[ad_1]
In the days since Joe Biden won the U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump has rejected the results, spread lies about voter fraud, replaced key military leaders with loyalists, and encouraged Republicans of all walks of life. party levels to challenge the vote counts that show it lost. .
Americans are now debating how Biden should respond.
Biden called Trump’s refusal to admit an “embarrassment” and told voters that “the fact that they are unwilling to acknowledge that we won at this point does not matter much.”
But some have asked the president-elect to go further, and are furiously sounding the alarm about an American politician adopting the tactics of a dictator.
Some misinformation experts say that Biden’s current strategy of downplaying Trump’s behavior may be the right one at this point, even if it may be “frustrating to watch,” said Becca Lewis, a researcher affiliated with the Data & Society Research Institute, that studies disinformation. .
“By not giving Trump the attention he craves, he deflates much of the strength and power that Trump and his supporters have right now,” Lewis said.
Biden’s campaign used a similar approach during the campaign in response to attempts by Republicans to turn an email story from Biden’s son Hunter into a major scandal.
Rather than trying to answer point by point, the Biden campaign bluntly dismissed the story as “a conspiracy theory,” said Whitney Phillips, a communications professor at Syracuse University. “It was done in a tone of, ‘We are responding to this because we have to. We’re not giving him a lot of mental energy, ‘whether that’s how they feel behind the scenes or not.’
“That particular strategy really seemed to work,” he said.
That Biden recognized Trump’s rule-breaking behavior since the election, rather than trying to ignore it, was important, Phillips said, but his quick turn to speak about the issues Americans face next, and the challenges the administration faces. had to face, it was “effective rhetorically, but also emotionally.”
Biden was responding “like an adult,” he said.
For Biden’s team, “responding directly to any of these allegations at this stage is simply adding more oxygen to the fire,” said Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.
Shafiqah Hudson, an author and researcher who has studied online disinformation campaigns, said she would like Democrats to take a stronger stand and condemn Trump’s actions “in the strongest terms.” But Biden’s response “is the kind of response that you would expect from someone who has the job of trying to repair a fractured nation,” he said.
In response to competition from right-wing media and activists spreading disinformation about the loss of Trump, causing 70% of Republicans to say they do not believe the elections were free and fair, according to a poll Recently, Democrats should continue to explain how the electoral process went. it really works, and the built-in checks and audits that take place as votes are counted, said I’Nasah Crockett, a researcher and artist who has tracked manipulation and misinformation on social media.
“I think it would be great if Biden and his campaign took a very preschool approach to the situation that we find ourselves in,” Crockett said. “If you’re working with young children and you’re trying to get them to understand some basic concept, you need to keep repeating it, getting it back to where you started.”
It’s also important to recognize how radical claims by Republicans about voter fraud are specifically aimed at delegitimizing black voters and discarding their votes, said Shireen Mitchell, a disinformation researcher and founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women.
Republicans have focused their unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud on black-majority cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, where support from black voters helped Biden win the presidency.
“They are using code language to say that anyone who is not white is an illegal voter,” Mitchell said. Trump’s attacks on vote-by-mail, which many Americans chose to make during a pandemic that has disproportionately killed black and brown people, is part of a long history of ever-evolving strategies to disenfranchise black Americans, said.
Michigan’s Democratic attorney general addressed that concern explicitly this week, arguing that the Trump campaign’s electoral demands were “unfounded” and that his unifying narrative was assertions that suggested: “Blacks are corrupt, Blacks are incompetent, and they don’t You can trust the blacks. ” reported the Detroit Free Press.
While social media users have furiously debated whether it is time to label Trump’s weakening of democracy as a “coup” attempt, misinformation experts said the framing might not be particularly helpful at the moment.
Talking about a “coup” might speak to the concerns of some Americans, including those who have been following the news very closely, but it might not communicate much to those who have paid less attention and could alienate others, Phillips said. .
“I think the problem is less that ‘hit’ is a strong word, that people don’t know what a hit is,” Hudson said.
In the face of millions of Americans who already distrust election results, a more useful tactic to combat Trump’s misinformation might be to remind Americans exactly how long before the election Trump and his supporters had been announcing their plan to rate the elections. Illegitimate election results, Phillips. said.
“This was a communication strategy before a single vote was cast,” Phillips said. Reminding Americans of the long timeline of Trump’s claims about the elections “allows people to exercise their cunning, to sniff shit. If someone has been sowing a lie before an event occurs, it should make the person stop. “
But Biden and the Democratic Party should not overestimate the strength of American democracy in the face of Trump’s attacks, or the number of Americans who view the current system as legitimate, Crockett said: “What worries me most is that there is a fundamental faith in institutions that I think the top Democrats have, which is, honestly, idealistic right now. “
If Trump escalates his refusal to give in, and if powerful Republican politicians continue to support him, it may not be enough to keep dismissing and diverting attention from his behavior.
“Depending on the number of snowballs, there may be a time when [Biden] he has to take it seriously, ”Lewis said.
