The disastrous Iowa caucuses on Monday night underlined one of the most pressing challenges that social media platforms will face this year: misinformation from real, influential people in the United States, not just Russian trolls and other foreign actors.<\/p>\n
As news emerged that the caucus results were delayed amid technical difficulties, conservative operatives on Facebook, Twitter and other top networks promoted a narrative that the caucuses were “rigged” by the Democratic establishment.<\/p>\n
Popular users pointed fingers at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Iowa Democratic Party, presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, the organization behind a glitchy voting app and even the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n
President Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, tweeted “rigged?” late Monday night, sparking a frenzy and garnering more than 6,000 retweets just as party officials, campaign staffers and cable news pundits were scrambling to understand why the caucus results weren’t coming in.<\/p>\n
“Rigging ain’t easy,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, to an audience of 4.3 million followers, responding to a CNN segment announcing there were “still no results” on Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
And Sean Davis, the co-founder of the conservative website The Federalist who has almost 250,000 followers, tweeted without any evidence on Tuesday morning that the results were “taking forever because the data are 100% corrupted and they can’t track down all the original ballots, which were never secured and have zero chain of custody verification, for a manual recount.”<\/p>\n
The key takeaway:<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0Experts have spent years raising concerns that users based in the U.S.\u00a0\u2014 people with political agendas and access to Twitter- or Facebook-sized microphones\u00a0\u2014 could pose an even greater challenge to the social media platforms in 2020 than Russian or Iranian disinformation operatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The disastrous Iowa caucuses on Monday...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21589,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21588\/revisions\/21589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}