Trump’s election lies show how disinformation erodes democracy

Recent polls have found that 70 percent of Republican supporters in the United States believe that President Donald Trump was defeated in an unfair or fraudulent election, echoing claims made by both foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns.

Numerous legal challenges to the Trump campaign have been defeated in courts across the country, and rumors of voter fraud have been repeatedly debunked. That includes some Fox News journalists and Republican state officials, like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state for Georgia. But apparently it is not enough that elections are free from fraud, they must be perceived as such.

Even after Joe Biden takes office, millions of Republican supporters will continue to believe the election was illegitimate. This is not just an issue for a smooth transition to a Biden administration. Rather, it is the latest symptom of a dysfunctional public sphere.

Democratic societies must include citizens in political processes, incorporate high-quality information into decision-making, and ensure a basis of mutual respect. While any particular political discussion may not meet these ideals, the system as a whole must promote these three basic democratic functions.

The dangers of misinformation

In our recent article for Quarterly Political Research, we show how disinformation campaigns attack these functions. Individual instances of harmful communication can be successfully challenged, but their volume and persistence, and their concerted attacks on institutions and norms that enable productive political discourse, suggest more serious and lasting damage.

Disinformation is communication that intentionally promotes misunderstandings, through lies, misrepresentations, misleading sources, or other tactics. Disinformation campaigns are organized efforts that use disinformation to achieve political or economic goals.

Russia has been seen as the main source of disinformation campaigns in the 2016 elections, and Russia and other foreign states continue to target the United States, but American partisan elites and citizens are the main culprits for disinformation in the 2020 elections.

While disinformation campaigns can be started by a small number of people, they have a much greater impact when their claims are amplified by high-profile influencers and ordinary members of the public.

Three harmful forms of misinformation

We identify three forms of misinformation that can contribute to lasting harm.

The first is corrosive falsehood, which is not as common a lie as an attempt to undermine institutions that often provide high-quality information or correct false beliefs, such as the professional media and government information agencies. Russian propagandists, conservative commentators, and Trump have consistently attacked the credibility of professional journalists, accused news organizations of spreading “fake news,” and created real fake news organizations to push partisan messages.

Social media platforms did little to reject false information related to the 2016 elections. They have tried this year and have come under attack as a result.

Read More: How Tech Companies Have Tried To Stop Voter Misinformation And Intimidation – And They Come Short

The repeated damage from corrosive falsehoods can culminate in what we call “epistemic cynicism,” which can lead citizens to mistrust accurate sources of information, regularly dismiss claims as a result of partisan compromises, or stop believing in a shared reality.

The second damage is moral denigration. Disinformation campaigns regularly make false or misleading claims to vilify people or misrepresent their beliefs. For example, Trump and his allies have spent months promoting conspiracy theories about Joe Biden under the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamily, or intentional misspellings of the hashtag, once social media companies began trying to curb the spread of falsehoods.

More generally, leading Democrats have been portrayed as supporters of shadowy globalist cabal, violent antifa factions, or child trafficking and pedophilia networks. Such statements provoke antipathy and disgust and, if believed, justify a total disregard for everything the accused say.

Online campaigns of this kind of moral denigration contribute to what we call “techno-affective polarization.” While supporters have grown increasingly hostile to their political opponents for some time, social media appears to amplify these tensions.

Despite Biden receiving more votes in key states like Arizona and Georgia, as well as the national popular vote, so-called Stop the Steal campaigns emerged on social media and in various right-wing media outlets.

These disinformation campaigns reflect the same rhetoric as the baseless #BidenCrimeFamily hashtags, wrongly implying that political opponents are so undesirable that they could only win by cheating, which they are willing to do because they are corrupt.

Fake accounts, fake voters

The third harm is unjustified inclusion, when people without the right to participate in a democratic process do so at the expense of legitimate participants.

Obviously, foreign disinformation campaigns accomplish this by using fake accounts or bots claiming to be US citizens. Domestic and foreign agitators have also used fake accounts to impersonate members of particular groups, such as antifa or Black Lives Matter activists, to misrepresent their views and widen social divisions.

Unjustified inclusion often leads to unjustified exclusion, such as when the voices of real citizens are drowned out or when real people are labeled fake. This is also a common misinformation campaign strategy.

There have also been widespread and false accusations that anti-racism protesters or victims of gun violence are actually actors for hire, or that millions of false people are voting by mail. Over time, such accusations can produce a situation of general inauthenticity, when people believe that false or illegal participation in their democracy is widespread.

While elections and the peaceful transfer of power are considered the minimum conditions for democracy, it is increasingly clear that a healthy and knowledgeable public sphere is essential for the proper functioning of elections.

If citizens do not believe in the institutions that count the votes and the organizations that accurately and credibly report on those results, if they see political opponents as unworthy to be heard, if they dismiss the voices and votes of other citizens as false or illegal, then it will be impossible to agree on what a legitimate election looks like.

Without being able to talk to each other, it may not matter who gets the most votes.