Renée DiResta writes:

On the morning of September 21, 2020, three trays of United States mail were discovered in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin. The local sheriff’s office reported that the mail dump included several absentee ballots. When a U.S. Postal Service spokesperson made a similar assertion two days later, a local Fox affiliate, WLUK, reported the statement on its website. And then a national network of conservative commentators and influencers did something that happened again and again last fall: They picked up a bare-bones news story and made it sound nefarious.

Within hours, Jim Hoft, the combative founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, a conservative media outlet, came across the story. A consortium of researchers working together on an effort called the Election Integrity Partnership (which included my team at the Stanford Internet Observatory) had by this point begun to track false and misleading voting-related information, particularly claims about ballot and mail fraud, as it moved across the social-media ecosystem. Our partnership began 100 days before the election and continued for a few weeks following Election Day. In that time, The Gateway Pundit would become a primary driver in dozens of instances in which false information or misleading narratives went viral. “We report the truth,” a banner on the site noted, as its pages regaled readers with stories of malfunctioning voting machines in Michigan, ballot boxes stuffed into cars, and “miraculous” fake ballots marked for Joe Biden. In our data set tracking the spread of misleading claims, The Gateway Pundit’s stories racked up more than 800,000 retweets on Twitter and at least 4 million views on YouTube over a four-month period.

The process of producing viral misinformation hits followed a familiar pattern throughout the 2020 campaign: Prominent pro–Donald Trump influencers or hyper-partisan conservative outlets would pick up a real-world event—in many cases an isolated incident that bubbled into the national conversation via social media—and shoehorn it into a far broader narrative. Many of the narratives involved hints of conspiracy. So it was with the wayward Wisconsin ballots: Soon after WLUK published its story, Hoft dashed off an article that added four lines of original content atop the station’s reporting:

Democrats are stealing the 2020 election.

Two trays of US mail were discovered in a ditch near Greenville, a rural area north of Appleton, Wisconsin.

According to local officials the mail included mail-in ballots.

The USPS unions support Joe Biden.

Soon after the story’s publication to The Gateway Pundit’s website and social-media pages, Charlie Kirk, a radio talk-show host and Twitter-verified conservative activist with 1.7 million followers, reposted it, as did Breitbart News. By noon the following day, more than 40,000 individual Twitter accounts had retweeted the story, reaching millions of viewers. [Continue reading…]