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One year after the assault on the US Capitol, fake news resist: how they were born and who spread them

Curated by Kendrick McDonald , Melissa Goldin and Lorenzo Arvanitis
With the collaboration of Chine Labbé , Virginia Padovese , Giulia Pozzi , Marie Richter , Roberta Schmid , Sophia Tewa , Edward O'Reilly and Sam Howard

Of the 113 US sites identified by NewsGuard for posting election disinformation shortly after the 2020 presidential elections and which are still active, 81% continued to post false information about the January 6, 2021 election and assault on the US Capitol. according to a new analysis by NewsGuard.

The problem is global. NewsGuard's analysis also revealed that half of the European sites identified last year as spreaders of false information on the elections , and which are still active today, continued to publish disinformation on the issue .

In its 2020 Election Disinformation Monitoring Center , NewsGuard identified 159 sites that, between election day (November 2, 2020) and the inauguration day of the new president (January 20, 2021), had spread false information about the election. .

Now, more than a year after the election and nearly a year after the assault on the Capitol, a new analysis by NewsGuard has highlighted how the vast majority of sites that spread election disinformation a year ago have continued to promote the theory that the elections were not legitimate , while minimizing the assault on the Capitol, defending its architects or blaming others for the attack.

NewsGuard's analysis later revealed that 892 major brands funded sites that spread disinformation on January 6 through the purchase of digital advertising space during that time, according to data provided by Moat Pro, an advertising intelligence tool. Much has been written last year about the fact that websites that spread disinformation are financed by revenues from programmatic advertising.

NewsGuard also took care of it earlier this year: a report produced in collaboration with Comscore, a company that measures audience, traffic, and advertising metrics for dozens of sites, estimated that companies pay 2.6 billion dollars each. year directly into the coffers of sites that spread disinformation through advertising . The brands that advertise on the 159 sites that, according to NewsGuard, have published disinformation on the American elections and on January 6 are 892: 32% less than in the same period last year.

In figures: NewsGuard analyzed false information on the elections, including those relating to the integrity of the vote and the assault on the Capitol on January 6, published in the 90 days between September 1 and December 1, 2021.

  • Of all U.S. sites featured in the 2020 Election Disinformation Monitoring Center, 81% continued to share false information. Including European sites in the calculation, this percentage amounts to 72%.

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Number of sites in the 2020 Election Disinformation Monitoring Center *

Number of sites that published misinformation on the US elections and January 6 between September 1 and December 1 2021

USE

113

91 (81%)

France

19

10 (53%)

Italy

12

8 (67%)

Germany

11

4 (36%)

United Kingdom

2

1 (50%)

* Excludes 19 sites currently inactive

Misinformation on the 2020 presidential election

In 2020, One America News (OAN), a pro-Trump channel deemed unreliable by NewsGuard, was a much-followed source of misinformation about the presidential election . Among the hoaxes it has spread, we find false information about the reliability of the election hardware and software company Dominion Voting Systems. Currently, it is being held in Washington a cause Federal filed by the company against OAN.

  • Most recently, NewsGuard found an article on the site, published in October 2021, regarding the electoral review requested by Republicans in Arizona. The article contains false and misleading information to support the theory that the 2020 elections were illegitimate. "The Arizona Audit Report found tens of thousands of contestable votes, illegal voting practices, and what appears to be outright fraud," says the site, adding, "The truth is, Trump won, and the media didn't. they want America to understand it. "
  • In the period of NewsGuard's analysis, between September 1 and December 1, 2021, at least 102 brands advertised on the OAN site , according to data from Moat Pro.

Regarding the news published by OAN about the 2020 election, including the above article, Christina Bobb, presenter of the "Weekly Briefing" program that followed the recount of votes organized by the Republicans, told NewsGuard in an email that " the Arizona Audit report outlines a number of contestable votes and practices, "and provided a link to the Arizona Senate report on the matter.

In the fall of 2021, many sites featured in the NewsGuard Election Misinformation Monitoring Center focused on Republican recounting in Maricopa County, Arizona, which ultimately concluded that US President Joe Biden received more votes from former President Donald Trump. The recounting has not brought to light any evidence of electoral fraud that may have influenced the results of the vote. Yet, in the days following the publication of the recount results in September 2021, a flood of articles were published stating the opposite thesis. NewsGuard found at least 24 articles that contained false information on the election review, published between September 1 and December 1, 2021 from sites that had previously been included in the Monitoring Center.

  • The Gateway Pundit, a site that, according to NewsGuard analysis, played a pivotal role in spreading false claims about the electoral review in Maricopa County (and considered unreliable by NewsGuard), published several articles claiming that the recount had revealed thousands of fraudulent and illegal votes.
  • One of these articles , published on September 25 and entitled "THE REASONS TO CANCEL ARIZONA – THE LIST: 70,000 duplicate, fake, illegal and ghost votes (7 times Biden's margin of victory), missing devices, deleted data, deeds criminals reported to the authorities, "he says:" Yesterday's presentation of the results of the review of the outcome of the 2020 elections in Maricopa County was clear: the 2020 elections in Maricopa County should never have been certified with the victory of Joe Biden ".
  • The article received 4,657 interactions on public Facebook posts and was shared by Facebook pages that, as of December 2021, had an overall number of followers in excess of 220,618, according to data from CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring tool owned by Facebook.
  • According to data from Moat Pro, 118 brands advertised on The Gateway Pundit website in the period of NewsGuard's analysis. In September 2021, Google allegedly banned The Gateway Pundit from its advertising services, Forbes reported .

