The DeJoy Case: Criticism of Poor Performance, Rumors of ‘Sabotage’
Online narratives about U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and the U.S. Postal Service underscore the challenge of disentangling legitimate criticism from rumor and conspiracy theorizing.
In this Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) analysis, we describe some of this discourse and characterize how it has been spreading through social media.
We see evidence of attempts to mobilize audiences and affect political change through calls to action accompanying, in some cases, unsubstantiated and/or misleading claims.
Photo above: U.S. Postal Service trucks in Waltham, Massachusetts in January 2020 by Sam LaRussa via Flickr / CC BY 2.0
This Election Integrity Partnership analysis was co-authored by Stephen Prochaska, Adiza Awwal, Damian Hodel, Mike Caulfield, and Kate Starbird, all researchers at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Introduction
In recent days, there has been renewed attention around Louis DeJoy, the current U.S. Postmaster General who was appointed in 2020 by a board of governors (who were appointed by President Trump). DeJoy has been criticized for changes at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that led to poor USPS performance in 2020, even as many states were relying on USPS delivery of mail-in ballots as an alternative to in-person voting during a pandemic. There have been calls for his firing from voices on the political left, along with a range of public criticism. Some of the criticism has been substantiated. For example, on October 5, a federal judge (Judge Emmet G. Sullivan) made the determination that the policy changes implemented by DeJoy did "impede" states' efforts to provide safe alternatives to in-person voting (before those policy changes were suspended by court injunction on September 27, 2020). The federal judge also wrote that negative nationwide impacts from the policy changes were foreseeable. However, public and online criticism of DeJoy has also featured unsubstantiated claims that he intentionally sabotaged the USPS to prevent the success of mail-in voting, as well as false claims, such as allegations that DeJoy ordered the dismantling of mail-sorting machines to intentionally harm the USPS’s ability to distribute mail-in ballots in a timely manner (fact-checked here by The Washington Post). This case underscores the challenge of disentangling legitimate criticism from rumor and conspiracy theory. Here, we describe some of this discourse and characterize how it is spreading through social media.
Examining How Criticism of DeJoy — a Blend of Factual, Misleading, and Unsubstantiated Claims — Spread on Twitter
At the EIP, we’ve been tracking these rumors for several days, both leading up to the recent court decision and in the subsequent day(s). Below is a temporal graph of the approximately 34,000 tweets in our data that reference DeJoy and include both terms related to voting or ballots and a term related to criticisms of DeJoy.
Criticisms of DeJoy appeared to be ongoing in our data, but renewed interest began in earnest on October 1, when the Twitter account of Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew), a non-profit organization that positions itself as a watchdog for government accountability, posted the following tweet:
@CREWcrew’s tweet, which has been retweeted nearly 5,000 times, largely by left-leaning audiences, resurfaced criticism about the USPS’s poor performance in the weeks surrounding the 2020 election, claiming that DeJoy “intentionally” tried to slow down mail service to “interfere with voting by mail.” These claims are unsubstantiated. Though DeJoy’s changes at the post office did slow service in some places, there isn’t evidence that his actions reflected an intentional effort to interfere with mail-in voting (as opposed to cost-saving measures).
Subsequent posts on social media included more specific accusations, for example that DeJoy removed or destroyed vote sorting machines and mailboxes in Democratic neighborhoods, exemplified below:
The tweet above, posted by political pundit Cheri Jacobus (whose Twitter account has approximately 225,000 followers), was retweeted more than 1,500 times and received more than 5,000 likes, and helped create a second wave of tweets (in Figure 1). It includes the claim that mail-sorting machines were removed intentionally to harm the mail-in voting process. A March 2021 fact-check published in The Washington Post asserts that this claim is false, describing how the USPS’s plan to remove high-speed sorting machines was put into place prior to DeJoy taking the reins as Postmaster General.
Other prominent tweets by online influencers on the political left pushed the claims further, for example by accusing DeJoy of election fraud and claiming that he is a traitor. For example, a tweet posted by the unverified Twitter account of a liberal political commentator with more than 250,000 followers asserted that DeJoy attempted to sabotage the 2020 election through his work at the USPS and included a call for “traitors” to be purged. It was retweeted approximately 800 times.
