In the days before the 2008 presidential election, a hoax started circulating in parts of Virginia.
It was a paper flyer that said “due to larger than expected voter turnout,” Republicans
should vote on election day and Democratic party supporters should vote the day after.
Fast forward eight years later, and images show up on Twitter claiming to be Hillary
Clinton ads. They told people they could vote by texting.
It’s not a coincidence that this image features a Black woman,
just like it wasn’t a coincidence that the hoax flyers in 2008 were “distributed in
predominantly African American areas.” Fifty-five years after the Voting Rights Act
banned racial discrimination in elections, the Black vote is still being targeted.
And now, voter suppression has gone digital.
Twitter now has a policy explicitly banning misleading information about voting procedures.
Facebook and YouTube do too. But there are other types of digital voter
suppression that may be harder to tackle. MItchell: people were sharing images that
were telling people not to vote. Shireen Mitchell is tracking digital voter
suppression ahead of the 2020 election after seeing the tactics deployed four years ago.
This Instagram post from October 2016 encouraged people to “boycott” the election. It came
from an account called woke_blacks, and was posted with a caption that said regardless
of who wins, “we are on our own.” Mitchell: So you basically are saying, you
know, why should we bother if there's no campaign that's going to focus on our issues? And so
that's one of the ways in which this works. And this ad on Facebook from a page called
Blacktivist simply encouraged people to vote for the third-party candidate.
These posts, and many others like them, were uploaded by Russian operatives as part of
a multi-year strategy to promote discord in the US and help elect Donald Trump.
That effort involved more than 60,000 Facebook posts, 116,000 Instagram posts and 10 million
tweets from Russian accounts impersonating Americans.
Deen Freelon: There were those who posed as sort of white conservatives. And these were
kind of Trump-supporting individuals. Then you had what I call a nonblack leftists. And
the third category was sort of Black protesters, Black left wing protesters.
In a study of the Russian Twitter activity, Freelon found that there were fewer Black-presenting
accounts than right-wing accounts, but on a per-tweet basis, they received higher
engagement in the form of likes, retweets, and replies.
Those tweets coincided with the rise of the Black Lives Matter protests following the
killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Freelon: And so you have this convergence
of the Black Lives Matter and pro-black politics with Russian attempts to interfere in American
politics and specifically in American elections. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee,
no single group was targeted by the Russian operatives more than African-Americans.
The accounts built an audience by publishing content celebrating Black excellence and by
decrying police brutality. And then around the election, they told their
followers not to vote and celebrated non-participation. We don’t know the ultimate effects of those
posts, but they give us a sense of the tactics we might see again from both Russia and from
domestic actors in 2020. Mitchell: I've seen campaigns pick up the
same tactics for 2016 that Russia was using for themselves in their own campaigns. We’re
seeing domestic actors pick up the same exact tactics.
Black voters participate in elections at higher rates than Asian and Hispanic Americans.
And for the past 16 years, the Republican party has only been able to attract single
digit support from Black voters in presidential elections.
That’s less than any other racial, gender, age, or income demographic. And it puts them
at high risk for voter suppression by those who may conclude they have little
to lose by reducing the Black vote. Residential and economic segregation have
provided ways to target vote suppression. “A federal appeals court struck down a North
Carolina voter ID law, saying its provisions deliberately target African-Americans with
almost surgical precision.”
“A racially-charged robocall is making its way through Detroit tonight.” “The call
falsely claiming that mail-in voters will have their personal information shared with
law enforcement.” And social media platforms enable targeted
messages too. When this Russian account bought a Facebook
ad promoting Jill Stein, they used targeting categories that Facebook offered, including
people with an interest in “pan-Africanism, African-American civil rights, and African-American
history.” And even in non-paid posts, replies and mentions
allow anyone to try to insert themselves into the in-group discussions of specific communities
online. This year Facebook prohibited paid ads that
tell people not to vote. Twitter has banned political ads altogether. And since 2016,
they’ve both caught and removed several networks of inauthentic accounts.
Mitchell: You’ve seen Facebook and Twitter say they've removed x y z accounts. And I’m
guessing this is daunting for them. But the problem is that it's not going to stop.
2020 is already bringing an environment ripe for misinformation and confusion. States are
changing their procedures due to the coronavirus pandemic, and voters may feel less safe gathering
at polling places. Meanwhile, President Trump has baselessly
claimed that voting by mail leads to massive fraud, a form of indirect vote suppression
that Facebook and Twitter have handled inconsistently. It’s more important than ever for voters
to distinguish good information about voting from suppressive and unreliable sources, which
unfortunately, this year includes the President of the United States.