Netroots Nation 2022 — Day Two — Featured Panel: Disinformation and the Vote

This Fri­day morn­ing at Net­roots Nation, the con­ver­sa­tion at the Dis­in­for­ma­tion in the Vote pan­el focused on how such efforts dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly tar­get non-Eng­lish-speak­ing communities.

Pan­elists includ­ed Voto­Lati­no’s Research Man­ag­er Liz Lebron, The New Geor­gia Pro­jec­t’s Research Direc­tor Ranan­da Robin­son, APIA Vote Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Asso­ciate Kyle Van Fleet, and the Free Press’ Cam­paign Man­ag­er Rose Lang-Maso.

Dis­in­for­ma­tion in the vote direct­ly impacts com­mu­ni­ties of col­or by using racial­ized lan­guage. Liz Lebron says that while vot­er fraud dis­in­for­ma­tion hurts the entire elec­toral process, nar­ra­tives blam­ing “ille­gal vot­ers” specif­i­cal­ly impacts the Lat­inx community.

This por­trays the two major types of ongo­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion; nar­ra­tives tar­get­ing dis­en­fran­chised com­mu­ni­ties from “out­side” sources, and nar­ra­tives designed to be spread with­in these com­mu­ni­ties. One exam­ple of the lat­ter is Voto Latino’s dis­cov­ery of tar­get­ed mes­sag­ing against cer­tain polit­i­cal can­di­dates with­in the large pop­u­la­tions of Latinix vot­ers in Flori­da, repeat­ed­ly declar­ing them social­ists or communists.

Rana­da Robin­son at The New Geor­gia Project also found that large amounts of this dis­in­for­ma­tion focus­es on con­vinc­ing vot­ers their vote does not mat­ter — not just about con­vinc­ing peo­ple to change their vote, but about con­vinc­ing peo­ple not to vote at all: “It not only steers peo­ple the wrong way, but it also con­vinces peo­ple to stay at home.”

Robin­son high­light­ed the impor­tance of being sen­si­tive when han­dling vot­ers who fall vic­tim to these lies, rather than mak­ing peo­ple feel stu­pid. Dis­in­for­ma­tion is doing what it is designed to do, con­vinc­ing and upset­ting unsus­pect­ing vic­tims, and no one wants to feel that they have been deceived and ashamed.

This kind of dis­in­for­ma­tion is also often post­ed and spread in lan­guages besides Eng­lish. Rose Lang-Maso not­ed that Eng­lish con­tent is reg­u­lat­ed much more than Span­ish con­tent. At Free Press, Lang-Maso and her team worked to take down one extreme­ly vio­lent and offen­sive piece of Eng­lish dis­in­for­ma­tion from Face­book in less than a week. When that same con­tent was dis­cov­ered in Span­ish, Face­book took eleven months to remove the mate­r­i­al. This is just one exam­ple of the dis­pro­por­tion­ate effects dis­in­for­ma­tion is mak­ing in non-Eng­lish speak­ing com­mu­ni­ties as well as the poten­tial glob­al impact these posts have to pow­er to make.

Kyle Van-Fleet empha­sized the real life vio­lence expe­ri­enced by the Asian com­mu­ni­ty as a result of dis­in­for­ma­tion. Com­bat­ing these dead­ly nar­ra­tives can be incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult for APIA due to the broad audi­ence the Asian Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty includes. Effec­tive work in this area means under­stand­ing many dif­fer­ent cul­tures and lan­guages, includ­ing engage­ment in dif­fer­ent plat­forms such as WeChat, that are fre­quent­ly used by the APIA com­mu­ni­ty. Van-Fleet said there is a need for more man­pow­er, infra­struc­ture, and fund­ing in this area to pro­tect the APIA com­mu­ni­ty from dis­in­for­ma­tion-fueled violence.

Final­ly, each pan­elist described the dif­fi­cul­ty their orga­ni­za­tions face as tar­gets of dis­in­for­ma­tion them­selves. In 2020, The New Geor­gia Project was the tar­get of vot­er fraud dis­in­for­ma­tion at a press con­fer­ence for the state of Geor­gia’s Gov­er­nor and Sec­re­tary of State. Instances such as this force orga­ni­za­tions to redi­rect their efforts toward repair­ing their rep­u­ta­tion in the com­mu­ni­ty. Robin­son encour­aged vic­tims of dis­in­for­ma­tion to use the media atten­tion to deny the claims and quick­ly piv­ot to explain­ing your cause and the com­mu­ni­ty being served.

In con­clu­sion, Lebron argues that the most impor­tant role such orga­ni­za­tions as Voto­Lati­no can play is to estab­lish them­selves as cred­i­ble voic­es in their com­mu­ni­ties of focus and sup­port­ing year-round civic engage­ment in the face of dis­in­for­ma­tion designed to silence voters.