“We’re taking every opportunity to connect people to reliable information about the election,” said Kevin McAlister, a Facebook spokesman. He said the company was also “deploying the teams and technology we used in the general elections to fight voter suppression, misinformation and interference in the Georgia runoff elections.”
None of the top misinformation spreaders responded to requests for comment.
Their claims ran the gamut from insults — that the Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were corrupt — to the often-repeated false claim that voting machines that run on software from the company Dominion Voting Systems flipped votes from President Trump to President-elect Biden.
Mr. Quran said the accounts also appeared to be “professionalized” in how they spread misinformation.
“We see them regularly testing new narratives to see where they can hit a certain nerve, and then acting on it,” said Mr. Quran. Misinformation that successfully targeted Latino voters during the November presidential elections, for example, was also being repurposed for Georgia, he said.
One claim, that Mr. Warnock, a pastor in an Atlanta church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, “celebrated Fidel Castro and welcomed him to his church” was not accurate. There is no evidence that Mr. Warnock was involved in arranging Mr. Castro’s appearance at the church 25 years ago. There is also no evidence that he welcomed Mr. Castro.
It was a variation of claims that circulated in Florida during the presidential election that linked Democratic candidates to the Communist Party in Cuba. Some of those claims have also been translated into Spanish to target the more than 300,000 voters with Latino backgrounds in Georgia, said Mr. Quran.
Voters in Georgia are also being targeted with misleading information by new media start-ups. A conservative local news network called Star News group, which already runs news sites in Tennessee, Virginia and Minnesota, announced in November that it was opening a new venture called the Georgia Star, according to the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America. The network did not respond to a request for comment.