On X, formerly Twitter, some public workers are already being accused of fraud
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Some recent social media posts on X have shown specific public servants and voters accusing them of voter fraud. That activity has led to harassment and threats against the individuals. Experts say that much of the behavior is due to the social media platform's standards, which have been relaxed from four years ago. NPR's Lisa Hagen reports.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Earlier in the week, a Pennsylvania postal worker was doing his job delivering mailed-in ballots to a county courthouse. A man filming with his phone began asking questions and followed him into the building.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I don't know. Apparently, he's with the post office, but that looks very suspect.
HAGEN: In his post, the man said the postal worker had, quote, "an insane amount of ballots." The camera zooms in on the postal worker's face, and this video now has 6 million views. Renee DiResta is a research professor at Georgetown University and an expert on election disinformation. She says sharing concerns or trying to make sense of the voting process is a normal part of free and fair elections.
RENEE DIRESTA: But there's a really big difference between discussing a concern and putting somebody's face up and accusing them of treason.
HAGEN: County officials in Pennsylvania confirmed to local news outlets that the man filmed in the video was a postal worker doing his job. The man is now receiving threats based on the video. This is not a new pattern, but in 2020, DiResta says major social media platforms did more to try to add context and amplify information from credible sources. That was before billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X.
DIRESTA: I would say the major difference this time, though, is that X is hosting the communities where this sort of effort at sensemaking is taking place.
HAGEN: Musk himself has spread a number of rumors about election fraud. He's launched a super PAC to help Trump. On X, that super PAC has created a dedicated space to share instances of potential fraud. It has gained about 60,000 users in under two weeks.
DIRESTA: And most of the people who are responding to the posts are convinced that the election is being stolen, and so it feels a little bit more like a place where they're trying to just gather evidence to prove the thing that they've already decided has happened.
HAGEN: X did not respond to a request for comment. DiResta says each post purporting to show voter fraud contributes to a larger effort to discredit election results if a preferred candidate loses. And the impact on the everyday people who get tangled up in these conspiracy theories is profound. Jane Bentrott works with a legal nonprofit called Protect Democracy. After the 2020 election, it helped file a number of defamation lawsuits.
JANE BENTROTT: These are on behalf of people who found themselves suddenly being lied about in the public sphere for claims that they were breaking the law when they were not.
HAGEN: Pro-Trump figures and partisan media organizations like One America News have had to publicly retract allegations against the people they falsely accused of election fraud. For instance, Bentrott says, in 2020, Trump's then attorney, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, baselessly accused two Georgia election workers by name of manipulating ballots. Here's one of those workers, Shaye Moss, right after a jury awarded her and her mother $150 million last year.
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SHAYE MOSS: The flame that Giuliani lit with those lies and passed to so many others changed every aspect of our lives - our homes, our family, our work, our sense of safety, our mental health.
HAGEN: Here's Bentrott again, talking about Giuliani.
BENTROTT: As he learned, and hopefully others who are paying attention learned, folks who accuse others falsely of breaking the law can have substantial consequences for those lies.
HAGEN: But even successful defamation cases like these take years to resolve. Giuliani's yet to pay these women anything. Protect Democracy made an effort to hold high-profile figures like Giuliani accountable for spreading false accusations. But overall, the media landscape those influencers are part of has remained intact, according to DiResta.
DIRESTA: What you're seeing is a pipeline by which somebody makes an allegation - usually a small account, a person with a very - a concern that feels very real to them. But it's picked up by a person who has maybe tens to hundreds of thousands of followers.
HAGEN: She's studied the way the January 6 Capitol riot was motivated, in part, by beliefs in the messages this pipeline generated. In 2020, more than 60 court cases, multiple recounts and ballot audits found no evidence of significant voting irregularities. DiResta is hopeful American election officials are better prepared for what's coming. But ultimately, she says, the tone will be set by political leaders.
Lisa Hagen, NPR News.
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