BuzzFeed reports:

Disinformation and its fallout have defined 2020, the year of the infodemic. Month after month, self-serving social media companies have let corrosive manipulators out for dollars, votes, and clicks vie for attention, no matter the damage.

After an initial showing of unity as the coronavirus pandemic hit North American shores, people in the US became divided over basic scientific facts about COVID-19. Then, after a horrified country watched George Floyd take his last breaths as a police officer pushed a knee into his neck, some members of the right-wing media recast peaceful demonstrators exercising their civil rights as violent thugs. And, as the year closed out, the president and his enablers smeared the simplest, most fundamental democratic act of counting a ballot as fraud.

To understand how the disinformation flywheel can catapult fringe ideas from obscure corners of the internet into mainstream political discourse, Philadelphia offers a lesson in civic breakdown.

“I can’t believe what I’m seeing right before my eyes,” said a man in a viral video who identified himself as Brian McCafferty, a Democratic poll watcher. “This has nothing to do with Joe Biden or Donald Trump. This has to do with our democracy, and I will tell you: There’s corruption at the highest level in the city of Philadelphia.”

On Nov. 5, two days after Election Day, McCafferty stood inside the Philadelphia ballot-counting center as workers behind him quietly filed paper after paper and guards circulated among them. McCafferty wore a green-and-red hat with headphones placed on top, a mask tucked under his chin, and he spoke in a conspiratorial tone that implied grave wrongdoing was happening here, just out of reach.

“This is a coup against the president of the United States of America,” McCafferty said, falsely claiming that election officials had prevented him from coming close enough to watch the ballots being counted.

There was no coup, of course. And McCafferty’s claims that he was prevented from observing the count are bogus.

McCafferty’s tweet with the video received thousands of shares, including from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who wrote, “Dem mayors are defying the law.” (It’s not clear how Cruz found McCafferty.) The tweet was later deleted — but the video spread to Facebook and YouTube, where thousands more people viewed it. By the end of the day, McCafferty was telling his story to Fox News host Tucker Carlson and his audience of 5.3 million people.

On Carlson’s show, McCafferty no longer said he was Democrat nor that he had evidence of voter fraud. Instead, the two talked in broad strokes about corruption in Philadelphia, implying there was something nefarious about how the ballots were being counted. What exactly, they did not say.

“Tucker, I took a video of what I saw,” he said, “and that’s why I got thrown out.”

That part was true. According to two local officials and another observer, the people overseeing the counting asked McCafferty to leave because he was breaking one of the only rules for observers: no filming.

“He was removed from the room by security after refusing to stop taking pix in the observer area,” Kevin Feeley, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia City Commissioners, texted BuzzFeed News. “He was told several times that he had to stop, there are signs in multiple places saying no pix allowed, and he disregarded all of it.”

Lauren Vidas, an election law attorney who was there as a Democratic observer, said the ballot counters continued their work through the commotion. “They didn’t flinch. I don’t even know if they noticed it,” she told BuzzFeed News. “This was him purposely creating a scene.”

Later that day, Trump held a press conference, during which he gestured toward the incident and complained about observers having to keep their distance. “They don’t want anybody there. They don’t want anybody watching as they count the ballots,” he said about Pennsylvania.

Two hours after Trump spoke, the Philadelphia Police Department arrested two men who allegedly drove a Hummer with QAnon stickers on it from Virginia to “straighten things out” at the ballot-counting facility. According to court filings, when they were intercepted, they possessed two handguns, a semiautomatic rifle, and a samurai sword.

“One of them is on Facebook Live just prior to his arrest, basically with a call to arms,” Andrew Wellblock, the assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, told BuzzFeed News. “They described their work as being a ‘fire mission,’ which is a military term, like where you direct your artillery and firepower.”

This is the power of disinformation seeded online by opportunists. [Continue reading…]