The worst-case scenario for the proliferation of misinformation about the election is playing out, disinformation researchers said Wednesday morning.
The presidential race is extremely close, it could take days to get final results, and President Trump has falsely declared his own victory early — leaving a gray zone with a huge information gap that is ripe for exploitation.
“Many are still glued to social media streams hoping to glean any new information, which makes them likely to encounter misinformation,” said Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center.
The range of Election Day misinformation was pretty much what the social networking companies expected, said two Facebook employees who work on the company’s election team and one Twitter employee. Foreign disinformation actors were largely booted off the major social networks, leaving the Russians and others to work for crumbs of engagement on less popular online forums like Gab and Parler, said the employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
But Wednesday and the ensuing days will probably be much more chaotic if the race remains too close to call, they said.
In particular, misinformation researchers and the Facebook and Twitter employees said they were concerned that candidates and their advisers would start to share misleading information and distorted narratives, or continue to call the election prematurely.
Some of this began to play out on Wednesday morning. Twitter applied a label to a post by Ben Wikler, head of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which asserted prematurely that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won in the state.
“Some votes may still need to be counted,” Twitter’s label reads. The company also limited users’ ability to like and share the post.
“As votes are still being counted across the country, our teams continue to take enforcement action on tweets that prematurely declare victory or contain misleading information about the election broadly,” Trenton Kennedy, a Twitter spokesman, said in a statement. “This is in line with our Civic Integrity Policy and our recent guidance on labeling election results.”
But even more worrisome than posts sharing misleading information is the erosion of the public’s trust in the democratic process beyond this specific election, said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation analyst at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think thank.
“In countries I’ve worked in where there is a history — and evidence — of voter fraud, citizens’ distrust in the democratic process lingers long even after several cycles of clean, well-run elections,” Ms. Jankowicz said. “We need our political leaders to step up right now and assure voters that all votes will be counted.”
Ms. Jankowicz suggested that people look at official sources of information like state and local election boards, and tune out politicians and pundits for now. If posts provoke an emotional response, she said, there is a good a chance it was from people trying to be emotionally manipulative.
And Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, advised: “If something you see online seems too good — or too terrible — to be true, take extra care to verify it. Don’t share anything online that you can’t personally verify.”