How a Network of Student Journalists Pushed Back Against 2020 Election Misinformation
In the old normal, election night is like the Super Bowl for journalists. Everyone camps out in the newsroom watching the results come in, together. Work is done. Memories are made. I understand a LOT of pizza is eaten.
But this is not a normal year; newsrooms are closed and journalists are working remotely. I have yet to set foot on my graduate school’s campus. The dangers of COVID-19 mean we cannot physically be together, and yet the most important election of our lifetime is taking place amid a digital misinformation war meant to undermine faith in the US elections process. So what can first semester grad students do?
Carrie Brown, Director of the Social Journalism program at CUNY, offered my cohort and I an exciting opportunity to participate in ProPublica’s Electionland, a collaborative journalism project covering voter suppression in the 2020 US presidential election. While other newsrooms focus on the results of the election, Electionland seeks to document, in real-time, the various barriers to voting that Americans experience: voter intimidation, long lines, broken voting machines, misinformation, closed polling stations, and no-show absentee ballots.
How it works
Under the guidance of Diara J. Townes, an investigative journalist and the community engagement lead at First Draft, we joined First Draft’s Student Network, an online community of student journalists from across the country working together to seek out false or misleading information, particularly around unsubstantiated claims of “voter fraud.” First Draft works with newsrooms all over the world to protect communities from harmful, false information on the internet. They are interested not only in debunking misinformation, but also in “prebunking,” or alerting news outlets as soon as possible that certain misinformation exists and is gaining traction online so newsrooms know not to give it further credence.
We participated in a series of trainings where we learned about the different types of different types of misinformation:
- imposter content: when an individual poses as a credible news source
- fabricated content: content that is completely made up & has no basis in truth
- manipulated content: has some grain of truth, but has been intentionally doctored or changed
- misleading content: intentionally framing information or an issue in order to mislead
- satire or parody: often not intended to cause harm, but has the potential to confuse or mislead
- false connections: when the headline or images don’t coorespond with the information in the piece
- false context: correct information that is used in the wrong context
We also practiced boolean searches, a method of stringing keywords together to search for specific information. They look confusing, but make a little more sense once you break them down. This is one example of a search I used in TweetDeck to find first-person chatter about claims of voter fraud in Georgia:
(“lost ballot” OR “stolen ballot” OR “ballot stolen” OR “missing ballot” OR “ballot never arrived” OR “never got my ballot” OR “ballot never came” OR “can’t vote”) AND (“GA” OR “Georgia” OR “Atlanta”) AND (“my” OR “I” OR “we” OR “me” OR “us” OR “our”)
We were directed to share any interesting findings in the Cross Check Slack channel, and to log our findings into a misinformation database adorably named Junkipedia.
I signed up for three 1 hour-long “shifts,” and used CrowdTangle, TweetDeck, and other social media and messaging platforms such as Reddit and Discord to monitor election misinformation in Wisconsin and Georgia.
Hold On to Your Butts
During my final shift, I noticed that a certain video on my TweetDeck was steadily racking up likes and shares. In the video, a young woman sounding harried tells the camera that she just witnessed poll workers in Maricopa County, Arizona, instruct voters to fill out their ballots in sharpie and claims that this voided their votes because the voting machines don’t pick up sharpie ink. I’m including only a screenshot of the video because I don’t want to give it more views by sharing the original content, but you’ll see it’s been viewed over 200,000 times:
It’s amazing how quickly this blew up on far-right Twitter.
The video was fabricated. No ballots were invalidated by sharpie, and there was no conspiracy to invalidate votes for President Trump. Voting machines can and do record sharpie ink. But “Sharpie Gate” prompted local news outlets to publish pieces debunking that conspiracy and establishing that Sharpies could, in fact, be used on ballots: https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/sharpies-can-be-used-on-voting-ballots-in-arizona-officials-say
Additionally, I searched for this video on Facebook and found it posted on a far-right conservative page called DC Watchdog. Here is a screenshot of the post. You’ll notice at the top left that the poster is based in Nepal:
Why is this happening?
Politico breaks down how this conspiracy theory gained traction in pro-MAGA spheres online: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/05/sharpie-ballots-trump-strategy-arizona-434372 . I’ll highlight one quote in particular that gets at the heart of the misinformation battle:
Now What?
This experience left me feeling somewhat horrified, but mostly hopeful. On the one hand, this process was honestly fun. I was introduced to research tools that I can use going forward and I got to be part of a network of other student-journalists doing important, timely work. It was exciting to spot conspiracy theories in the wild and feel like I was helping squash them out. I felt like the Terminator, but for bullshit. It’s comforting to know that there are people working around the clock to defend our democracy and protect the public from harmful misinformation. On the other hand, while I knew abstractly that there are forces in the world actively working to undermine our democracy, it is still shocking to actually see those forces operating in real time.
I’m left reflecting on how we as engagement journalists can use our tools to do some “pre-bunking” of our own, sometimes referred to as “education.” Yes, the work of tracking down and stamping out misinformation is crucial. We know that white supremacists, right-wing conspiracy theorists, and foreign enemies use every social media tool to spread false information. But debunking misinformation can only be one piece in the fight for our democracy. Running after bad news is a lot harder than stopping it in the first place. It’s a bit like playing misinformation whack-a-mole; we’re always chasing the dragon.
Journalists must find ways to incorporate civic education into our work, because our schools and televisions don’t currently teach the people we serve about the systems that govern their lives. Systems that people, were they armed with information, might navigate differently or change entirely.
