100 Bauder, Chase, and Mulvihill, “Fox, Dominion Reach $787.5M Settlement.”

101 Davey Alba, “No Proof People Stole Maiden Names to Vote,” New York Times, November 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/technology/no-proof-maiden-names-vote.html.

102 Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, Dennis Montgomery, and Steve Bannon, “What Is THE HAMMER What Is The Scorecard War Room Pandemic Episode 470,” November 2, 2020, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/what-is-the-hammer-what-is-the-scorecard-war-room-pandemic-episode.

103 Nicole Leaver and Joan Donovan, “Viral Slogan: Hammer and Scorecard,” Media Manipulation Casebook, February 10, 2021, https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/viral-slogan-hammer-and-scorecard.

104 Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad,” New York Post, October 14, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad.

105 Fox News reportedly passed on the story and, interestingly, even the New York Post attributed the explosive story to two reporters who may not have been the ones to actually author it. According to two anonymous Post employees who spoke with the New York Times, the article was written by staff reporter Bruce Golding, who didn’t want his byline used because he “had concerns over the article’s credibility.” Katie Robertson, “New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report amid Newsroom Doubts,” New York Times, October 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-post-hunter-biden.html.

106 The Hunter Biden laptop story was out of scope for EIP because it didn’t relate to voting or election delegitimization—but I found it interesting as an example of two companies taking different moderation approaches to the same incident. I thought Facebook had made the right call by reducing distribution while allowing the story to remain and be shared by users and that Twitter had made the wrong one. The calls were made under the “hacked materials” policy. Blocking the nudes seemed fully reasonable, under the hacked materials policy as well as from an individual privacy standpoint—there is no free speech argument that justifies propagating someone else’s leaked private photos—but blocking the sharing of the newspaper URL was the wrong call. Twitter, responding to outcry, reversed the call several hours later.

107 “‘This Will Be Awesome’: Musk Leaks Twitter’s Hunter Biden Files,” Politico, December 2, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/02/musk-leak-twitter-hunter-biden-files-00072015.

108 Jessica Bursztynsky, “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Says Blocking New York Post Story Was ‘Wrong,’” CNBC, October 16, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/16/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-says-blocking-post-story-was-wrong.html.

109 Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac, and Jane Lytvynenko, “How Facebook Failed to Prevent Stop the Steal,” BuzzFeed News, April 22, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-failed-stop-the-steal-insurrection.

110 Jessica Guynn, “Facebook Deploys Emergency Measures to Curb Misinformation as Nation Awaits Election Results,” USA Today, November 5, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/11/05/facebook-election-misinformation-crackdown-emergency-measures-trump/6182001002; Horwitz, Broken Code, 220.

111 Jessica Guynn, “Facebook Shuts Down Pro-Trump ‘Stop the Steal’ Group over ‘Worrying Calls for Violence,’” Time, November 5, 2020, https://time.com/5907902/stop-the-steal-facebook-group-trump-election.

112 Ryan Mac, Craig Silverman, and Jane Lytvynenko, “Facebook Stopped Employees from Reading an Internal Report About Its Role in the Insurrection. You Can Read It Here,” BuzzFeed News, April 26, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/full-facebook-stop-the-steal-internal-report.

113 Mac, Silverman, and Lytvynenko, “Facebook Stopped Employees from Reading an Internal Report.”

114 Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac, and Jane Lytvynenko, “Facebook Knows It Was Used to Help Incite the Capitol Insurrection,” BuzzFeed News, April 21, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-failed-stop-the-steal-insurrection.

115 Silverman, Mac, and Lytvynenko, “Facebook Knows It Was Used.”

116 Teo Armus, “A ‘Stop the Steal’ Organizer, Now Banned by Twitter, Said Three GOP Lawmakers Helped Plan His D.C. Rally,” Washington Post, January 13, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/13/ali-alexander-capitol-biggs-gosar/.

