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So unless you've been living under a rock the past couple days (and really, who could blame you?) you've seen the explosion of stories alleging that fake ballots, "created" by the Democrats, are being added to the count. It usually hooks on to a story like the one below.
Citizens should watch counts carefully, of course. Discrepancies, when identified, require explanation. But as we pointed out in our @2020partnership paper on what to expect after the election, there are always *some* discrepancies and some errors. https://www.eipartnership.net/news/what-to-expect
This is why our prediction for post-election misinfo asserted these narratives would be central. When you know there is going to be some amount of expected irregularity that you can weaponize in an area few people understand -- well, that's a disinfo sweet spot.
We hypothesized that the flow of these narratives would resemble (to some extent) the version of mail-dumping narratives we saw on the right in the run up to the election.
They aren't like mail dumpings in that in mail dumpings there was at least *some* misbehavior, even if not politically directed. But they are like dumpings in that they take an expected amount of mostly transient dysfunction and create a grand conspiracy out of it, day by day.
Surrounding this, of course, are various videos and photographs, either fake or falsely framed, that claim to show activity that is associated with getting those supposedly fake ballots into the count (which we also anticipated).
I mean, we could go on. Everything here is more or less predictable, right through Sharpiegate
Everything has more or less unfolded exactly as we specified in that document, and I wish we could say it was because we were brilliant.
But the truth is less glamorous and impressive. Disinformation campaigns work partly on supply-side principles. What misunderstandings can be exploited? What news stories are likely to happened that can be falsely framed? What media is already out there to work with?
You think like a bad actor (or disinformer as @wiczipedia calls them in my new favorite term). You've got demand, you've got supply, and you've got some things that have historically worked to connect demand for misinfo and supply of material to work with.
And where those two thing intersect? That's your sweet spot. That's "ballots found" right now-- there is a group of people out there invested in an institutional Democratic fraud theory (demand) and there's a supply of reframeable mis-reportings and misplaced ballot events. Boom.
And if the match is really really good, it can run on the work of the misinformed as much a the intentionally disinforming.
This thread got away from me a bit! But the point here is that while methods do evolve, and sometimes there are one-off events that are unpredictable, most disinformation campaigns are actually pretty predictable because of supply/demand constraints.
Anyway, our pre-election report is out there, and still worth a read. Take a look! https://www.eipartnership.net/news/what-to-expect
