‘Tis the Season of Disinformation
Rapid Response for Teachers and Students
We used to focus all our attention on election night, waiting for the networks to “call the election.” But this year, as we expected, a lengthy count followed into the week after the election with networks waiting until the following Saturday to project Joe Biden as the winner.
Even prior to the election, experts counseled patience as we counted massive mail-in and absentee ballots and encouraged us to be cautious as we read the news. They worried that during the post-election period, a tsunami of misinformation would likely circulate on social media — which is exactly what happened.
Because we teachers are trusted sources of information in our communities, whether we are actually teaching about the election or not, we are likely to encounter questions from students and families during this long post-election period. This information is made more critical by President Trump’s refusal to concede as has been the custom in virtually all modern US Elections.
What electoral information and misinformation should we be prepared for?
States are the entities that actually run and certify elections in their states, and they actually have five weeks post-election day to do so. (See Post-Election Dates You Need to Know.) In Presidential Elections, state-run elections are used to determine the “Electors” in each state, and these Electors determine the President. It’s all very complicated, and it differs by state. Fortunately, authoritative state guides exist and students can be referred to them as trusted sources for information. This is a good example of where there are right answers and clear places to find them.
The misinformation side is more complicated.
Mike Caulfield, who has developed and shared the SIFT curriculum with NWP, has pulled together a set of blog posts looking at the misinformation about voting and electoral processes he has seen circulating this October. There are three blog posts followed by a video CoLab where he and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl talk with NWP teacher leaders Bud Hunt, Kim Jaxon, and Dina Portnoy. Find his three blogs below:
Trends in Electoral Misinformation: Week One takes up the narrative of “mail and ballot dumping”;
Trends in Electoral Misinformation: Week Two takes up the narrative of pre-printed ballots, or ballot stuffing;
Trends in Electoral Misinformation: Week Three take up the use of SIFT and the ‘letter in a bottle’ analogy.
All three blogs are referenced in the one-hour CoLab below with show notes directly underneath:
For an introduction to the SIFT curriculum in a set of five, 30 minute lessons, see the Check Please! open course. This course can be used with colleagues or with students.
For a look at how SIFT helps address Coronavirus misinformation, see the Infodemic Coronavirus project.
The two books referred to by Kim Jaxon were Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression and Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology.
A reminder of how long it took to know the results of the primaries this year is available in this interactive from the Washington Post.
A primer on how the election process works can be found at USA.gov: Presidential Election Process.
Staying away from the superspreaders
Electoral misinformation will be out there, and the scale is daunting.
As just one example, a new investigation from NewsGuard, a service that uses trained journalists to rate thousands of news and information sites and mark credible sources in your browser, finds that a sample of roughly three dozen Facebook groups have become “super-spreaders” of election-related misinformation, meaning they have shared false content about voting or the electoral process to their audiences of at least 100,000. And although sites on all sides have been found to circulate misinformation, the majority of the 40 pages that NewsGuard found spreading this type of misinformation leaned right or was affiliated with emergent right-wing movements, including pages like Gateway Pundit, Viral Patriot and MAGA Revolution.
Social media, of course, is particularly vulnerable, and despite attempts to control electoral misinformation, much still gets through. Commonsense Media has done a great job of taking a look at what different platforms are doing to combat misinformation at this time. Check out their interactive guide covering seven popular platforms with your students to see how they rate.
Finally, it might be useful to look at what some news organizations are doing to explain their approaches to “calling the election.” AP has led the way in explaining what they do and how they make decisions. More such transparency stories may follow.
And remember, whatever anyone says or thinks, it ain’t over till it’s over.