The Gateway Pundit published an article by Joe Hoft, site contributor and twin brother of founder and editor-in-chief Jim Hoft, in response to an email sent by NewsGuard to Jim Hoft about the aforementioned article. The piece from The Gateway Pundit opens with these words: "Our country was founded on the belief that it is the winners of the elections who must govern. When elections are stolen, the entire social fabric of our country is destroyed. We have been at the forefront of highlighting the corrupt and criminal actions related to the 2020 election fraud. This article was published the day after the results were released to the public in Maricopa County. "

Various other sites that received an unreliable rating from NewsGuard, including Newsmax.com , LouderWithCrowder.com, and IndependentSentinel.com , have posted false information about the election review results .

Other sites have instead disseminated false information in support of the thesis according to which voting by mail, boosted during the 2020 elections due to the COVID-19 pandemic, can favor (and has favored) widespread fraud .

  • TheFederalistPapers.org, a conservative site that NewsGuard considers unreliable, ran an article in December 2021 (originally posted on the conservative site WesternJournal.com) entitled: "Poll: Majority of Likely Voters Think 2020 Election Results Have a Look somehow resentful of fraud ". The article states: "One of the reasons these elections have been so vulnerable to fraud is because various states have decided to implement a universal system of voting by mail."
    • The article underlines that "no court has ever found credible evidence of widespread, coordinated electoral fraud, and such as to modify the results of the 2020 elections, at least not yet", adding that "the illicit faces" may not "reverse the outcome. of elections in one direction or another ". However, in addition to the reference to the postal vote just mentioned, the article also states that "there have been numerous cases of fraud located throughout the country which undoubtedly influenced the outcome of the elections by changing the total number of votes received by both parties. candidates ".
  • The article received 2,076 interactions on public Facebook posts and was shared by Facebook pages which, as of December 2021, had a combined total of more than 2.3 million followers, according to data from CrowdTangle.
  • Although it is not excluded that electoral fraud may occur, the evidence shows that the phenomenon is rare. The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation compiles a database on electoral fraud that documents all cases registered since 1986. As of December 22, 2022, the think tank had counted a total of 1,334 cases of fraud, of which 224 involved voting by mail. In December 2021, the Associated Press detected "fewer than 475" cases of potential election fraud in the 2020 election in six disputed states, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

NewsGuard tried to contact TheFederalistPapers.org, sending a message through the form provided by the site and an email to the director and founder Steve Straub about the article just mentioned, but received no reply.

Other sites deemed untrustworthy by NewsGuardi, such as TheConservativeTreehouse.com , FacebookCollapse.com, and FrontPageMag.com , have posted false information about the postal vote in the 2020 election .

In 2020, AmericanThinker.com, another site considered unreliable by NewsGuard and which publishes conservative analysis and commentary on political and cultural issues, was another major source of false information about the presidential election. In early 2021, the site came under the spotlight over a rectification apologizing to Dominion Voting Systems for what the site called "completely false" claims about the company, which had "no basis". Despite this, the site has never stopped supporting the more general thesis that the 2020 elections are illegitimate.

  • On November 6, 2021, more than a year after the election, the site claimed Trump is the real winner of the election in an article titled "The Big Truth: The 2020 Election Competition Was Really Manipulated ."
  • The article states, "The evidence can be summed up like this. Trump won fair elections on November 3, but lost the fraudulent ones on the evening of November 3 (around 10pm), and then on November 4 and beyond, in some Major constituencies. Democrats believed their polls (false) data that Trump was far behind. But they were shocked when they saw he was going to win by a huge margin in those states. No problem. That's when it was. they switched to plan B and did the dirty work at dawn. "

Let's go step by step: in support of this false claim, AmericanThinker.com explained that "the Democrats, with their allies in the lying media, stopped the normal vote count as never before" and "in the final hours of the day they have illegally moved the votes, generating a wave in favor of Biden. ”These claims have been widely denied by various newspapers and government representatives from both sides.

  • According to data from CrowdTangle, consulted in December 2021, the AmericanThinker.com article received 2,456 interactions on public Facebook posts and was shared by Facebook pages that had overall more than 123,000 followers.
  • At least 47 brands advertised on AmericanThinker.com between September 1 and December 1, 2021.

The popular hoax that Trump won the 2020 election , spread by AmericanThinker.com and other sites over the past year, has fostered the proliferation of other false information related to the topic and has had concrete consequences in the real world, including the assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In an email to NewsGuard, Thomas Lifson, editor-in-chief of American Thinker, did not comment on the aforementioned article, but included a link to the correction posted by the site, which we discussed earlier.

