A new paper from our team at @BKCHarvard on the disinformation campaign surrounding mail-in voter fraud. tl;dr: it's Trump and the Republican Party using mass media. Social media plays a secondary role. https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/Mail-in-Voter-Fraud-Disinformation-2020

Sure, he uses Twitter and his Twitter handle is massively influential in the network of media sources publishing materials on mail-in voter fraud. But he uses it like a press release, commanding attention at will be being the President and being outrageous.

55k stories, 75k FB posts, 5M tweets spike in attention in response to the same events: Trump TV interviews, press briefings, or tweets; RNC or Republican officials' action. and anecdotes elite right-wing media harnesses as "evidence" of voter fraud. https://cyber.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/2020-10/Mail-In-Voter-Fraud-Figure-2.pdf

We map Facebook accounts and media sources shared on public Facebook pages, and show that while the Facebook pages themselves are bi-polar, the media sources that 70% of the posts share are still mostly anchored in major media outlets.

Using text analysis, we show that syndicated news plays a much more important role than we usually think, and that we see a lot of AP and other syndicated stories across local and regional news sites and local TV stations, scattered all over the map.

Our detailed qualitative analysis captures TV appearances on Fox, press briefings. You can read about West Virginia mail carriers and dead dogs getting ballot requests to your heart's content. Vivid anecdotes on the right. Stats for the rest. Guess who is persuaded?

Finally, we rely on survey by others work together with our own findings to focus on the news editors and journalists who communicate with the ~30% of the US population who would rather not pay attention to politics and get their news from broadcast network news and local TV.

We offer examples of good and bad ways of framing the coverage: false neutrality (partisan rancor framing instead of facts vs disinformation) and narrow fact checking vs. explain that assertions of systematic mail-in voter fraud are a disinformation campaign

We end: "In the coming months, it will be critical for editors of .. national and local media, particularly on
the television stations trusted by the least politically pre-committed .. citizens not to fall for the strategy that the president has used...in the past six months