Similar to patterns the EIP reported on regarding the spread of false/misleading election fraud claims by pro-Trump audiences in 2020, we can also see evidence of attempts to mobilize audiences and affect political change through calls to action accompanying the misleading claims. A large proportion of tweets (37%) included calls for DeJoy to be fired — or for members of the USPS Board of Governors to be fired (so the latter could be replaced with governors who would fire DeJoy). Prior to the October 6 hearing, the most cited domain in the dataset was act.commoncause.org, which hosted a call for DeJoy’s firing along with an assertion that he had actively worked to sabotage USPS service around the 2020 election.
On Twitter, the conversation picked up again, quite dramatically, in the hours after Judge Sullivan’s decision (on Thursday, October 6). Prominent tweets in that recent surge — for example by @CNNPolitics, @MaddowBlog, and @CREWcrew — accurately cited the ruling to support claims that DeJoy’s actions harmed the USPS’s ability to deliver mail-in ballots. Overwhelmingly, the responses to those tweets (via replies and quote tweets), contain calls for DeJoy to be fired. A small proportion contain language reflecting the unsubstantiated claim that DeJoy’s actions were purposeful, for example by appending the “#sabotage” hashtag — though the ruling fell short of asserting that DeJoy’s intentions were to harm the mail-in voting process
Tracking Spread on DeJoy Criticism on Other Platforms
We also analyzed how criticism of DeJoy spread through other platforms. We were able to find a couple of videos on TikTok that contained some of the same claims supporting the broader narrative that DeJoy had intentionally harmed the post office. One received about 3,000 views (much higher than the median, but not substantial for that platform). The conversation on Facebook — visible through public pages and groups — was similar to that on Twitter in terms of content and tone, though less prominent. It included similar claims of wrongdoing from political officials as well as everyday people. For example, the day before the Sullivan court ruling, U.S. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania shared a post criticizing the USPS’s performance, noting late deliveries and lost packages and demanding a plan for service improvement.
A very small number of comments to that Facebook post invoke some of the false and/or unsubstantiated claims that DeJoy intentionally harmed USPS service to sabotage the mail-in voting process in 2020 and, in a few cases, that he planned to do that again.
Summary: Rumors Mixed With Legitimate Criticism
Rumors serve a variety of important civic purposes. In the absence of official information, rumors can be an important source of emerging information (Shibutani 1966). Importantly, rumors can also serve to call attention to social problems, and even when wrong can usefully force more formal channels to investigate or refute them. And, as many theorists have noted, sometimes the rumors are right, as was the case here with 2020 rumors that the mail had been slowed by the post office at a crucial time, a claim now partially vindicated by a recent legal judgment.
When it comes to intention, however, the situation is more complex. In elections, intention is important. People can lose faith in elections through knowledge of error or carelessness in the process, but a belief that public officials substituted their private or political interest for the public interest is particularly damaging to perceptions of electoral integrity. Sometimes intention can be ascertained, as when there is no other plausible motivation for an action, or where a certain result is explained by a common process or expected error. Other times the full range of intention is unknowable.
In election discourse online, conversations can mix claims about intention, impact, and conspiracy. These cases are common — taking shape and spreading across networks on both the political “left” and the political “right.” They can be extremely challenging to communicate about, especially as audiences pick up factual — and in some cases speculative but not false — content from media and influencers and add more explicitly false claims, creating distorted narratives. Often, we’ve seen these narratives leveraged for calls to action, as we do here with the calls for DeJoy to be fired. While that call may be warranted by the facts of the case, it draws its energy from audiences emotionally mobilized, in some cases, by unsubstantiated claims of intentional malfeasance — claims that contribute to diminished trust in election processes and procedures.
We expect for conversation around DeJoy’s work at the USPS to continue, as the facts around the case evolve and as we approach the 2022 midterm election. We encourage caution for everyday people, influencers, and others as they engage with this discourse — as even factual statements are often leveraged to advance a distorted narrative.
Citations
Shibutani, T. (1966). Improvised news: A sociological study of rumor. Bobbs-Merrill.