Election 2024: Track the trends
Track the trends, our blog series by Dan Evon, Senior Manager of Education Design, identifies patterns in and offers analysis of data gathered on the News Literacy Project’s Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024, a tool for exploring falsehoods about presidential candidates and the voting process. The dashboard contains hundreds of examples of election-related viral rumors, categorized by themes and narratives.
You can read all the posts below.
September 12, 2024
Rumors that question the integrity of our elections arguably represent the clearest threat to American democracy. After all, such falsehoods helped motivate thousands of people to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to protest the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. While these claims have been debunked repeatedly, they remain prevalent on social media and make up a quarter of all examples related to election integrity collected on the News Literacy Project’s Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024.
These falsehoods are being used as the foundation for a new wave of baseless claims designed to draw the integrity of the 2024 election into doubt. Or, as one poster put it: “Never forget … They did it once, and they’re going to try to do it again.”
Bogus claims about the outcome of the 2020 election — like the one above, which falsely claims that normal increases in overnight vote totals show evidence of election fraud — are being recycled and recirculated ahead of the November race.
Meet the new lies, same as the old lies
In addition to resurrecting persistent falsehoods about the 2020 elections, viral propaganda this year has sought to sow doubt about the eligibility of individual candidates. While this is clearest in the bogus “birtherism” claims about Democratic nominee Kamala Harris — which falsely state that she wasn’t born in the United States — former President Donald Trump’s candidacy also has been called into question by falsehoods distorting the impact of his felony convictions. And after news broke on July 21 that President Joe Biden was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Harris to lead the Democratic ticket, eligibility rumors again saw an uptick, with many people making the false assertion that this change would violate election rules.
CAPTION: Candidate eligibility rumors have emerged as a common narrative, as shown in these two examples: On the left a falsified document is shown in a post implying that Harris’ birth certificate is from Jamaica. On the right is a post falsely claiming Trump is ineligible to run in Texas because of his felony convictions. (This claim is missing context. It is based on Texas state law and does not apply to federal elections.)
It’s also worth noting that more than 20% of all election integrity rumors in our database make false claims about noncitizens voting. Federal law prohibits noncitizens from casting votes in presidential elections, but online factions have been making a concerted effort to muddy the waters around this fact.
**NewsLit Tip: Know what you don’t know. Most people are not experts about how elections really work — let alone election laws. When a claim pops up about an unfamiliar subject, make sure that the information is coming from a credible, standards-based source.
What can you do? Vote.
Based on all available evidence, voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the U.S. However, vast misinformation campaigns aimed at convincing the public otherwise have had a major impact on how American citizens view election integrity. According to a recent Public Affairs Council survey, only 37% of Americans believe that the election will be “honest and open.”
While the crowd that charged the Capitol believed they were trying to “stop the steal,” the real theft occurs when people are misled into thinking their votes don’t matter and they stay home on Election Day. Don’t let misinformation dissuade you from using your civic voice this Election Day. Visit Vote.gov to review your voting rights and ensure you are registered.
September 5, 2024
Welcome back to our blog series focused on the Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024, a tool for exploring trends and analysis related to falsehoods regarding the candidates and voting process. As of today, NLP’s Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024 contains more than 600 hundred examples of online falsehoods. By categorizing them by themes and narratives, we provide important insights about trends and patterns in the misinformation spreading about this year’s presidential race.The role of repetition
Ever heard the phrase, if you “repeat a lie often enough … it becomes the truth”? It’s often credited to Nazi Joseph Goebbels, one of the most notorious and malevolent propagandists in history. This law of propaganda drives much of the misinformation we find online. Our vulnerability to oft-repeated falsehoods and the “illusion of truth” effect makes it crucial to understand the common themes and narratives of viral misinformationCandidate’s cognition a common theme
Claims that exaggerate and distort candidates’ cognitive abilities and intellect are the most frequent in our collection. This was true when President Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee running against former President Donald Trump, with many false claims attacking the candidate’s age. And the trend has continued with Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s important to note that these overall narratives are not entirely fabricated (all three politicians have had their share of public gaffes), but they appeal to our natural desire to confirm our biases, providing an exaggerated and distorted glimpse of reality in which the candidates are reduced to caricatures of themselves. Are Trump and Harris both mentally fit to be president? Our dashboard isn’t designed to answer that. But it can help to make you aware of the spate of misinformation that intends to skew your viewpoint on this question.
