Foreign vs Domestic: An Examination of Amplification in a Ballot Misinformation Story
Contributors:
Joe Bak-Coleman, Michael Caulfield, Koko Kolitai, Rachel Moran, Kate Starbird, Tom Wilson, and Ian Wisemore: University of Washington Center for an Informed Public
Renée Diresta: Stanford Internet Observatory
Main Takeaways:
There has been, and will be, multiple narratives around “mail dumping” meant to degrade the trust in mail-in voting.
Domestic, verified accounts are major spreaders/promoters of misinformation narratives instead of just foreign accounts.
A speedy response from local officials and social media platforms is critical to prevent the spread of disinformation narratives.
Introduction
The 2016 U.S. elections took our media ecosystem, and our democracy, by surprise. It revealed to us the extent to which foreign adversaries could leverage technology designed to bring us together and instead drive us apart. Discussion around the 2020 election has focused, in many regards, on how (and indeed whether) our response to foreign disinformation campaigns has improved. Our investigations, including this one, regularly demonstrate that domestic campaigns are the far bigger threat in 2020 — and that the purveyors of information disorder do not require armies of foreign trolls (or even automated or inauthentic accounts) for creation, amplification, and distribution. Instead, they leverage blue-check accounts, many of whom have vast followings, and enjoy significant trust within their audience.
This post analyzes a recent case of false information around discarded ballots in order to explore the scope and impact of foreign intervention relative to domestic drivers — an important dynamic to understand, particularly as media coverage often disproportionately focuses on instances of foreign interference, which can unduly elevate the assumed influence of foreign adversaries. In this specific example, the amplification activity observed by Russian accounts was thematically similar to the type of actions attempted in 2016. However, the vast majority of amplification of the misinformation was domestic, and the reach of foreign manipulation was minimal.
Mail-in Ballot Misinformation in Sonoma County
In the early morning of Friday, Sept. 25 conservative media personality Elijah Schaffer, who has over 248,000 followers, tweeted an image purporting to be thousands of mail-in-ballots in a dumpster in Sonoma County, California. Shortly thereafter, the Gateway Pundit released an article (screenshot below) using the same images without watermarks, claiming they were sent in by a reader in California. The implication was that the ballots had been thrown away uncounted — more purported evidence to bolster an ongoing disinformation campaign that mail-in voting is rife with fraud. In reality, the images were of ballot envelopes from the 2018 election being recycled at a Sonoma County landfill in accordance with state law. While domestic, well-known sources were the first to post and amplify the story online, recent investigation has uncovered limited foreign amplification attributed to Russia.
Figure 1: Screenshot taken Sept. 25th of the original story posted on Gateway Pundit. As with Elijah Schaffer’s original tweet, Gateway Pundit claimed to have received the photos directly from an unnamed source. Gateway pundit has misleadingly updated the story several times, most recently with “The County of Sonoma put out a statement saying the ballots were from 2018. The county says the ballots were already opened. You can judge for yourself.”
Social Media Analysis: Tracking the spread of the story
Shortly after midnight on Sept. 25, Blaze TV reporter Elijah Schaffer posted the original tweet containing the images from the Sonoma County dumpster. Just after 7 a.m PDT, Gateway Pundit released an article containing the same images and quotes, with the claim that the sender of the images saw county workers covering up the ballots with cardboard. As the story spread on social media it was swept into broader narratives that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, and that issues around improperly discarded mail (including ballots) will undermine the integrity of the election. This Sonoma instance was one of a growing number of misleading stories around mail-in voting.
Figure 2: Original Tweeted Posted by user @ElijahSchaffer containing misleading image of recycled ballot envelopes from 2018.
Sonoma County official channels were quick to debunk these reports, releasing a tweet clarifying that the purported ballots pictured were in fact old empty envelopes from 2018, discarded according to law. The implied claim — that this constituted 2020 election fraud — was quickly debunked given that California ballots for the 2020 election would not be mailed out to voters until Oct. 5. Our research supported the county's determination that the tweet and article constituted rapidly spreading disinformation — and likely politically-motivated disinformation. We reached out to our social media partners to flag the story. The original tweet containing the images was removed from major platforms soon afterwards. The Gateway Pundit updated their article to reflect the announcements made by Sonoma County officials, but questioned the county’s statement that the discarded ballots had been opened.
Whenever we discuss viral mis- and disinformation, it’s important to contextualize the reach. The amplification of the Sonoma images on Twitter can be traced to blue-check (verified) Twitter users. The original tweet from Elijah Schaffer, in combination with retweets from independent journalist Tim Pool, social media influence Keemstar, and Donald Trump Jr drove around 90% of the Twitter conversation discussing the Sonoma claim. On Facebook, amplification centered around the sharing of the Gateway Pundit article, which garnered over 7,500 interactions in its first day on the site.
Figure 3: Growth of tweets related to the dumping of ballots in Sonoma following the initial tweets by Elijah Riot and the Gateway Pundit. Size of shape corresponds to the size of the user’s audience. (View interactive graph)
Our analysis of the reach of the Sonoma images does highlight some foreign amplification, albeit minor. There was at least one instance of a Russian-affiliated news site sharing the images and a story that was similar to that of both the Gateway Pundit and Schaffer’s initial tweet. The site USAReally is a known Internet Research Agency-affiliated website that has been sanctioned by the US Treasury. This particular article, however, garnered very little attention on any platform, including Twitter where it was found less than a dozen times in our search collection. In another example documented by Graphika and attributed to suspected Russian actors, a user on Parler by the name “Leo Alpine” shared this image in a post that received fewer than 500 views at the time of reporting. While there may well be additional foreign sockpuppet accounts amplifying this particular article, much like others we’ve encountered this election, any foreign activity in this case was dwarfed by the impact of well-known, blue-check influencers like KEEMSTAR and Donald Trump Jr.
Foreign interference is minimal compared to home-grown amplification
Unfortunately, much of the dialogue surrounding misinformation — and especially disinformation —is focused on speculation about ongoing active measures by foreign actors. This shapes how we conceive of efforts to mitigate the spread of misinformation online — and how we prioritize the policies we develop to ensure integrity in our elections and our information ecosystem. However, as emerging evidence from this election cycle is illuminating, many of the false narratives being cultivated around voting integrity are coming from within the U.S.
This does not eliminate or even minimize the potential for foreign governments to impact national conversations. Instead, it highlights the current importance of the domestic pathways by which misinformation is spreading and undermining faith in our democratic processes. Unlike foreign interference, this domestic variant is unlikely to be solved by traditional platform-led mitigation efforts such as source-labeling or scrubbing of accounts, and will ultimately require more nuanced — and difficult — discussions. As the election nears, and more instances of voting-related misinformation appear, it is important for state and federal election officials to quickly and clearly debunk alleged fraudulent instances. The speed of Sonoma County officials’ intervention in this particular case was crucial in properly contextualizing the ballot images and lessened the potential for foreign interlopers or domestic actors to impactfully amplify the misinformation.
Conclusion
While we cannot control the actions and potential interference from foreign actors, we can urge people to take a moment before deciding to spread voting related information on social media. Misinformation is designed to outrage and create a reaction among us, like a narrative about ballots being dumped. However, if users waited before deciding to share this shocking information, the spread of the misinformation could have been limited. Further, local officials need to be speedy in providing corrections and interventions to address potential misinformation surrounding the democratic process in the U.S. election. Sonoma County’s response was critical in addressing the concerns related to this content and provided contextualization to explain the imagery of ballots in the trash.