Misinformation around election season has been spreading, including false claims that Donald Trump is not appearing as a candidate on Oregon’s Voter Pamphlet to some Pennsylvania ballots being destroyed.
Stephen Prochaska is a doctoral student at the University of Washington Information School and a graduate research assistant at the Center for an Informed Public. He joins us to share more on the strategy behind the spread of misinformation and what to expect before, and after, Election Day.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. There is now one day left before voters have to turn in or mail their ballots in Oregon and Washington, or go to the polls in many other states. Campaigns might be in the final stretch, but if recent elections are any guide, it’s likely that misinformation efforts are about to kick into a higher gear. Stephen Prochaska studies how and why misinformation spreads online. He is a doctoral student at the University of Washington’s Information School and a graduate research assistant at the Center for an Informed Public. He joins us now. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.
Stephen Prochaska: Yeah, hi, thanks for having me.
Miller: I want to start with the big picture. Based on the research you’ve been doing for a number of years now, what do you think the coming weeks hold for us as a country?
Prochaska: Yeah, it’s a great question, I think a lot of us are thinking about – what are we to expect as we move forward here? I think in some ways, of course, like any prediction is going to be, it’s ultimately just a prediction. It’s uncertain. However, based on the previous election cycle, and based off of some of the research that we’ve been doing and what we’ve been seeing, we have a couple of theories as to what we’re gonna see.
So, the day before the election day, we’re probably going to see a lot of online rumoring on election day, based off of different places where our election processes … there may be an error that’s misperceived or misrepresented online as evidence of some sort of election fraud that might be happening. I guess, to frame the kind of research that we do, we tend to look primarily at, as you described it, mis- and dis-information. But we describe it as rumoring, and a rumor can actually be true or false. So, as people are making sense of events as they unfold, they’re gonna come up with theories about what’s going to happen.
To give an example that we saw in 2022, in Maricopa County in Arizona, there were some errors as tabulators were having a difficult time scanning ballots as people were voting, and a lot of voters were really upset by this. There were long lines that were emerging from it, but there were rumors online alleging these errors were intentionally caused. However, at the time of rumoring, it was really difficult to understand what the underlying problem was. Of course, they were not intentionally caused, and it ended up being some issues with the printer settings. But the audiences who expected fraud going into Election Day promoted their experiences as evidence of fraud. And I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to say that we’ll probably see something similar on Election Day in this cycle.
A similar dynamic that we’re expecting to see is that not all of the votes are going to be counted by the end of election night. And as those votes continue to be tallied, we’ll probably see some online rumoring, suggesting that the slow counts are indicative of some sort of fraudulent ballots being introduced to the process – that is false. That’s not how this works, of course, we have a lot of evidence our election integrity infrastructure is pretty secure. However, for audiences that are convinced that fraud is happening, any kind of delay or anything that there isn’t a lot of understanding of may be interpreted as evidence of fraud.
So as that counting extends out, particularly in any swing states that take a long time to count, we’re expecting to see a lot more rumoring, probably catalyzed by online influencers or political elites who have been promoting some of the rhetoric around election fraud to begin with.
Miller: It’s striking to me that in both of those examples from recent elections, there is a kernel at the center of them that is fact-based … whether it was an actual error, as opposed to massive fraud, but an actual error in Maricopa County, or the delays in vote counting just based on changes in the way Americans are voting and the individual rules in each state.
How significant is it and how much more likely is rumoring to be successful for something that turns out to be not true? Is it more likely to be spread if there is some element of truth in the center of it?
Prochaska: That is a great question. It’s hard to say about likelihood of spread. It’s easier to debunk something that’s based off of factually incorrect information. This is where fact checkers are actually the most successful, is if there’s a discreetly false piece of information that’s spreading. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the news recently. There’s been some videos going around that were fabricated by Russian disinformation accounts. And with these, we can easily get a fact check out very quickly. So rumoring is less likely to spread in that case because we have an alternative explanation.
Miller: I think there is a fake video of Haitian voter fraud that was just a fabrication.
Prochaska: Yes. Thank you for clarifying that. That was the one I was referring to. And what we actually see in a lot of our work is what you named, which is that there is a kernel of truth. There is this factual thing that happens that people then begin to rumor around, and they’re trying what we call “collective sensemaking.” So they come together as a group and they try to understand what is happening. And one of the things that we’ve seen is that, as that collective sensemaking process occurs, different people, if they’re predisposed to see things in a particular way – in this case, if they’re predisposed to see it as evidence of fraud – then they will perceive it as evidence of fraud, even if the evidence there is actually more ambiguous and that there may be a much more mundane explanation available.
