Track the trends: Stay ahead of these election falsehoods
VISIT THE DASHBOARD
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 misinformation
Candidate’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.