The effect on the outcome on Nov. 5 remains to be seen, but it has already debased what passes for political debate about the two major party candidates, Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. It has also corroded the foundations of the country’s democracy, undermining what was once a shared confidence that the country’s elections, regardless of who won, have been free and fair.

Russia, as well as Iran and China, have gleefully stoked many of the narratives to portray American democracy as dysfunctional and untrustworthy. Politicians and influential media figures have in turn given foreign adversaries plenty of fodder to work with, inciting and amplifying divisiveness for partisan advantage.

“They do have different tactics and different approaches to influence operations, but their goals are the same,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in Washington, said in an interview, referring to foreign adversaries. “Very simply, they’re looking to undermine American trust in our democratic institutions and the election specifically, and to sow partisan discord.”

Numerous factors have contributed to the surge in disinformation, which Ms. Easterly and other officials have warned will continue far beyond Election Day.

Social media platforms have helped to harden media ecosystems into distinct, disparate partisan enclaves where facts contradicting preconceived narratives are often unwelcome. Artificial intelligence has become an accelerant, making fake or fanciful content ubiquitous online with merely a few keystrokes.

In today’s political debate, it seems, facts matter less than feelings, which are easily manipulated online. It all played out in full in recent weeks, after two devastating hurricanes killed hundreds across the Southeast and prompted outlandish conspiracy theories and violent threats to rescue workers.

A fictitious image of a girl clutching a puppy in a life raft so moved Amy Kremer, the chairwoman in Georgia for the Republican National Committee who posted it this month, that she stood by it even after she learned it was not real.

“Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she wrote on X, where her initial post received more than 3 million views. “It is seared into my mind forever.”

Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, essentially used the same excuse after facing criticism for popularizing a racist fiction that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the city’s cats and dogs.

He argued he was reflecting local residents’ actual concerns, if not actual facts. (Mr. Trump, for his part, stood by the original claims in an interview with Fox News’s Howard Kurtz on Monday. “What about the goose, the geese, what about the geese, what happened there?” he said. “They were all missing.”)

In much the same way, Mr. Trump has succeeded in reviving allegations that the outcome of the race against President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 was not legitimate — simply by flatly refusing to concede otherwise. Election officials, as well as numerous courts, have said repeatedly that there was no election fraud in 2020.

A concerted conservative legal and political campaign that went all the way to the Supreme Court has abetted the falsehoods about election fraud anyway. The project has undercut government agencies, universities and research organizations that once worked with the social media giants — especially Facebook and Twitter — to slow the spread of disinformation about voting.

>>1355876
>creating fake people is a recurring Russian tactic
Oh great, we're back to blaming Russia for the election again.

In hindsight, the efforts to challenge the results four years ago were haphazard, even farcical, compared with what is happening now. At one point the people pushing claims about election fraud mistakenly chose Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a small family business in Philadelphia, as a venue for a news conference instead of the more famous hotel downtown. Even so, Mr. Trump’s challenge culminated in the violence on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.

This year’s efforts to discredit the election, many officials and experts say, could do greater harm.

“Now, that same election denial impulse is far more organized, far more strategic and far better funded,” said Michael Waldman, the chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice and New York University School of Law, a nonpartisan legal and policy institute. “And now it is something that tens of millions of people believe and share.”

Perhaps the single biggest factor in today’s disinformation landscape has been Mr. Musk’s ownership of Twitter, which he bought two years after the 2020 election and rebranded as X.

Twitter’s previous chief executive, Jack Dorsey, along with Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, faced public and government pressure to enforce their own policies against intentionally false or harmful content, especially around the Covid pandemic and the 2020 election.

In August, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote a mea culpa to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who has led the conservative charge against moderation by the major social media platforms.

Mr. Zuckerberg said that, in hindsight, Facebook had wrongly restricted access to some content about the pandemic and the laptop belonging to Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter.

“We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again — for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers,” he wrote.

Meta’s stance signaled a desire to step back from America’s fractious political debate, though the company says it continues to moderate false election content. Mr. Musk has by contrast used X to thrust himself square into the middle of it.

He dismantled the platform’s teams that flagged false or hateful content and welcomed back scores of users who had been banned for violating company rules.

He has raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s bid and campaigned for him in appearances in Pennsylvania. In posts to his 200 million followers — more than Mr. Trump had in his heyday on the platform — he has also repeated unsubstantiated claims that the Democrats are recruiting ineligible immigrants to register to vote.

