This Week in Misinformation No. 11

12 August 2021

Aug 13, 2021

Misinformation watchers, it’s been a full week, and then some.

The Arizona audit, however, has gone quiet! So we’ve skipped that category this edition. Will reinstate (sorry!) if more reporting comes out of it. Unfortunately, there was so much happening with the COVID situation, though, that we broke that single section into two: Vaccines (usual!) and Everything Else (new!).

But let’s do platforms first. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was suspended from Twitter, again, this time for a week, for posting false claims about the COVID vaccine. Not to be outdone, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) put a video with an incorrect claim about the effectiveness of masks up on YouTube, and the Google-owned website suspended him (he said he was honored to be so censored). A video saying people who have taken the vaccine will die within two years spread widely on TikTok. On the good side, Facebook took down an anti-vaccine campaign that is thought to be backed by Russia. On the not so good side, Facebook was criticized by the researchers whose accounts it suspended for doing research on misinformation in political ads last week. So many reports, too, on the kinds of things that Facebook is not doing anything about: ads promoting fringe misinformation sites, QAnon shows and their hosts, Republican fundraising on dubious claims about southern border migrants and COVID-19, and more. Misinformation expert Joan Donovan, of Harvard, published a paper calling “misinformation-at-scale” America’s biggest problem, and I have to agree with her there.

Over to the 2020 election, former Justice Department officials including Trump’s own acting Attorney General gave accounts of Trump pressuring them to aid his efforts to cast baseless doubt on the election result after he lost. One official who was willing to do so found a nice job after he left government.

Dominion Voting Systems, the subject of so much of the election misinformation being pushed, filed defamation suits with damages potentially in the billions against Newsmax and One America News (OAN) for their roles in broadcasting the false claims about its machines, adding to the suit it is bringing against Fox News. Perhaps in a bid to boost the new defendants’ spirits, Donald Trump put out a statement saying Fox News was losing viewers and missing out on a ratings “bonanza” by declining to falsely report that there was massive, widespread fraud in the election. (Newsmax reproduced the statement in full with the self-serving headline, “Trump: Many Turning Off Fox News.”) Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Lindell, who have provided Newsmax and OAN with a lot of their material, are already defending themselves from a similar Dominion suit; this week a federal judge in DC denied their motion to dismiss.

Which brings us to Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium. Lindell hyped this event for several weeks, saying it was the venue at which cyber security experts and reporters of all kinds would be given the “packet captures” and all other evidence from secret sources that he had been promising the public for months. Some serious cyber experts did show up, but in the end there were no packet captures at all, and no minds were changed. After three days of sound and fury--promises that the real stuff was coming soon, aimless narration of projected screen shots, technical difficulties, an appearance by the progeny of Brazil’s authoritarian leader, and the high techno-drama that always seems to follow Steve Bannon and Ron Watkins around--the people in attendance reported being no closer to convinced that the election was stolen. No one claimed the $5 million Lindell had offered for someone to prove the data he had was not related to the election. Nothing, it turns out, was signified.

Back to probably-Q himself and the cyber symposium, Ron Watkins finally made up his mind sometime last week that he was into what Lindell was selling and began hyping a “whistleblower” that had come to him with proof of voting machine tampering. All of this blew up at the symposium, on the live feed. Ron had posted “evidence” screenshots on Telegram that showed a password that only the whistleblower would know, identifying her as Tina Peters, an election official in Mesa County, Colorado. Peters traveled to South Dakota for the symposium, and while she was en route authorities launched an investigation of her office for the leak. The Colorado Secretary of State seems to be quite serious about getting to the bottom of things, but Peters stayed on the symposium stage as if nothing was the matter. (Ron’s lawyer instructed him to pause everything happening at the symposium; go lawyer!) Meanwhile, Arizona politicians seemed glad for the chance to get closer to the Q crowd, with State Senator Wendy Rogers and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake both taking pictures at the event with a well-known Q personality.

The QAnon movement claimed two more lives this week when a California man drove his children to Mexico and killed them. The man told the FBI that he learned from the QAnon community that the kids’ mother (and maybe the Illuminati) had put “serpent DNA” into them and thought he was doing what was best. Closing ranks, the Q community quickly pulled out the excuse that the entire episode was a “false flag” done by someone to make them look bad. This is standard practice for Q followers; for example when there are mass shootings they convince one another that the event either didn’t happen or was staged. This happened, tragically, to the father of one of the survivors of the shooting at Parkland.

“Devolution” is the future of QAnon, “graphene oxide” vaccine claims are lighting up the conspiracy channels, and Q adherents thought a FEMA emergency signal test on 11 August might have been something truly sinister.

A new, scientific-sounding video with misinformation about vaccines and masks is making the rounds at an incredible rate. LogicallyAI and VICE dug into the COVID misinformation website “OpenVAERS” and explain why it is so efficient at getting wrongness to the people who want it. The decision to vaccinate or not, based largely on one’s understanding of the benefits versus the risks, has become a serious divide in society. Vaccines are now recommended for pregnant women. The zombie flick “I Am Legend” has worked its way into vaccine conspiracy lore. Debate swirls over whether vaccines can--or should--be mandated, and by whom. As college campuses open up amid the delta wave, fake vaccination cards are being used to cheat schools’ requirements.

Misinformationists are capitalizing on flawed studies and misrepresenting solid ones to proliferate new falsehoods. Medical professionals who gave their opinion on mask effectiveness at a school board meeting in Tennessee are swarmed and threatened by angry anti-mask parents in the parking lot afterwards. Republican governors of Texas, Florida, and Arkansas are mired in squabbles with the White House, school districts, and science itself over their orders blocking local authorities from requiring that masks be worn in public. At the national level, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) called for mass noncompliance with CDC advice, and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) proposed legislation that would ban mandates for masks or vaccines everywhere.

Intelligence officials publicly warned that there was some danger of political violence related to the conspiracy theory that Trump would be reinstated in August. (Q influencers speculated that the government airing its concerns is setting up another “false flag.”) The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Senate took Facebook to task for cutting off the NYU misinformation researchers. New York Times reporters chronicled the events leading up to the spat between the Biden White House and Facebook over COVID misinformation.

The family of rioter Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by law enforcement as she attempted to charge a barricade inside the Capitol on January 6th, has filed a wrongful death suit. Trump weighed in, saying there must be “justice” for Babbitt. There are now at least 570 people under arrest for the events of January 6th, but many more are being investigated. Analysis of video clips taken in the crowd has confirmed several prominent anti-vaccine activists were present with the rioters. The treatment of the police that day, and police officers’ statements about it, continues to be a flashpoint. The House committee investigating the insurrection may seek Trump’s phone calls from the White House in its inquiry and has welcomed aboard a former Republican congressman as a senior technical adviser.

Misinformation about climate change is heating up, while history like 9/11 and the early years of the Afghanistan war have left a legacy of lies. A police officer’s death in Chicago prompts untrue reports that she had a newborn and was just back from maternity leave. Deepfakes are being used to exploit real women.

That, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.

-- Kevin