You can’t see the forest for the trees
Debunking individual rumors — for example, proving that Trump did not “freeze” during a campaign speech or that Harris did not say that “the problem of solving a problem is not a problem”— only partly succeeds in combating misinformation. Those who create and share misinformation are doing more than just pushing an individual falsehood. They are making a concerted and sustained effort to manipulate our political views by repeating these claims to distort consensus reality, or our shared understanding of the world around us. We need to prepare ourselves for the inevitable false claims that will fill our news feeds in the lead up to the 2024 election. The best way to do that is to shift our attention from individual posts of questionable content and focus more on broader trends. By learning to identify the false narratives that bad actors attempt to establish about candidates and the election process, we can spot them before they draw us in. We will continue to add every election-related viral rumor we can find to our collection through Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, 2025. So, you might want to check the dashboard’s running tally of false claims as part of your daily news routine. We also will publish analyses of political misinformation here in the weeks to come.August 29, 2024
Every day people are bombarded with information on social media, and in this rush of content, false claims can slip by undetected. Developing the skills to identify and address falsehoods is important for every online user, especially in the days leading up to a historic presidential election, when the volume and variety ratchet up, as well as the stakes. That’s why NLP has launched its Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024 – an interactive collection of viral election-related falsehoods that we began compiling in July 2023, with a post from an ordinary Instagram account. The shocking image: a screenshot of what appeared to be an endorsement of Donald Trump for president from superstar Lady Gaga.
But it was not genuine. The image was created by doctoring a photograph of Gaga as she addressed a crowd in Pennsylvania during President Joe Biden’s campaign in November 2020. And the alleged quote, well, that was a complete fabrication. Since then, we’ve cataloged more than 500 other false claims aimed at influencing the electorate.
But the dashboard goes well beyond simply compiling examples of false, manipulated and AI-generated content. It identifies common tactics used to create these falsehoods, along with the recurring themes around which they cluster – an approach that we hope helps people be able to better recognize and reject these pieces of misinformation in their feeds.
The Types and Tactics of Misinformation
NLP’s Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024 is divided into two broad sections: themes and types of misinformation.
Tricks of context have proven to be the most common form of election misinformation online so far — and the most common is the use of “false context,” or presenting an image or video along with text that inaccurately describes it. This tactic is likely popular because it is both effective and easy. False context claims often follow major breaking news events when people are following trending hashtags to get the most recent information. During a natural disaster, it is practically guaranteed that engagement seekers will post years-old photographs or videos and falsely claim that they relate to current events. The same dynamic plays out in political posts. After a campaign rally, for example, it’s not uncommon for images of large, enthusiastic crowds – such as photos of concerts – to go viral as disingenuous depictions of crowd size.
Fabricated content and manipulated content are the two other misinformation types found in the dashboard. While there have been a fair number of fabricated images created with AI-generated software, these technologically advanced falsehoods are still outpaced by less sophisticated counterparts. It is far more common to encounter a sheer assertion – an evidence-free claim that is fabricated out of thin air – or a fictional quote, than an AI-generated image. Manipulating content is another common approach to creating misinformation, with doctored images of T-shirts, signs, and news chyrons among the most common items used in these digital alterations.
Visit the Misinformation Dashboard: Election 2024
Developing the skills to identify and address falsehoods is important for every online user, especially in the days leading up to a historic presidential election, when the volume and variety of misinformation ratchet up, as well as the stakes.
- Subscribe to receive emails about the series here.