Last week, he echoed the refuted assertion that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the count in 2020, a falsehood that resulted in a $787.5 million settlement paid by Fox News.

Mr. Musk also, according to a recent study, played an outsize role in amplifying content promoted by Tenet Media, a news outlet that the Justice Department accused last month of covertly using $10 million in laundered funds from Russia to pay right-wing media personalities like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin.

It is not clear whether Mr. Musk knew of the Russian links — the influencers claimed they did not. He certainly engaged regularly with Tenet Media’s content, though, and Tenet regularly tagged him, presumably to draw his attention, according to the study, published by Reset Tech, a nonprofit research and policy organization based in London.

At least 70 times from September 2023 to September 2024, he responded to or shared accounts linked to Tenet and its influencers to his followers on X — many of them relating to this year’s election, the study found.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

The disinformation challenge has grown even as government officials have become more attentive and, as this election approached, more proactive than in previous election cycles.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have issued regular updates on intelligence collected about interference from foreign actors, principally Russia, Iran and China.

The goal is to focus public attention on foreign attempts to manipulate the election, but it is not clear that such efforts — themselves criticized as partisan — can have a significant impact on views at home.

One of the trailblazers in fact-checking in the United States has been PolitiFact, which the journalist Bill Adair founded in 2007 to measure the claims politicians make on a scale from true to mostly true, mostly false to “pants on fire.”

Mr. Adair now says that the effort has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies that cloud the nation’s political debates. “It’s never been worse,” he said in an interview following the publication of a new book about his fact-checking life, “Beyond the Big Lie.”

The problem, he said, is not fact-checking itself but that even the act of calling out falsehoods has been characterized by some as a political exercise.

While “all politicians lie” might be a common lament, Mr. Adair said that the blame has tilted significantly to the Republican Party. “You have a convergence of a politician and a party that believe they can benefit from lying,” he said.

John Mark Dougan, the former sheriff’s deputy from Florida now working for Moscow’s propaganda apparatus, has previously declined to comment on his connections with Russia’s disinformation campaigns, but his contributions are clear.

He appeared in a video on the platform Rumble earlier this month, detailing what he and the host claimed was an account by an exchange student from Kazakhstan accusing Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate, of sexual abuse. He has spread that and the other smears on multiple social media platforms and in scores of news outlets he has created from his apartment in Moscow.

In a text message, he reacted angrily to questions about making false accusations against Mr. Walz. “What about E Jean Carrols claims?” he wrote, imprecisely, about E. Jean Carroll, the woman who accused Mr. Trump of sexual assault. Referring to her vulgarly, he said she “didn’t have any evidence whatsoever,” even though a jury in New York ordered Mr. Trump to pay her $83 million for defaming her in 2019 after she came forward with her accusation.

Mr. Dougan then shared links to Hindustan Times, an English-language news outlet in Delhi, and to two sites that he created, Patriot Pioneer and State Stage, both included on a list of websites the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency cited last week as platforms for Russian disinformation campaigns.

“Lots of publications have been writing about this,” he wrote.
___

NYT msm misinformation? N'yuck n'yuck

https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-conspiracy-theories-misinformation-trump-musk-0e5a84b1d9e6cd63cd8ca22ee9900387

ATLANTA (AP) — Voting machines reversing votes. More voters registered than people eligible. Large numbers of noncitizens voting.

With less than two weeks before Election Day, a resurgence in conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting is forcing state and local election officials to spend their time debunking rumors and explaining how elections are run at the same time they’re overseeing early voting and preparing for Nov. 5.

“Truth is boring, facts are boring, and outrage is really interesting,” says Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole with truth. But what we try to do is just get as much information out there as possible.”

This year’s election is the first presidential contest since former President Donald Trump began spreading lies about widespread voter fraud costing him reelection in 2020. The false claims, which he continues to repeat, have undermined public confidence in elections and in the people who oversee them among a broad swath of Republican voters . Investigations have found no widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines four years ago, and each of the battlegrounds states where Trump disputed his loss has affirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s win.

In the past week, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed a voting machine had changed a voter’s ballot in her Georgia district during early voting, and Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X, has promoted various conspiracy theories about voting machines and voter fraud both online and at a rally for Trump in Pennsylvania.

