Feb. 27, Jared Schroeder, assistant professor of journalism at SMU Dallas specializing in Free Speech/First Amendment topics, for a piece warning Texas voters to beware of disinformation on social media channels. Published in the Dallas Morning News: http://bit.ly/32x3zn7
Our social media feeds will have more lies in them than normal this week.
While many Texans cast ballots in early voting, be assured the pipeline of misinformation and disinformation is saturating the channels ahead of Super Tuesday and the massive state and national primaries. Foreign and domestic bad actors live to tamper with our election process.
These floods of false and misleading information on election days have become as much a part of casting a ballot as getting an “I voted” sticker. We should expect and prepare for them. . .
Information on social media is a sort of amalgamation of the Wild West and a high school cafeteria.
By Jared Schroeder
Our social media feeds will have more lies in them than normal this week.
While many Texans cast ballots in early voting, be assured the pipeline of misinformation and disinformation is saturating the channels ahead of Super Tuesday and the massive state and national primaries. Foreign and domestic bad actors live to tamper with our election process.
These floods of false and misleading information on election days have become as much a part of casting a ballot as getting an “I voted” sticker. We should expect and prepare for them.
Election Day in 2018 was characterized by false claims of voter suppression, misleading information about polling locations, deceptive information about candidates, and doctored photos. These types of information spread like wildfire across social media.
They spread quickly because the polarized narratives that characterize our online communities fuel them. The people who seek to damage what we know about candidates and issues count on the fact that we are more likely to share information we agree with, and which fits our existing beliefs. We are in many ways blinded by our beliefs, and they know it.
It is up to us, each voter, to vet the information we encounter on social media with skepticism and an eye toward verifying anything that seems particularly salacious. We should not only vet the information for ourselves and our voting decisions, but we should also do so for others by making sure we don’t share false information.
We cannot count on social media firms to vet and take down information. Facebook announced it will not take down false political advertisements. One approach to avoiding Election Day misinformation would be to avoid Facebook, since it has become ground zero for false information. YouTube and Twitter have their own policies, but the fact remains that information on social media is a sort of amalgamation of the Wild West and a high school cafeteria. Rumor and falsity are powerful, contagious and dangerous to our election process.
Similarly, the First Amendment generally bars the government from censoring information or forcing social media firms to take down untrue information; the onus is on those harmed by false information to request that social media sites remove it or sue, and wait for the courts to catch up. Our democratic system in a social media age requires us to decide what is true and what is not. Now we have to do the job, though it has become increasingly difficult.
This week, be on the lookout for these and other types of misinformation:
- Photos taken out of context, with groups creating false claims and then using — or misusing — the photos as evidence of those claims.
- Deepfake video clips that falsely portray people saying or doing things they never said or did.
- Last-minute information about changes to polling locations or hours.
- New claims that candidates are under investigation for crime or revelations that they are secretly part of a dangerous group.
Employ your skepticism. In most cases, candidates and issues have been well-vetted by news organizations, so why would this information appear on Election Day, rather than before? Some people discount traditional media as biased, but the truth is, while these sources publish a range of views, they do publish verifiable facts. People disagree on what those mean, but if an assertion is damning enough to destroy a candidate’s campaign, you should be suspicious if it hasn’t turned up in a traditional news source. We can also turn to fact-checking organizations, such as Snopes, that vet information.
It’s a shame our election days have become open season for attempts to manipulate us, but it is also a reality. It is up to us to spot false and misleading information about our elections.
Jared Schroeder is an assistant professor of journalism at SMU Dallas, where he specializes in First Amendment law. He is the author of the 2018 book “The Press Clause and Digital Technology’s Fourth Wave: Media Law and the Symbiotic Web.” He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.