Trump didn’t just prime his audience to be receptive to false narratives of voter fraud, he inspired them to produce those narratives (eg Sharpiegate, suitcases of votes, observers denied, etc.) and then echoed those false claims back to them. Participatory disinformation.

One hypothesis here — these kinds of false narratives are even stickier for those who believe them (than more top-down propaganda) due to that participatory dimension & the positive reinforcement of having their “discoveries” repeated by their media & political celebrities.

If you look at the Sharpiegate tweets, the rumor starts w/ some well-meaning concerns about sharpies, but there’s an echo of suspicion, even in some of the earliest tweets, that the distribution of sharpies is part of the voter fraud efforts they were told to look for.

The rumor picks up as a series of pro-Trump accounts amplify original reports (of sharpies bleeding through) w/ an added (utterly unfounded) framing that this is evidence of voter fraud specifically against Trump voters. The narrative then begins to hit more influential accounts.

Voters who were previously not suspicious, become worried that their vote won’t count. Some go online & see that their vote had been cancelled, misreading a website that actually says their mail-in ballot was cancelled when they cast an in-person vote. Those stories fuel the fire

Reading the tweets, you can see people who had been initially looking for evidence of voter fraud become absolutely convinced that they (or their online friends) have been victims of an effort to disenfranchise them — a very difficult, maybe impossible misperception to correct.