117 “How the ‘Stop the Steal’ Movement Outwitted Facebook Ahead of the Jan. 6 Insurrection,” NPR, October 22, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048543513/facebook-groups-jan-6-insurrection.

118 “View of Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization,” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 2 (2022): 1–49, https://journalqd.org/article/view/3137/2635.

119 Top twenty-one spreaders of election misinformation on Twitter: Center for an Informed Public, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graphika, and Stanford Internet Observatory, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Stanford Digital Repository: Election Integrity Partnership, March 3, 2021, https://purl.stanford.edu/tr171zs0069.

120 “Project Veritas #BallotHarvesting Amplification,” Election Integrity Partnership, September 29, 2020, https://www.eipartnership.net/2020/project-veritas-ballotharvesting.

121 Ian Kennedy et al., “Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization,” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 2 (2022), https://doi.org/10.51685/jqd.2022.013.

122 Yochai Benkler, Robert Farris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

123 Renée DiResta, “The Misinformation Campaign Was Distinctly One-Sided,” The Atlantic, March 15, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/right-wing-propagandists-were-doing-something-unique/618267. To understand the dynamics of relative engagement with misinformation news sources across the political spectrum, see Laura Edelson et al., “Understanding Engagement with U.S. (Mis)Information News Sources on Facebook,” ICM ’21: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement Conference, November 2021, 444–463, https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3487552.3487859.

124 Benkler et al., “Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign,” Berkman Klein Center, October 2, 2020, https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/Mail-in-Voter-Fraud-Disinformation-2020.

125 University of Washington Center for an Informed Public professor Kate Starbird describes the concept of evidence being assembled to fit an existing frame in a February 3, 2021, Usenix Enigma conference talk titled “Online Rumors, Misinformation and Disinformation: The Perfect Storm of Covid-19 and Election2020,” https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2021/presentation/starbird.

126 Starbird, DiResta, and DeButts, “Influence and Improvisation.”

127 Ryan Quinn, “Conservatives Sue, Investigate Disinformation Researchers,” Inside Higher Ed, June 23, 2023, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2023/06/23/stanford-u-wash-faculty-fought-disinformation-got-sued; Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn, “These Academics Studied Falsehoods Spread by Trump. Now the GOP Wants Answers,” Washington Post, June 6, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/06/disinformation-researchers-congress-jim-jordan.

128 “Addressing False Claims and Misperceptions of the UW Center for an Informed Public’s Research,” Center for an Informed Public, March 16, 2023, https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/03/16/uw-cip-election-integrity-partnership-research-claims.

129 After the election, some Stanford Internet Observatory researchers examined platform moderation of content that we had tracked via the Election Integrity Partnership’s Jira ticketing system. See Samantha Bradshaw, Shelby Grossman, and Miles McCain, “An Investigation of Social Media Labeling Decisions Preceding the 2020 U.S. Election,” PloS One 18, no. 11 (2023): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289683.

130 “Summary of Investigative Findings,” Tech Policy Press, n.d., accessed September 3, 2023, https://techpolicy.press/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/J6-Committee-Draft-Social-Media-Report-TPP.pdf.

131 “Far-Right Influencer Known as ‘Baked Alaska’ Sentenced over Capitol Attack,” The Guardian, January 10, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/10/baked-alaska-anthime-gionet-sentenced-capitol-attack.

132 Craig Timberg, “Gallows or Guillotines? The Chilling Debate on TheDonald.win Before the Capitol Siege,” Washington Post, April 15, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/15/thedonald-capitol-attack-advance-democracy.

133 Jonathan A. Greenblatt, “No One Is Born an Extremist. Jan. 6 Shows Virtually Anyone Can Be Swept Up by Hate Groups,” USA Today, January 6, 2022, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2022/01/06/january-6-hate-groups-adl-research/8995472002.

134 Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

135 Zicheng Cheng, Hugo Marcos-Marne, and Homero Gil de Zúñiga, “Birds of a Feather Get Angrier Together: Social Media News Use and Social Media Political Homophily as