Are our newsrooms ready for a Category 5 disinformation storm?

The mainstream media must rise to the challenge and quickly dispel election-related disinformation, because our democracy is at stake.

One of the biggest journalistic failures of the last decade has been to insufficiently rebut the massive amounts of disinformation spewing out of Fox News and other parts of the right-wing ecosphere.

Traditional journalists have an inclination to ignore disinformation --  because they believe it’s beneath them, or they think it’s a distraction, or so as to not spread it. This has proven to be a colossal mistake.

But in the coming weeks, the mainstream media must rise to the challenge and quickly dispel election-related disinformation, because our democracy is at stake.

Any journalist paying attention knows that bad-faith actors who want to make sure that Donald Trump becomes president have a multi-part plan to steal the election if necessary.

It involves:

• Disrupting the voting, especially in areas that are predominantly Democratic.

• Seeding narratives about voter fraud.

• Lying about the outcome and Interfering with the certification process.

Every part of that will be fueled by disinformation, much of it spread on social media. So it’s imperative that the mainstream media correct disinformation and push back on false narratives – in real time

“We know that this is going to happen, so what do we want to do knowing this is going to happen?” asks Juliette Kayyem, a former Homeland Security official who is now a  security expert at Harvard.

One way to get ready is to prepare for likely scenarios.

For instance, Get Out the Vote efforts are inevitably going to be hit with disinformation, Kayyem told me in an interview.

“How would I suppress 20,000 African American votes in Detroit? I have an idea,” Kayyem said. “You spread rumors that the machines aren’t working, or that there’s an active shooter in the area.”

As we saw in the wake of Hurricane Helene, when bad-faith actors including Trump himself spread false rumors about FEMA, “people believe this stuff,” Kayyem said. “Let’s stop wondering why people believe this stuff and push back on it.”

News organizations, Kayyem said, need to be asking themselves “How are you going to get information in real time and assess its veracity? What are you getting out to your stakeholders to push back on that disinformation?”

To truth-squad rumors, journalists should embed themselves with election administrators and open lines of communication with election monitors including the Election Protection Project, the consortium of good-government groups that is itself monitoring social media for disinformation, deploying thousands of volunteer poll-watchers, and recruiting a team of legal experts to staff the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline.

Already, as Steven Lee Myers wrote in the New York Times, “the torrent of half-truths, lies and fabrications, both foreign and homegrown, has exceeded anything that came before, according to officials and researchers who document disinformation.”

And as Nick Corasaniti wrote in the Times

It is in this social media landscape that an attempt to subvert the election could gain grass-roots heft, as supporters primed for four years to believe elections are corrupt pounce on deceptive and false reports or exploit small examples of human error into broad narratives about rigged elections.

Election officials are already under siege, Christina A. Cassidy and Christine Fernando wrote for the Associated Press:

With less than two weeks before Election Day, a resurgence in conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting is forcing state and local election officials to spend their time debunking rumors and explaining how elections are run at the same time they’re overseeing early voting and preparing for Nov. 5.

“Truth is boring, facts are boring, and outrage is really interesting,” says Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole with truth. But what we try to do is just get as much information out there as possible.”

Election law expert Matthew Seligman told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that disinformation poses an even graver danger than it did in 2020:

The ingredients are here already. The pretext—the conspiracy theory about the illegitimacy of the results of the election—is much more powerful this time because the seeds are being planted earlier on. We’ve been hearing about these allegations of noncitizen voting, which to be clear are complete conspiracy theories. We’ve been hearing about that for months, and the Fox News audience has been hearing about it for months. So when Donald Trump claims after the election that his loss was illegitimate because of noncitizen voting, people will be primed to believe that. Then they will demand of other Republicans in Congress, in governor’s mansions and elsewhere, that they have to do something. The fake electors will then vote on December 17… [W]hat happens there is the real question. We saw in 2020 the attempt. And so the question in 2024 is: Will that attempt succeed?

Twitter is going to be a cesspool this time around, as Julia Ingram and Madeleine May reported for CBS News:

Elon Musk has used the social media platform he owns to amass nearly 3.3 billion views on X by fueling doubts about election security issues since January this year — making the tech mogul one of the most viral voices on elections during the 2024 campaign, a CBS News investigation has found.

Musk has frequently shared conspiratorial narratives that have been vexing to public officials who are trying to maintain Americans' confidence in the election in the face of  a barrage of misinformation and disinformation.

Richard L. Hasen, writing for Slate, focused on the prospect of Trump declaring victory before all the votes are counted – and the media’s response:

[T]here are good reasons to believe that many of us are not prepared for what’s coming in the days after Nov. 5. We could well once again face a situation where Trump is ahead in the tally of announced results in key states such as Pennsylvania, only to see Harris declared the winner by the weekend after the election. The days after the election, as this potential “blue shift” materializes, could be fraught with disinformation, confusion, and even potential violence. It’s on the media, and all of us, not to let things spin out of control.

“We know he’ll never say he lost,” Kayyem said. “So he either wins, or he says that he won and won’t concede. So start thinking about how you’re going to cover that.”