Why the fight to counter false election claims may be harder in 2024
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
We're now a year out from the next presidential election, and the people working to safeguard voting are worried. They say a campaign of legal and political pressure coming from the right is stifling efforts to fight back against false claims about the country's voting systems, lies that haven't stopped spreading since 2020. Joining us now to talk about all of this are NPR correspondents Shannon Bond and Miles Parks. Hey to both of you.
MILES PARKS, BYLINE: Hi there.
SHANNON BOND, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: So what have you been hearing from election officials as they look ahead to 2024?
PARKS: Since 2020 - really since 2016 with Russia's interference in that election - the whole elections community has been focused on fighting election lies. That's not new. But what is new is that that fight has gotten a lot more complicated recently. Over the past year, year and a half, many conservatives have started pushing back on those efforts, arguing that they amount to censorship of free speech. I was talking about this with Wesley Wilcox, who's a Republican election supervisor in Marion County, Fla. And he said starting last year, he literally couldn't use the word misinformation around Republican voters anymore.
WESLEY WILCOX: In Republican circles, misinformation is a dog whistle, you know? It blew up, and all of a sudden, man, you got skewered if you even mentioned the word.
PARKS: And our reporting found this backlash is being felt everywhere that's connected to election information. It's research. It's affected the federal government. It's affecting the social media companies. They're all gun-shy, as Wilcox put it, due to a real fear that they'll be targeted.
CHANG: Targeted. When you say targeted, who is doing the targeting?
BOND: Well, there's a couple different things going on here, Ailsa. So first of all, there are Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana who have brought a lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of going too far in pressing platforms to take down misleading posts about elections as well as about COVID. And this summer a district judge in that case issued this really broad injunction blocking the government from communicating, for the most part, with platforms. Now, that has been put on hold. The Supreme Court is going to hear that case, but that definitely has had a chilling effect. There's also a private lawsuit targeting outside researchers who studied election lies and rumors in 2020. And then there's also pressure coming from Congress. Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio is leading an investigation into alleged collusion between the Biden administration and tech companies and researchers, which Jordan argues is unconstitutionally targeting political speech.
CHANG: I mean, Shannon, it does seem kind of fraught to have the government weighing in on what people can or cannot say online, right?
BOND: Yeah. I mean, and there is, of course, this open question about what role the government should take when it comes to, you know, pushing back against rumors or outright lies about, you know, high-profile issues like elections and public health. There's also legitimate skepticism of the role that social media companies play, you know, with all this power they wield over online speech. And those are important debates. But government officials and platforms and researchers say the allegations being made in these lawsuits and in this investigation are really mischaracterizing their work. They say there is an important public interest in identifying and mitigating false or misleading claims and potential foreign interference that could have real impacts in elections - right? - eroding trust in the electoral process, disenfranchising voters, you know, things like suggesting votes won't count if they use a certain kind of marker on their ballots.
I spoke with Kate Starbird, who's a researcher at the University of Washington. She's been targeted by the congressional probe, and she's received harassment and threats over her work. And she says all of this has a big impact on the democratic process.
KATE STARBIRD: Weaponized criticism of research on misinformation is having a negative impact on our ability to understand and address what many of us feel to be a pretty large societal problem.
CHANG: OK, I hear her saying that there's a negative impact. But I'm just wondering, Miles, what sort of concrete examples are election officials pointing to? Are they?
PARKS: Yeah. I mean, we saw one this week. There were election days in a number of states across the country. And on past election days, the Department of Homeland Security really touted a closer working relationship with the social media companies to the point where if a local election official saw something misleading online, they could report it to this partnership that was funded by DHS. And then it would get funneled to the social media companies for review to see if it broke their rules. That is not happening now. DHS told me they had no contact with any social media companies on Tuesday. Instead, they're working to amplify local election officials and give them the tools to fight back themselves. But as we know, those local election officials are tasked with a lot of responsibility.
CHANG: Yeah.
PARKS: I talked to Wilcox, the Florida election official we heard from a second ago, and he told me it's hard to ask local election officials to understand a rapidly changing online environment.
WILCOX: We are nearing capacity on people, you know? You want me to be a cybersecurity expert. You want me to be a database expert. You want me to be - now I've got to be an AI expert. I'm like, I'm sorry. At some point, I got to tap out.
CHANG: I hear him.
PARKS: And many of those election officials are tapping out. You know, study after study has found an alarming turnover rate for people who are working in the local election space.
CHANG: Man. Well, Shannon, Miles was just talking about social media platforms. Are those platforms being affected by this environment? What are you seeing?
BOND: They are, Ailsa. They're taking a step back, you know, to put it bluntly. Tech layoffs across Silicon Valley have hit teams working on trust and safety. Some of these platforms have become more reticent to police, you know, some false claims, including, you know, the false claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Now, many of the platforms say they are still committed to keeping elections safe. But certainly the sense among folks working in this field is that they are being far quieter about this work. And then, of course, there is X, the platform formerly known as Twitter...
CHANG: Right.
BOND: ...Where Elon Musk - right? - who now owns it - he has undone years of work. He's eliminated the election integrity team entirely, and he's made changes to the platform that just make it a lot harder to find credible information.
CHANG: Exactly. OK, so if all of these different players - like, the tech platforms, the researchers, the federal government - if they are all sort of stepping back, I guess, where does that leave us heading into a presidential election year?
BOND: Well, Ailsa, we know when there is a vacuum of information, you know, that opens the door for even more rumors, conspiracy theories and lies to proliferate.
PARKS: And those lies have real-world effects. I mean, we saw that on January 6. We also know that they are driving a continued threat environment for local election officials. Just this week election officials in a number of states reported receiving suspicious letters, some containing fentanyl. So all of this is connected.
CHANG: Wow. That is NPR's Miles Parks and Shannon Bond. Thank you to both of you.
PARKS: Thanks, Ailsa.
BOND: Thank you.
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