This Week in Misinformation: #EastmanMemo Revealed, #AZAudit Angst, Facebook's 'Big Tobacco' Moment, Vaccine Mandates Pushback, Ron's Twitter Art, Seth Rogen/Emmys

23 September 2021

Sep 24, 2021

This Prism newsletter strives to be the paper of record for all that’s happening in misinformation. For any citizen whose life is impacted by misinformation, it helps you see how storylines evolve from multiple, sourced angles on important stories in one place. For amateur and professional misinformation watchers, it is your go-to resource for updates on peers, platforms, propagandists, and politicians. Learn more about Prism and our other products on our Substack page, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook!

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As with last week, we have embedded quick-look reliability scores for media outlets cited in the summary, courtesy of the terrific folks at Ad Fontes Media.

Now, on to our top four stories.

First, big news on January 6th as we learned about and—thanks to investigative journalists—had the chance to read a memo with a bogus legal theory for how Vice President Pence could unilaterally reject the Electoral College count and declare Trump the winner instead of Biden.

A prominent conservative attorney and then-professor of law wrote two versions of the (CNN, 43.53) memo (Insider, 43.44), which detailed a six-part plan to steal the election, and which President Trump seized upon and tried to persuade Pence to execute.
Weeks before the memo, the Trump campaign had learned the reality of the claims of widespread fraud due to hacked voting machines, which is to say those claims were entirely without merit. Knowing this has had seemingly no impact on Trump’s strategy, including up to this week when he asked the State of Georgia to decertify its elector slate (Newsweek, 39.21) and demanded the governor of Texas audit the election there (The Hill, 44.85).
Even if Trump believes the things he says about the elections, other Republicans appear to be going along with them mostly to help further a longtime agenda of making it harder for Democratic-leaning voters to cast their ballots (Reuters, 48.93).
President Biden is considering whether and how much of the executive branch documents about this and other of Trump’s election-related chicanery to release to the ongoing investigations (Washington Post, 43.81).
The Justice for January 6th “political prisoners” rally was not well attended, except for by reporters and law enforcement (Washington Post, 43.81). Organizers were disappointed that Republican lawmakers who promised to speak didn’t show (Newsweek, 39.21).

“All eyes on Arizona” is heard across the misinformation landscape; the Cyber Ninjas’ report of their work these many months is finally to be made public on Friday.

Many, including audit funder Patrick Byrne, are looking forward to the report proving there was “double-digit election fraud” (Twitter account of Arizona Right Wing Watch). There is much talk of Arizona being the “first domino,” meaning the report will prove widespread fraud, vitiating its slate of electors and forcing someone to “decertify” and flip the state to Trump (Twitter account of state legislator Wendy Rogers). (We say “someone” because there is literally no person or body of people with authority to do anything like this.)
Republicans running for governor Matt Salmon (called for a statewide canvass and full audit) and Kari Lake (has been calling for decertification for a while, and this week earned Mike Lindell’s august endorsement) are getting way ahead of themselves without knowing what the report will say.
Local journalist Jen Fifield published a #StopTheSteal origins story of sorts about Doug Logan, the boss Cyber Ninja (AZ Central, 43.97), and the Ninjas say they will not comply with a court-ordered Arizona Senate request for their records (AZ Mirror, 43.70). Meanwhile, the Arizona Senate and Maricopa County reached a settlement in their dispute over access to routers (Associated Press, 49.39). So at least that’s done.

Facebook critics are calling the company’s present circumstances a kind of “big tobacco” moment—and a lot of other unflattering press continues to roll out, to boot.

Bloomberg made the tobacco comparison (45.72), suggesting Facebook knows about the harms it causes and does nothing about it, but others were thinking along the same lines. Scientific American (43.70), for example, published saying Facebook “hinders misinformation research.” Another anti-vaccine video went viral on Facebook and other platforms (Media Matters, -), and the Wall Street Journal (46.04) put out another in its Facebook Files series, this time about how Mark Zuckerberg’s creation has, against his intention, motivated more vaccine resistance than vaccine enthusiasm.
Then there were stories on scams happening on Facebook Marketplace (ProPublica, 47.46), troll farms reaching 140 million users before the 2016 election (MIT Technology Review, -), and scrutiny of the company’s content moderation double standard for VIPs (Forbes, 43.74). (There was also an anecdote from a new book about Peter Thiel, but the thing probably didn’t go down as reported in the book.)
The New York Times (44.72) reported that Facebook’s leadership adopted a “no apologies” posture in January after a string of bad publicity. Jury’s out as to whether this is a winning strategy for them.

Quickly on vaccines: there was more backlash against mandates, and we learned that tendency to listen to Trump about COVID last year is a significant predictor of how a person feels about vaccines in 2021.

Prism Metanews

This Week in Misinformation: #EastmanMemo Revealed, #AZAudit Angst, Facebook's 'Big Tobacco' Moment, Vaccine Mandates Pushback, Ron's Twitter Art, Seth Rogen/Emmys

23 September 2021

JANUARY 6TH

ELECTIONS

ARIZONA AUDIT

COVID — VACCINES

COVID — NOT VACCINES

PLATFORMS

QANON & COMPANY

GOVERNMENT/PUBLIC POLICY

GENERAL/OTHER

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