 million people, according to NPR. Twitter representatives invoked these numbers: 2,752 Russia-linked Twitter accounts and more than 36,000 automated "bots" tweeting 1.4 million times about the election. Much of the content was aimed at widening divides in American culture.
When responsible media identify disinformation, they tend to dutifully ignore it so as to not give it oxygen to circulate. The damage is done though. The disinformation has seeped into the bloodstream of conversation and social media, often with a boost from the President, whose campaign has been reported to be heavily financing a strategy, called “death star,” that is primed to unleash disinformation during the campaign cycle. The piece, "The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President: How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 elections" in the Feb. 10 issue of the Atlantic, is a playbook worth accounting for in the nation's defense strategies and worth circulating to all college students.
Instead of ignoring disinformation campaigns, responsible media should call out the disinformation as such in as real time as possible. It is, of course, tricky to distinguish disinformation from differing points of view in a messy democracy, but we’ve come to expect it of Facebook and Twitter. One cautious step for the media is to piggyback off Facebook and Twitter, and when they take measures to keep disinformation off their platforms, the media can step in and call attention to that disinformation. The way the media should do that is to lead in given stories with the truth or the reality and back into the debunked disinformation efforts, citing the sources seeking to pollute the democratic discourse. This is a technique we teach in social justice journalism and is directed at giving prominence to accuracy and at punishing through sunlight those who intentionally are a corrupting influence. How to write those stories without pumping oxygen into the disinformation is a conversation starter for news organizations. One model might be how news outlets handle corrections without repeating and magnifying the error being corrected.
A useful primer is the American Press Institute’s Trusted Elections Network Guide to Covering Elections amd Misinformation.
It's incumbent on we in the media to take it on. We’re on deadline.
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