Disinformation on January 6th

NewsGuard then found several articles containing false information about the events of January 6, 2021, when rioters, some of them armed, stormed the United States Capitol during a session of Congress certifying the outcome of the presidential election in favor of Biden.

  • The main hoax NewsGuard spotted on Jan.6 claims that the FBI staged the assault .
    • That false theory would have originated in a June 2021 article posted on the Revolver News website, and has since been widely disseminated by Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson in his prime time program and three-part documentary on January 6 titled “ Patriot Purge ".
    • Many of the articles identified by NewsGuard are based on circumstantial evidence, such as the alleged similarities between the January 6 assault and the plan to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in October 2020, which some FBI informants helped foil.
    • However, there is no evidence that federal agents orchestrated the assault on the United States Capitol. In September 2021, the New York Times reported that the FBI had at least two informants among the rioters who stormed the Congress building on January 6, but specified that the confidential documents obtained did not provide any evidence that the FBI had participated in planning or coordinating the attack, explaining that "the documents show that the informant went to Washington on his own accord, not at the request of the FBI." The New York Times also reported that "at best, the documents seem to show that the supervisor of the FBI informant was slow to perceive the gravity of what was happening that day."
  • Some articles attempted to rewrite the events of January 6 . For example, ZeroHedge.com, a site considered unreliable by NewsGuard, claimed that the attackers were not armed . Another site considered unreliable by NewsGuard, InformationLiberation.com, claimed that those who entered the building that houses the United States Congress had received permission from the Capitol police.
    • However, according to a database compiled by NPR , of people under federal investigation for their role in the January 6 assault, as of December 2021, 23 were charged with possession of deadly or dangerous weapons, and three with possession of firearms on the ground. of the Capitol.
    • In addition, the Capitol police officers did not allow the assailants to enter the building. According to video footage from that day from various angles, rioters climbed onto scaffolding, broke down doors, broke windows and pushed over barricades to enter the building. Some of them also attacked police officers.

Europe and UK

NewsGuard's analysis found that the proliferation of hoaxes over the 2020 election and the January 6 assault didn't just affect the United States. Although a smaller percentage of European sites in the Monitoring Center continued to spread disinformation the following year, it is clear that the false information that circulated in the United States was "exported" from European sites known to be lacking in credibility.

  • In Italy, in November 2021 the site considered unreliable by NewsGuard ComeDonChisciotte.org published an interview with former state senator of Virginia Richard Black, titled "Former US Senator Black Italians: 'Your freedom is in danger . Resist tyranny! '”.
    • The site reported Black's claims without providing readers with any additional context or information that contradicted them: “ The US presidential election was massively corrupt. In all six "swing states," Trump had a strong advantage until the polls were closed for the night. Republican observers were ordered to leave so that only the Democrats remained at the polls. A wave of false votes was sent to polling stations in large inner cities dominated by Democrats and, when the polls were reopened, Biden was mysteriously ahead in every state, ”the interview read.
    • NewsGuard sent two emails to ComeDonChisciotte.org, but received no response.
  • In Germany , the site considered unreliable by NewsGuard JournalistenWatch.com in September 2021 published an article titled “Are the elections already held? Big cities have seen a sharp increase in postal votes "one week before the German federal elections.
    • The site drew a direct link between the US elections about a year ago and the German ones: " The last presidential elections in the USA, in which Trump was removed from office by illicit means used by the left, should serve as a warning to all. us. But now it would seem that the foundations for a fraud have also been laid here. "
    • Contacted by NewsGuard about this article, Max Erdinger, who writes for JournalistenWatch.com, said in an email: "I am responding to you because our editorial team is currently working on numerous articles regarding the indoctrination methods of so-called media. quality, whose sites are under scrutiny, among other things, for spreading disinformation about the 2020 US election and the assault on the US Capitol on Jan. 6. In doing so, we came across several articles that did not speculate that the recourse to the postal vote could have led to fraud in Germany, exactly as happened in the United States, which we believe is a serious omission ". Erdinger then asked NewsGuard if he would like to provide a "comment" on the matter.
  • NewsGuard has identified at least five French sites deemed untrustworthy that have published articles on the recount in Arizona, including a September 2021 article titled " Arizona Election Review: Don't Believe Media, Review Confirmed Scope of Fraud, " published by the site ResistanceRepublicaine.com .
    • NewsGuard sent two emails to the generic ResistanceRepublicaine.com email address, but received no response.

Conclusion: considering that the proliferation of false information on elections does not seem to have stopped in 2021 , there is no reason to think that the phenomenon will stop in view of the next election cycle. Additionally, with the anniversary of the January 6 assault on the United States Capitol now upon us, it is reasonable to expect that the sites that NewsGuard has classified as untrustworthy will give even more space to the false narrative that questions the integrity of the election and , with it, the very foundations of democracy in the United States and abroad.

 

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