The floodgates are “very much” open, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works with state and local election officials.

“This is making election officials’ lives much more difficult,” he said.

Eric Olsen, who oversees elections in Prince William County, Virginia, said combatting misinformation has become an important and challenging part of the job.

“It’s really difficult from our position, a lot of times, because social media feels like a giant wave coming at you and we’re in a little canoe with a paddle,” he said. “But we have to do that work.”

On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly attempted to sow doubt about the upcoming election – something he did ahead of his two previous bids for the White House. Even after he won in 2016, he claimed he had lost the popular vote because of a flood of illegal votes and he formed a presidential advisory commission to investigate. The commission disbanded without finding any widespread fraud.

This year, Trump claims that Democrats will cheat again and uses “Too Big to Rig” as a rallying cry to encourage his supporters to vote. Election experts see it as laying the groundwork to again challenge the election should he lose.

Spreading bogus accusations about elections has other consequences. It’s already led to a wave of harassment, threats and turnover of election workers as well as the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The conspiracy theories that have surfaced in recent weeks are not new. There have long been claims of “vote flipping,” with the most recent ones surfacing in Georgia and Tennessee.

A claim in Georgia’s Whitfield County was highlighted by Greene on Alex Jones’ “InfoWars” show. Jones has a history of spreading falsehoods and was ordered to pay $1.5 billion for his false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a hoax.

County election officials issued a statement, noting the case involved one voter out of 6,000 ballots that had been cast since early voting began. The ballot was spoiled, and the voter cast a replacement that was counted. Officials said there was no problem with the voting machine.

Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said every report they’ve seen so far of someone saying their printed ballot didn’t reflect their selections on the touchscreen voting machine has been a result of voter error.

“There is zero evidence of a machine flipping an individual’s vote,” he said. “Are there elderly people whose hands shake and they probably hit the wrong button slightly and they didn’t review their ballot properly before they printed it? That’s the main situation we have seen. There is literally zero -- and I’m saying this to certain congresspeople in this state -- zero evidence of machines flipping votes. That claim was a lie in 2020 and it’s a lie now.”

In Shelby County, Tennessee, county election officials said human error was to blame for reports of votes being changed. Voters had been using their fingers instead of a stylus to mark their selections on voting machines, officials said.

In Washington state, Republican Jerrod Sessler, who is running for the state’s 4th Congressional District seat, shared a video on social media this week that claimed to show how easily fraudulent ballots can be created. But the video did not make clear that voter information on each ballot is checked against the state’s voter list.

“A ballot returned using fake voter registration information would not be counted and is illegal in Washington state,” Charlie Boisner, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office, said in an email.

Musk recently invoked Dominion Voting Systems as part of his remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania, seeming to suggest its equipment was not trustworthy. Dominion has been at the center of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election and settled its defamation lawsuit against Fox News last year for $787 million over false claims aired repeatedly on the network. The judge in the case said it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations made by Trump allies on the network were true.

In a statement, Dominion said it was “closely monitoring claims around the Nov. 2024 election” and was “fully prepared to defend our company & our customers against lies and those who spread them.”

A request for comment from Musk was not immediately returned.

Musk, who has endorsed Trump, has repeatedly pushed misinformation about voter fraud to his 200 million followers on the X platform, where false information spreads largely unchecked.

He has often sparred online with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Recently, the two tangled over Musk’s claim that there were more registered voters in Michigan, a presidential battleground state, than people eligible to vote. Benson said Musk was including in his count inactive voters who are scheduled for removal. A federal judge on Tuesday tossed out a lawsuit filed by the Republican National Committee claiming problems with the state’s voter list.

During an interview last month, Benson said she was disheartened to see someone in Musk’s position repeating false information.

“If he was sincerely committed, as he says he is, to ensuring people have access to information, then I would hope that he would amplify the truthful information -- the factual, accurate information -- about the security of our elections instead of just amplifying conspiracy theories and in a way that directs the ire of many of his followers onto us as individual election administrators,” Benson said. “It’s something that we didn’t have to deal with in 2020 that creates a new battlefront and challenge for us.”
___

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2024/election-misinformation-quiz-ai-fake-real/

>>1355879
We never left, because they never stopped.

>>1356026
>We never left, because we never take our meds
FTFY

>>1356155
>Ivan made another shitty gaslight attempt
Do you ever get tired of it?

>>1356164
It's all he has