As we head into the midterm elections, we know more now than we did in 2016 about the kind of disinformation Russian operatives generate in an attempt to sow discord and undermine faith in U.S. democracy.
However, some of the most impactful cases of divisive viral content two years ago did not originate with Russia but rather with politically motivated right-wing users who put the propaganda online themselves. All Russian bad actors had to do was amplify it.
Naim Tyler's video alleging he found a rigged Pennsylvania voting machine is one such example.
The video he posted showed him repeatedly pressing the button for Donald Trump, while the machine’s indicator light stayed on for Clinton. It turned out that the machine was working properly, and that Tyler wasn’t following the instructions for changing his vote. But nonetheless, the video aligned with right-wing conspiracy theories and went viral, aided by Russia’s then-unknown disinformation campaign.
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Russian troll accounts frequently retweeted right-wing celebrities and media accounts to boost their messages. The Russian account @tpartynews, posing as an American Tea Party group, retweeted both political provocateurs like Ann Coulter and mainstream right-wing accounts like Fox News. Russian accounts have been found to push right-wing conspiracies published by fringe news websites, according to an analysis by the German Marshall Fund, which tracks Russia’s influence campaigns.
The spread of viral misinformation, sometimes aided by foreign governments, is a playbook that tech companies, journalists and government agencies are watching for when Americans head to the polls on Nov. 6 for the 2018 midterms.
Sometimes the lie spreads so far and wide that the truth cannot ever catch up or debunk it.
Tyler’s video racked up millions of views, and caught the attention of both far-right media and mainstream outlets. By noon, the far-right website Gateway Pundit had shared the video in an article that claimed “Machines won’t take Trump votes.” Another article from the conspiracy site Infowars received more than 50,000 Facebook engagements and was linked to by 33 websites with their own original stories on the video.
The Washington Post included the tweet in its election live blog, and NBC News pointed to it in a story about reports of voting machine errors in Pennsylvania.
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The tweet may even have reached Trump. In a telephone interview on Fox News on Election Day, Trump noted national reports of voter fraud, and while not naming the tweet specifically, seemed to describe its contents.
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Propublica, CNN and Buzzfeed all debunked the idea that Tyler’s video illustrated a rigged election. In a fact check that attracted little attention and a fraction of the original video’s social engagement, Propublica reported Tyler’s video showed the machine was working “exactly as it should,” and included a video explainer of the voting machine that clearly established Tyler had simply not followed the posted directions to change his selection.
But news organizations did not report at the time that Tyler, who did not allow reporters to use his real name on election day, had deep ties to alt-right groups. He had been tweeting his pro-Trump views for months, earning him minor celebrity status in the alt-right.
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As for the midterms, [Dr. Vladimir Barash, the science director at network analytics firm Graphika, Inc., and co-author of a new study that analyzed how misinformation spread on Twitter during and after the 2016 election] said “there’s no magic spell you can wave over the media landscape and solve disinformation. But platforms have some responsibility to make decisions about what constitutes safe, informed public discourse.”
Most of the Twitter accounts that spread disinformation during the 2016 election are still operating today, according to Barash's study. On a typical day, these accounts push more than a million tweets.
How a right-wing troll and a Russian Twitter account created 2016's biggest voter fraud story (NBC News)