Donald Trump and his allies have kept busy the past six weeks spreading lies and conspiracy theories about the presidential election he lost—but not too busy to also push misinformation about the fast-approaching runoff elections in Georgia. New research reported by the New York Times on Tuesday has found that a small group of disinformation “superspreaders” have trained their sights on the Peach State ahead of its high-stakes contest January 5, pushing bogus stories about illegal voting and the Democrats vying to unseat Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. The lies, which lay the foundation for challenges to the results there like the kind Trump has leveled in his authoritarian bid to remain in power, have found footing on social media, and may even be reaching more people than reporting by credible outlets.
Americans are “being drowned in misinformation in Georgia by these superspreaders,” Fadi Quran, a director at the human rights group Avaaz, which conducted the study, told the Times. “We see [disinformation superspreaders] regularly testing new narratives to see where they can hit a certain nerve,” Quran added, “and then acting on it.”
The narratives include everything from lies meant to damage Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to baseless allegations of improprieties in the voting process, including a claim that people who were not eligible to vote had received ballots for the special election. The bogus claims have been circulated by MAGA celebrities like Diamond and Silk and Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law. Trump himself has alluded to them in his broader attacks on the electoral system, as he seeks to overturn his decisive loss to Joe Biden in November. “I told [Loeffler and Perdue] today, ‘I think you’re dealing in a very fraudulent system,’” he said during a garrulous, indignant press conference on Thanksgiving. “I’m very worried about that.”
Social media companies had attempted to tamp down disinformation around the general election. Twitter has played whack-a-mole with Trump’s batshit claims, affixing warning labels to his erroneous and reckless posts. Facebook, meanwhile, implemented changes to its advertising policy and tweaked its algorithms to elevate trusted news sources over more partisan, less credible ones. That resulted in a rise in traffic on the platform for outlets like the Times and NPR and drops for places like Breitbart. But those adjustments were temporary in the eyes of Facebook leadership, and they have since been abandoned—a move that could allow right-wing conspiracies to flourish even more on the platform than they already do, Avaaz warned.
“Facebook has gotten a lot of pressure over claims that they are censoring the right or conservatives, but what the data shows is that they may be favoring these actors,” Quran told the Times. “These accounts regularly spread misinformation. The question is: Why doesn’t Facebook demote their reach per their policies?”
The answer may be that doing so would be bad for Mark Zuckerberg’s bottom line; the company’s own internal research has suggested that more toxic content tends to be more popular, and the so-called “nicer newsfeed” resulted in less engagement with the platform. A healthy democracy is better served by credible news; Facebook’s interests, on the other hand, seem to be better served by less trustworthy sources of information, like Eric Trump and Seb Gorka.
While the surge of disinformation could certainly form the basis of later challenges to the legitimacy of the Georgia vote, it’s unclear what it will mean for the vote itself. While attacks on Warnock and Ossoff are meant to scare off voters, claims that the election is being rigged have concerned some Republicans, who fear that it could depress turnout among their own voters. But with the Senate on the line, turnout has already been high, and both parties have been intensely focused on the race. Will the disinformation help or hurt the Republican cause? That much is still unclear. What is clear is that the “alternative facts” era ushered in by Trump will not end with his presidency.
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