A relatively quiet and calm election day gave way to a storm of online disinformation on Wednesday as false claims and viral rumours filled the vacuum created by delayed vote counts.
Conspiracy theorists, troll farms and hyper-partisan social media influencers exploited the uncertainty to spread dubious accusations of widespread election fraud, sometimes boosted by candidates and party officials.
Facebook and Twitter scrambled to delete posts and impose warning labels on politicians including Donald Trump, while attempting to "pre-bunk" false information by pushing official bulletins to the top of users’ feeds.
Twitter took action on more than half a dozen of Mr Trump’s tweets, either hiding them behind labels or adding warnings when the US President claimed victory. Facebook said it would label all posts from both Mr Trump and Joe Biden, in an attempt to get ahead of any attempts to prematurely declare victory.
In Arizona, conservative activists protested outside a vote counting centre against an alleged plot involving sharpie pens, which had spread widely on social media despite local officials’ insistence that ballots filled out using heavy markers would still be counted. Similar claims were spread through immigrant communities in Spanish and Chinese, with the latter group being targeted by fringe media outlets linked to the anti-Communist Falun Gong sect.
We are continuing to label all posts from both presidential candidates making it clear that votes are still being counted and a winner has not been projected. We are also applying these labels to other individuals who declare premature victory in individual states or overall. pic.twitter.com/gmGdn4q52s
— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) November 4, 2020
Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor who studies conspiracy theories, said: "Unfortunately, it turned out that [our] worst case expectations in the disinformation space played out. "We’re in that period of uncertainty, we are seeing vote tally shifts as we predicted, and we are seeing efforts to delegitimise those vote tally shifts."
But experts said they had seen little sign that interference campaigns by foreign governments had exerted any serious influence, with the bulk of disinformation being spread by domestic groups. The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a rapid response group formed by leading disinformation researchers including Prof Starbird, also said that fears of widespread calls for violence by extremist groups had not come to pass, with violent rhetoric falling markedly since Tuesday.
Emerson Brooking, an EIP member at the Atlantic Council’s digital forensics lab, said: "Though the temperature may be rising the nation regarding vote tally this overt discussion of violence is not.
"Actual calls to violence and fear of violence remains nonspecific and mostly aspirational among [extremist] groups."
Asked whether foreign governments had played a major role, Camille François of the research firm Graphika said: "The short answer is no… we’ve seen a handful of accounts trying to push narratives that have been borrowed from domestic sources and not really doing an impressive job at getting any traction."
Most of the disinformation focused on the same handful of claims, built on outdated pictures and video, misinterpreted graphs or misunderstood details of America’s highly fragmented hodgepodge of voting systems.
US 2020 election
The same claims spread not only on major sites such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube, but on less-used services including LinkedIn, Pinterest, the teenagers’ meme app iFunny, the alternative social network Parler, and probably private messaging services such as WhatsApp.
One major theory, dubbed "Sharpiegate", alleged that Republican voters in Arizona’s central Maricopa County were given permanent markers as part of a scheme to trick them into invalidating their own ballots. Although the state’s Republican attorney general declared an investigation, officials said that sharpies had been given to all voters due to their quick-drying ink and that their use would not spoil any votes.
We have received hundreds of voter complaints regarding Sharpies at polling locations. Accordingly, we sent this letter to Maricopa County election officials. Let's get some answers. Read our letter here: https://t.co/c6FSFZiNj7 pic.twitter.com/HnZ16UTTrs
— Mark Brnovich (@GeneralBrnovich) November 4, 2020
Alex Stamos, an EIP member who was Facebook’s chief security officer until 2018, said the narrative had started in Chicago but been "repurposed specifically" for Arizona after Fox News declared the state for Joe Biden. Another theory focused on a sudden jump in the voting tallies for Michigan, which showed 138,000 ballots being awarded to Mr Biden at once.
President Trump retweeted one claim of potential fraud with the comment "WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?" Officials in Shiawassee County, Michigan, said that the spike had been caused by "an extra zero" being typed into an early reporting system, and that it did not represent any extra votes counted for Mr Biden.
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