And as that happens, online rumoring occurs, and then we see political rhetoric integrate into it and we see political influencers or elites who are coming into the conversation say, “Aha, this is evidence of this fraud we’ve been talking to you about for so long!” That’s the cycle that we see most often.
Miller: This gets to something that you and your team now call the “evidence” generation infrastructure. First of all … and I should say that when you write about this, you put evidence in quotes, maybe it’s obvious why you do that. But it’s worth spending a second just on that. Why put it in quotes?
Prochaska: It’s a great question. Getting back to that dynamic when we put it in quotes, we’re basically trying to reference that this is perceived evidence. People will allege that it’s evidence of something, but the reality is that it may not be evidence of the thing that they say it’s evidence of. So when people perceive it as evidence, we put it in those quotes to say, this is ambiguous, it may not represent that evidence. And in the case of what we study, it most often does not represent what they say that it is evidence in support of.
Miller: The word “generation” in that, seems important to me. It has a different implication to say “evidence generation,” than to say “evidence preservation.” Do you think, in general, that people are doing this in good faith?
Prochaska: That is a very hard question to answer. I will say, I think a lot of people are. I do think that there are a lot of folks … and when I say this, I mean at the volunteer level … people, just a citizen going about living your life. If you’re convinced that election fraud is taking place, then you genuinely believe that it is. And so you’re likely to, then, collect evidence, and amplify it saying, “Oh, this fraud is happening. I found evidence in support of that.” And then amplify that to other people who are in your community.
Miller: But I guess then, we need to go back in time a little bit, because there was an important “if” – if you’re convinced that election fraud is taking place, and earlier you’d said, if you’re predisposed to think that election fraud is happening. So, where does that happen? How do you become predisposed?
Prochaska: This is a great question. This is what we’re really looking at, is this ongoing intersection of rumoring and collective sensemaking with political rhetoric and political speech that we’ve seen a lot of since 2020, where there’s a lot of mis- and dis-information. A lot of rumors going around, sowing doubt about our election processes. However, we have seen similar things even earlier than that.
I think one of the things that might be helpful here is what we term the three “C’s” of evidence generation. The first C is convincing the public that our elections are insecure and that widespread fraud is happening. The second C is evidence collection. Now that audiences are convinced that fraud is occurring, they are more likely to be motivated to volunteer and seek out further evidence that they can then amplify online in support of this rhetoric. And then the third C is an election contestation. So the third C is their contest. This is what we’ve seen in referencing the infrastructure part of our piece here, which is saying there’s a lot of infrastructure that’s supporting election contestation, both in the past – in 2020 and 2022 – as well as what appears to be positioning themselves to do something similar in 2024.
Miller: So, it seems like, then, there are a lot of potential audiences for this “evidence.” Judges who might be brought in to weigh in on cases in the coming days, or state lawmakers or delegates, or perhaps people who might be asked to go to DC on January 6, 2025. I mean, are those all potential members of the audience for this “evidence”?
Prochaska: Absolutely. I think it’s a very broad audience, and there’s so much out there. As a center, we study a lot of individual rumors, but there’s so many, we cannot cover everything, and that’s as experts in this space who have developed years trying to figure out how we can track this kind of information.
A lot of these different pieces are going to be tailored towards a different audience, but collectively, all of those people are stakeholders here. And towards that question about, are some of these going to be attorneys or judges? We saw evidence in 2020 there were, of course, over 60 lawsuits filed trying to contest the election results in 2020. A lot of that, we have specific examples where some of those lawsuits were based off of false or misleading evidence that was generated through this online rumoring process. As soon as it gets exposed to legal scrutiny, it breaks down, and it’s not admissible evidence.
However, we also see many examples of those lawsuits being amplified online to generate more public and rhetorical support, to continue that ongoing rhetoric that continues to sow doubt about the integrity of electoral systems, and claim that fraud is happening. And of course, in 2020 that took the form of January 6, ultimately, which is very much on everyone’s mind, I think, this election cycle.
Miller: Is it fair to say that there is a more robust physical infrastructure or app infrastructure now, that can make it easier for people to collect and spread this “evidence”?
