Gavin Newsom, governor of California, speaks at an IBEW Local 6 event during the gubernatorial recall election in San Francisco, U.S., on Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2021. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.
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On Twitter and Facebook, hundreds of accounts made baseless accusations that the result was rigged, including a number of verified accounts.
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Trump’s embrace of the “stolen election” narrative led to the bogus audit in Maricopa County in Arizona, is being operated by a company with no previous election experience and was run by a man who had shared election fraud conspiracies on social media. It has still yet to conclude.It has also led GOP lawmakers in several other states to push for their own forensic election audits, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. In Pennsylvania, a group of Republican senators want to collect personal information on every registered voter, as well as a trove of communications between state and county election officials.