Everybody’s Doin’ It, Doin’ It, Doin’ It

With the US midterm elections just days away, the feverish paranoia about “misinformation” are rising fit to burst the mercury. But, depending which side of politics you favour, the more you’ll be convinced that it’s the dastardly other side who are doing it all.

And you’d be wrong.

One of the biggest but most common pitfalls to logical thinking is my-side bias. It’s common, because it’s so natural — which is what also makes it such a tough challenge. We want to believe the best of the people we like, and the worst of the people we don’t. None of us are immune to it — show me someone who claims to be totally unbiased, and I’ll show you the world’s biggest liar or fool.

But we can at least try (to which end, I highly recommend Ground News and their “blindspot feed”). In which case, you’ll certainly find that the bastards are all doing it — and even the most biased media can almost tell the truth, from time to time.

A series of false and misleading claims have gone viral online days before the US midterm elections.

Some of the claims cast doubt on the legitimacy of the voting process in key states, while others include manipulated content from across the political spectrum.

Now, remember how I admonish you to “always assume a ‘fact-checker’ is trying to bullshit you”? Case in point:

Claims that voting machines flip votes from Republicans to Democrats and vice versa have dogged US elections for years. Yet to date there is no evidence to suggest that election tampering has taken place.

A handful of posts recently began circulating on social media from voters in Texas who claimed that voting machines were switching their votes from Democrat to Republican. One tweet read: “Texas GOP up to the same dirty tricks.”

Local county officials and the secretary of state’s office all confirmed receiving a small handful of reports relating to voters experiencing difficulties with touch screen machines, and have encouraged voters to review their ballots before submitting them.

The interesting twist here is that it’s Democrats who are being “election deniers”, this time. Nonetheless, the BBC’s claim that there’s “no evidence” of tampering is simply a lie. There’s plenty of evidence — which is not the same as proof. Even the claims cited in this “fact-check” that machines switched votes are prima facie evidence. They may not hold up — election officials dismiss them as user error — but they are evidence.

More importantly:

Voting machines have previously been hacked by researchers in controlled studies to test how vulnerable they might be.

Electronic Systems Software, a company which provides voting machines to multiple Texas counties, has acknowledged such controlled studies on their website, but adds that these do not reflect an actual election scenario where “multiple levels of physical and cyber security are always in place”.

So, they can be hacked — but not if they’re a spherical voting machine in a vaccuum.

On the other side of the political aisle:

The film “2,000 mules” by right-wing political commentator Dinesh D’Souza claims to reveal widespread voter fraud operating across several swing states in the 2020 election, and has been promoted by multiple Republicans.

The “fact-checker” claims to debunk the film, but while it’s no stretch to say that D’Souza over-eggs the pudding, that doesn’t mean his central argument is completely unsound. Once again, pay careful attention to the pea-and-shells game that is “fact-checking”:

In limited cases, election crime and voter fraud can happen. But the allegation that it is widespread enough to swing the results of an election is baseless. In Arizona, a three-year-long investigation into voter fraud prosecuted just 20 cases in a state of 7.2 million people.

The problem with this argument is that voter fraud doesn’t have to be “widespread” to swing election results — not when so many elections come down to small numbers of votes in just a handful of counties. Case in point: but for a few “hanging chads” in Florida in 2000, Al Gore might have been president.

Just to remind you that it’s not just the wicked lefties making all the false claims, right-leaning sources are sharing a manipulated video that purports to show Obama being cut off, mid-speech, by an anti-Biden chant. Didn’t happen.

But the left are desperately lying and spreading disinformation about other things.

A fake version of Republican campaign pledges has been widely shared online, which has been manipulated to feature promises to cut Social Security benefits, raise the eligibility age for Medicare and tax veterans.
None of these are in the real Republican “Commitment to America” plan […]

A number of doctored memes featuring Dr Oz have been shared in recent weeks which claim to show voters in Pennsylvania tell him to his face that they don’t intend to vote for him.

BBC

I’m not a fan of Dr Oz, by a long shot, and some of the memes are deliberate jokes, as memes so often are.

In fact, the last claim shows just how dangerously contested ground so-called “misinformation” actually is. One person’s joke is another person’s “disinformation”. I’ve been on the receiving end of this myself, when a photoshop I created for The BFD was “fact-checked”. Yet, in my original image, I explicitly watermarked the image, and captioned it with an acknowledgement that it was photoshopped.

Whoever shared it, cropped it and ignored the caption.

This just goes to show: whenever someone waves their hands about “misinformation, disinformation and extremism”, it’s more than likely that it’s them doing it.

Isn’t that right, Kate Hannah?