Viral wave of accusations of electoral fraud: – It scares me – VG

– It scares me that such large groups in society take this for good fish, says American professor and researcher Torbjørn Lindstrøm Knutsen to VG.

President Donald Trump’s election fraud allegations have set fire to supporters who are cracking down on the ongoing vote counting.

Conspiracy theories were spread on social media during the election thriller in America.

“What is this all about?” Donald Trump asked his 88.2 million followers Wednesday morning US time. in a post now deleted by Twitter.

Screenshots of a voter map of the central state of Michigan taken from the Decision Desk HQ website went viral on Twitter and were captured by Trump.

The screenshot was supposed to show an inexplicable jump of 128,000 votes for Biden. However, it all clears up as human error from the Decision Desk website, which quickly fixed the error.

It did not arrest Trump, who tweeted the photo several hours after the error was corrected, and did not subsequently correct or delete the tweet. However, Twitter has hidden the message.

But it is not the only claim that has spread in recent days.

Case

Another accusation circulating is that the ink-filled ballots in Arizona were deemed invalid and that this went beyond the votes destined for Donald Trump.

Similar rumors and theories about voting have circulated in Chicago, Michigan, Massachusetts and Connecticut, writes Reuters.

The theory has been rejected by experts and government officials, but right-wing activists have spread it on social media, writes Business Insider.

“Too many” ballots

According to the BBC, the claim has spread that more people have voted than are eligible to vote in the state of Wisconsin.

The only problem was that the claim was based on an old figure for how many people have the right to vote in Wisconsin. The number has increased, so no more votes have been registered than those entitled to vote. The Twitter user who first posted the claim has now deleted it, but the screenshots continue to spread.

Trump’s inner circle has also been misled. Trump’s son Eric Trump posted a video on Twitter, which he believed contained 80 ballots, all for Trump, that were burned. This was also rejected by the official and the record was flagged as false.

But it continued to spread on social media and Eric Trump’s post alone had 1.2 million views, writes CNN.

By Buzzfeed News got Eric Trump the infamous title “a super disinformation spreader”.

– Great driver

Silje S. Skiphamn, editor-in-chief of fact-checkers at Faktisk, sees that allegations of voter fraud in the United States are now also spreading among Norwegian Facebook users.

– This takes time and the fact that the elections are very uniform makes it a major driver of allegations of voter fraud. It’s not uncommon for votes to take a long time to count in the US presidential election, Skiphamn says.

She believes that President Trump himself is the main reason for the spread of misinformation in the United States.

– The biggest driver of this is Donald Trump himself, who already came out on election night and said he won the election when he does not have one, says Skiphamn.

She notes that the past four years have shown that Trump supporters are very proficient on social media.

– That part of what is disseminated now originates in a coordinated action, I am quite sure. I’d say Trump supporters are more likely to spread misinformation than Biden supporters, Skiphamn says.

NTNU researcher Lindstrøm Knutsen notes that the elections have become more dramatic after the Cold War and that Trump is at the end of a long development.

– But it has gotten worse with social networks. Many voters no longer read newspapers and receive news from Facebook and social media. There are pockets in society around certain candidates. When Trump says something, the big groups buy what he says without consulting the newspapers and media, says Knutsen, who believes there is now danger in America.

He says that what he sees in America now is something completely new.

– When I woke up this morning I saw Trump supporters yelling outside the hall where the voices were being spoken in Philadelphia. They beat the winner and yelled “stop counting.” They do not understand the rules of democracy or believe in an anonymous conspiracy. I’ve never seen that before, he says.