(What follows is not a defense of social media. It’s just an attempt to provide some context for how we think about the circulation of damaging lies in politics).
The New York Times has an article today about three lies that began spreading on social media in the immediate aftermath of the killing in Texas on Tuesday of nineteen children and a teacher. They reflect the current obsessions that have taken hold of the American right - that the event was a 1) a false flag operation involving paid “crisis actors,” 2) that the killer was transgender (and that this was somehow because masculinity in America is under attack) and that the 3) shooter was an “illegal immigrant.” (Fact check: North Dakota, where the shooter was born, is in the United States).
Misinformation and disinformation have, of course, become central concerns of our age. I’ll leave for another time a discussion of some of the voluminous academic literature about how to define it, identify its sources and evaluate its impact on how people think about the world, including their politics. But I have been thinking lately about the Big Lie - the claim that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 election. That lie is a central obsession of former President Trump and now a defining fault line within the Republican Party. And it would appear to be a particularly good illustration both of the toxicity of the social media driven information eco-system of our day and the interrelated ways that the Trumpian pathologies now substantially define the Republican Party and feed and derive fuel from that eco-system.
But what is the origin of the Big Lie? One answer is an older lie, now circulating for over two decades, that “voter fraud” is a real problem in American elections. There are many chapters to that story, but one critical juncture in that longer narrative was the US Attorneys scandal of 2006-07. The barebones recap is this. It is typical that, when a new presidency assumes control of the White House, the 93 or so US Attorneys - federally appointed prosecutors working on behalf of the Justice Department - resign their positions, or are removed. Once the new slate of US Attorneys is in place, however, convention dictates that they keep their positions unless they resign for their own reasons or, more rarely, are removed for misconduct. But in December 2006, at first for unclear reasons, then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales originally sacked seven and ultimately nine of them.
Lengthy subsequent investigations which led, among other things, to Gonzales’ resignation as AG, revealed that a connecting thread in several of those firings was that several of the fired US attorneys had resisted pressure to bring voter fraud cases. To back up, the Bush administration had been increasingly pushing the idea that people might be voting illegally in American elections, either because they had managed to get themselves on the rolls even though they were not yet citizens with voting rights, or because the system for vetting the rolls nationally was insufficient to catch people who might vote in more than one state.
These arguments accompanied a growing push to insist on voter ID laws, since the argument went that voter IDs would provide greater “ballot security” and “election integrity,” two buzz phrases that have long been staples of the voter fraud fable.
It is a fact, one that has now been exhaustively studied, that what is variously called election fraud or voting fraud is vanishingly rare in the United States. Indeed, most of the cases in which people did vote improperly - and we’re talking about fractions of one percentage point for whom this is true - are more properly cases of mistaken voting. For example, someone might have voted in one district or precinct, or tried to, when they were registered in another. There is precisely zero evidence that any of that has ever been the result of an orchestrated plot by a campaign to use errant voting to win an election. And it's so uncommon that it couldn't possibly add up to anything decisive unless it were all taking place in one place at one time. Which it never is.
But it would be hard to overstate how much voter fraud became an obsession in conservative circles and the rightwing information ecosystem after the turn of the new century, including on rightwing talk radio and FOX News. And the improper and scandalous firing in 2006 of US Attorneys - people whose job it is to enforce the rule of law in the United States and were being told to prosecute non-existent crimes in service of a nakedly political agenda - came right from the top of the GOP, the presidency itself. And a key source of influence on the Bush administration - apart from its own characteristically corrupt conduct - was that same Limbaugh/Hannity/O’Reilly-led information ecosystem.
For those of you scoring at home, Twitter did not launch until July of 2006 and, it’s fair to say, basically no one had heard of it by the time of the US Attorneys firing later that year. And The Facebook, as it was originally called, launched only in 2004 (it dropped the “The” in 2005, or so the internet tells me), was still primarily being used by college students in 2006 (and was much less popular than MySpace), and didn’t even install the “like” button until 2009. In other words, these two social media behemoths played zero role in the wildly misleading and pernicious voter fraud obsession that resulted in the US Attorneys scandal.
The larger point is this. There is, even among many liberals (sometimes including me), a nostalgia for the pre-Trump GOP. Because, as bad as it was, it still abided by some rules of decorum and still held sacred some bedrock understandings of American democracy (like respecting the results of a duly contested election. Though, Florida, 2000, would like a word). And the claim here isn’t that there’s no difference between Bushism and Trumpism. But leaving aside all of the corruption and lying that W. and his cronies engaged in, the perniciousness and cruelty of their political agenda, it is a fact that big lies (including a full scale invasion of another country on the basis of such lies), even if not The Big Lie, originated, festered and grew without any meaningful help from social media for the entirety of that presidency. And while the Big Lie is, thankfully, a bridge too far for some diehard conservatives, like Liz Cheney, its wellspring, the voter fraud lie, had been allowed to metastasize for years by some of those “respectable” conservatives who now decry the Big Lie. Indeed, one could very well argue that the Big Lie is simply the reductio ad absurdum of all the election lies that Republican Party elites have been trafficking in for two decades now. And those election lies have been the primary justification for Republicans’ repeated efforts at voter suppression, an actual, serious problem.
(And that’s before we even get into the fact that the most significant cases of *actual* election fraud in recent years, including the use of illegally cast absentee ballots in the race in 2020 for North Carolina’s ninth congressional district and the currently unfolding mass falsification of signatures in the Michigan GOP gubernatorial primary, are Republican scandals. That’s a post for another day).
If you’re interested in older writing of mine about voter fraud claims and related voter suppression, here you go.