Prochaska: I would say so. Based off of what we have seen, it definitely appears like that is true. It would take, probably, more long-form research to be able to evaluate the exactness of that claim. But we’re definitely seeing a lot more organizations around. It’s possible that it could just be that they’re more public about the work they’re doing. As far as, ss there more? I think so, but we’re not 100% certain. We’ve definitely seen some apps as well. We’re seeing a lot of these grassroots infrastructure that are often organized at the national level by what’s called the Election Integrity Network. And a lot of that network, their goal is actually … they’ve appeared to be sowing doubt about election integrity.
The more technical infrastructure that we’re seeing, we’re seeing the apps that are being developed, for example, by “True the Vote,” who have been pretty prominent in spreading rumoring in the past, and were involved in the production of the now debunked film “2000 Mules” in 2022, which motivated a lot of this evidence generation amplification cycle that we described. They’ve developed apps, two apps in particular. One called the VoteAlert app, which allows members of the public to take photos and videos, and then directly amplify those online. And another one called IV3, which allows for the mass contestation of voter registration. This is challenging people who are on voter rolls based off of perceived ineligibility. We’ve seen some examples of folks going through photo rolls and then finding people with last names that sounds like they’re a noncitizen, and then challenging the registration based off of that.
Miller: The apps that you’re talking about, my understanding is that these essentially are aligned with the right. In 2020, obviously, the “Stop the Steal” movement was specifically from the right. And I know that this year as well, the Trump campaign has been much more likely to spread rumors or mistruths about our federal or state-based electoral systems. But are you also seeing an increase in mistrust about these systems from the left?
Prochaska: It’s a great question. We have definitely seen rumoring from the left. I don’t know if I could say that it’s been an increase. We actually saw rumoring from the left in 2020 and 2022 as well. And some of it gets into this very nebulous territory between, as we were talking earlier, where oftentimes rumoring is based off of a piece of fact that then results in more theorizing about, say, for example, the intention of a politician or a head of a government body behind a particular action. Louis DeJoy in particular has been, I think, a target of left-leaning rumoring in both previous election cycles.
Miller: The Postmaster General.
Prochaska: Yes, that’s right – USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. I think we’re seeing it, but I am hesitant to be able to say that we’re seeing more of it.
Miller: I want to switch gears a bit and go back to the big picture. In one of your bio’s, it says that you take an empathetic approach to understanding online rumoring. What do you mean by that?
Prochaska: One of the challenges that we’ve really run into is, there’s a tendency to assume that a lot of our conversations are about fact. There’s a lot of conversation: “we live in a post-fact society.” And in some ways we do have some evidence, depending on how you frame a conversation, that that may be true. However, one of the challenges that we’ve seen and has actually been a topic of our conversation today, is that we’re all uncertain about a lot of things in our day-to-day life. We have to take things based off of trust, based off of who – whether it’s a person in a news organization, a reporter, an institution – we have to assume at a certain level that they are able to be relied on for some information at least.
As communities have had that decline in trust, they turned to other entities and have then trusted them, in place of other institutions. I think the news media is a great example of this. We’ve definitely seen a very strong decline in trust. And in turn, a lot of folks online have been turning to less formalized sources of information or news.
When I say empathetic, I’m trying to signal that it’s very easy to misunderstand where someone is coming from based on the conclusion that they’ve reached. So here, when there’s a lot of populations that are believing that election fraud is happening and then acting based off of that, it’s important to recognize that if someone genuinely believes that the underlying integrity of our government and our nation … which these election systems are the foundations of our democracy. If we don’t have functioning elections, we don’t really have a democracy. And if people genuinely believe that, a lot of the actions and a lot of the rhetoric then makes sense.
I tend to approach with more empathy towards folks who are members of the public, day-to-day citizens who aren’t necessarily as active in the online economy of engagement, and in this case, rumoring. I tend not to engage as much empathy when I’m dealing with the political elites and the influencers who I think often stand to gain from the rhetoric they spread. But it’s important to recognize that many folks don’t have the time to verify everything, and to really understand and empathize with that before making any judgments about the position that someone may hold. I think [that] has been a really important piece to me.
Miller: Stephen Prochaska, thanks very much.
Prochaska: Thank you.
Miller: Stephen Prochaska is a PhD candidate in the University of Washington’s Information School. He’s also a graduate research assistant at the Center for an Informed Public.
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