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On the morning of September 21, 2020, three trays of United States mail were discovered in a ditch in Greenville, Wisconsin. The local sheriff’s office reported that the mail dump included several absentee ballots. When a U.S. Postal Service spokesperson made a similar assertion two days later, a local Fox affiliate, WLUK, reported the statement on its website. And then a national network of conservative commentators and influencers did something that happened again and again last fall: They picked up a bare-bones news story and made it sound nefarious.
Within hours, Jim Hoft, the combative founder and editor of
Alongside the pandemic, we’ve also had a parallel crisis: the infodemic, an unending stream of dis- and misinformation flooding social media feeds and online discussions. These types of rumors and falsehoods aren’t new, but the scale with which they spread online is unprecedented, allowing everyone from foreign governments to solo scammers to twist narratives down to the hyper-local level. A good example is the recent New York Times story showing how people in communities of color in the U.S. are hesitant to get COVID-19 vaccines because of misinformation about them from Russian-backed websites such as Sputnik and Russia Today.