[ad_1]
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (CNN Business) – In the capital of Pennsylvania, the state that eventually overturned the elections in favor of President-elect Joe Biden, supporters of President Donald Trump gathered to protest the election result this weekend.
The past four years in America have been an education on how disinformation and social media statements don’t stay online: they spill out onto the streets, can manifest as violence, and as seen in Harrisburg week, they will be used in an attempt to undermining the foundations of American democracy: free and fair elections.
Trump supporters gathered below the “Stop the Steal” banner are convinced that the election was stolen.
One woman told me that she saw so much “evidence” that the election was rigged that she would support a full re-vote.
“When you have video footage of people taking ballots and showing they are for Donald Trump and setting them on fire,” he said, “there’s a problem.”
But the video he cited as evidence of a rigged American election isn’t real.
It has been circulating on social media for days, albeit retweeted by Eric Trump, the president’s son, but the video doesn’t show Trump’s ballots burning, as some have claimed.
Election officials in Virginia, where the ballots appeared to come from, explained that what you see in the video are sample cards. They have been trying to correct viral misinformation for days.
Take into consideration the absence of the barcodes found on all official cards. The cards in the video were sample cards, “the city of Virginia Beach said in a statement last week.
The use of false information by Trump supporters in this way is not unique.
Other protesters I spoke to in Harrisburg cited a sudden shift in the online results map in favor of Biden on election night in Michigan as evidence that something had gone wrong. Trump amplified that statement himself on his Twitter account. But this has also been shown to be misinformation (a complete discredit here). Twitter tagged Trump’s post with a message that read “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is up for discussion and could be misleading.”
The use of false information did not start with “Stop the Steal”. Trump and some of his supporters built misinformation during the election campaign. CNN previously showed how Biden’s deceptively edited videos contributed to the belief by some Trump supporters that Biden was unsuitable for the job.
This, of course, does not happen in a vacuum.
The president himself, his allies, and Fox News personalities embrace disinformation. Sometimes Trump retweets a post with false claims that it is already going viral. Other times, Trump will create his own misinformation by publishing false claims. Trump and his followers used disinformation as “proof” to prove the validity of more misinformation.
Social networks aggravate the problem, as they act as an engine for the spread of disinformation.
Over the past week, Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook have taken aggressive steps to label the president’s fake posts as misinformation in an attempt to undermine the integrity of the election.
But those labels will not convince Trump supporters who have already embraced the election conspiracy theories. Some see the labels and fact-checks as proof that they are indeed correct and that Big Tech is trying to censor them.
I don’t think that’s his place. It is not up to you to determine what the truth is for people. We have our own mind. We can determine what the truth is, ”said the Harrisburg woman, who had cited the fake video burning the cards, told me.
The middle-aged woman told me her name was Melissa, but said she didn’t want to share her full name, citing “culture of cancellation”.
While he could have been wrong about that video, he identified the role platforms like Facebook play in shaping American political discourse as catalysts for confirmation bias.
“We’re like a big science experiment for social media,” he said. “If I look for a certain point of view and they seem to see that I prefer that point of view more, that is the point of view that they will feed me and then the other party will have a different point of view,” he said.
When asked if he’s worried, “I mean, I’m worried, yes. Due to the fact that, unfortunately, people don’t think for themselves. It feeds on everything it sees without a doubt.
Source link
