This Week in Misinformation: Election Deniers Rule, Trump Attorneys Flip, War Info Worsens
26 October 2023
Keeping up on misinformation is basically the best thing you can do for your brain. So glad you’re here!
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Reliability scores for media outlets cited in the summary are in parentheses for each, courtesy of the terrific folks at Ad Fontes Media.
Now, on to our top stories.
Basically every Republican who ran for Speaker of the House was an election denier.
After Steve Scalise dropped his bid, it was conspiracy theory panderer Jim Jordan (New Yorker, 40.50) who, it is fair to say, is very much in thrall to election misinformation and has been something of a lead January 6th truther. Jordan fell further short each time three votes in a row despite (or because of?) his campaign to pressure Republicans into supporting him. (They finally just voted overwhelmingly against him on secret ballot.)
Of the nine men still going for it at that point, seven had voted to overturn the 2020 election (NBC News, 44.68). Even the one nominated who didn’t, Tom Emmer, had been pretty solidly behind Donald Trump’s effort to challenge the result (CNN, 42.19). (Emmer withdrew hours later.)
It took a few tries, but the caucus eventually coalesced around Mike Johnson, whose record on January 6th isn’t better than the others’ (New York Times, 41.94). As the faction that abetted the attack on Congress was being voted into power in the House, Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards was testifying in court that the injuries she sustained defending those same men from the mob were life-altering (NBC News).
In other January 6th news, “cooperation” was the word of the week as prosecutors flipped one Trump associate after another.
In the Georgia racketeering and criminal conspiracy case, it was “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell, followed swiftly by garbage legal memo-writer Kenneth Chesebro, and then the Giuliani Elite Strike Force’s own Jenna Ellis. All three pleaded guilty in exchange for testifying against the remaining co-defendants and, clearly, much-reduced sentences. Meanwhile in Michigan, a similar scene was playing out with fake elector James Renner (ABC News, 45.51).
Special Counsel Jack Smith, pursuing the federal investigation into only Trump—several unindicted co-conspirators are mentioned—was reported to have secured the cooperation of former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (ABC News). Followers of January 6th stuff will tell you that Meadows text messages reveal he was at the center of everything between the election and the day of the attack—which could explain Trump’s volcanic reaction to the news (CNN).
Trump’s statements about Meadows prompted Smith to ask the judge to reinstate the gag order put on hold last week (NBC News). His lawyers are also trying to get a subpoena for supposedly missing videos of interviews the January 6th Committee did, and in fact published transcripts of. I would also like to know what’s going on with the videos myself, though I suspect the reason is positively mundane (e.g., Congress didn’t want to pay for the storage to preserve hundreds of hours of transcribed depositions).
Misinformation proliferated in the Palestine-Israel war and made the conflict harder for everyone.
Most notable was the viral misinformation about a Gaza hospital explosion (NPR, 43.40), which the Defense Department thinks was most likely caused by a rocket misfired by jihadis. Representative Rashida Tlaib attributed the humanitarian disaster to Israel, though, causing her a lot of problems with fellow Democrats when that claim was thrown in doubt and she didn’t apologize (ABC News).
Generally the misinformation about the war is getting harder to track (NBC News), and part of the reason is that visual fakery is rampant, especially on Twitter (Reuters Institute, -). On the other side of that equation, AI image detectors are being used to discredit the very real horrors of war (404 Media, -), an unfortunate feature of modern life we in the business call the “Liar’s Dividend.”
And all that is making the actual conflict, not just the information environment, worse (Reuters, 46.24). TikTok says it is doing things about videos (BBC, 45.13). Meta says it is doing things as well (CNBC, 44.37). Elon Musk is… well, he’s reaping the lack of safeguards he sowed at Twitter (PolitiFact, 44.64) and personally recommending accounts to follow for war information that no one should rely on for anything (Washington Post, 37.97).
A-one, a-two, a-one-two-three-grab bag: The Epoch Times (19.96) is terrible but did well during the pandemic; the QAnon “surfer” dad who murdered his children is deemed incompetent to stand trial; the blackout on searching COVID terms in Threads is supposedly temporary; the Supreme Court gives Biden Administration back its emails and Zoom calls with tech platforms; and Republicans are floating a new theory that Biden won't be on the ballot.
All that, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin