Misinformation by a thousand cuts: Varied rigged election claims circulate

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Brandy Zadrozny
@BrandyZadrozny
New from me, with a heavy assist from the researchers at @2020Partnership:

Misinformation by a thousand cuts: rigged election claims circulate online

Misinformation by a thousand cuts: Varied rigged election claims circulate
A dizzying array of false claims and conspiracy theories have dominated social and ultra-conservative media since the early morning after Election Day.
nbcnews.com
3:03 PM · Nov 11, 2020

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/misinformation-thousand-cuts-varied-rigged-election-claims-circulate-n1247476

For Trump supporters intent on finding it, proof of the president's claims that the 2020 election was "stolen" is everywhere.

For some, it's in the videos: the one in which a Colorado man claiming to be a poll worker, dressed in a yellow vest, rips up Trump ballots (it was a TikTok prank) or the trash bag of torn ballots found by a wedding party in an Oklahoma church (they were actually "spoiled ballots&quot or the testimony from a Pennsylvania postal worker who claimed he was ordered to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day (he has since recanted and also denied recanting).

For others, the evidence of a so-called Democratic plot could be found in the numbers.

"Is it me, or do people not understand statistics?" asked one of the 1.3 million members in Nationwide Recount 2020, a private Facebook group, presenting an impassioned, if confusing, case for why mail-in ballots in swing states were favoring Biden.

"Benford's Law," a supporter commented, linking to an anonymous Twitter account that claimed in a series of tweets that a mathematical observation that the first digits of numbers are likely to be smaller somehow suggested widespread fraud by the Democrats.

Posts like these, discussing a dizzying array of false claims and conspiracy theories, have dominated social and ultraconservative media since the early morning after Election Day, when President Donald Trump prematurely and incorrectly declared himself the winner. As the votes continue to be counted and Joe Biden's lead has increased (Biden was up by more than 5 million votes Wednesday), so has Trump's insistence that the election was stolen from him.

*snip*