Defects in the US media system to be wary of after Election Day

US Election Day is three weeks and one day away.

There is likely to be a major fight after Election Day in which Trump's Republican Party tries to use the courts to suppress the count of Democratic votes and keep Trump in office. Some Republican-controlled states could even override the popular vote and select a slate of Republican Electors even if their states votes for Biden.

Justin Hendrix points to Six Disinformation Threats in the Post-Election Period (Just Security 10/08/2020). His six bullet-point list of post-election manuevers to guard against includes the following. These are largely features of the broken media environment in the US which bad actors like Trump can exploit. How acute they will be immediately after the election will largely depend how far the Republicans go with Trump's threat to steal the election:

1. The news media fails to effectively handle the president’s lies about voter fraud and the integrity of the election.
2. Social media platforms fail to take urgent and effective action against false claims in the post-election period.
3. An army of Trump “election observers” produces a trove of false voter fraud “evidence” that obsesses the right for years.
4. Militias invested in a narrative act on that narrative no matter what the result is at the polls
5. Foreign adversaries that seem, in some respects, to be on the sidelines right now jump into the game 
6. We find out if the QAnon network has any gas left in the tank

Hendrix rates the probability of the first two as high, 3-5 as medium, and the sixth as low.

On the QAnon point, he quotes this tweet from Ben Collins of NBC:

No doubt how major platforms like Facebook and Twwitter handle toxic conspiracy theories will be a major factor. But the popularity of QAnon-type conspiracy theories is only the latest iteration of the continuing radicalization of the Republican Party that has been proceding without meaningful pause for the last three decades. I would argue that the George H.W. Bush Administration did represent a partial drawing back from that process that gained dominance in the party with Reagan's nomination for President in 1980. It's hard to see who among Republican leadership today will make a stand against QAnon-type conspiracism, which is hard to distinguish between Rush Limbaugh's or Alex Jones' versions of conspiracism.

Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum even argue that in the US we are seeing a new type of conspiracist thinking. In their book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (2019), they write, "Conspiracy theory is not new, of course, but conspiracism today introduces something new — conspiracy without the theory." I'm not sure that what they are identifiying is anything qualitatively new as it is an increasing prominence of a type of conspiracism in society.

But they point to theorizing about the JFK assassination as being focused on trying to adduce documentary evidence to support their arguments as being characteristic of popular conspiracy theories in the recent past. We see something similar with what has been called the ur-conspiracy theory of today's Republican Party, the notion that Franklin Roosevelt orchestrated the Japanese attack on Pearly Harbor in 1941. In other words, by "insisting that the truth is not on the surface, classic conspiracism engages in a sort of detective work."

They contrast that with what they see a new version:

The new conspiracism is something different. There is no punctilious demand for proofs, no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying ...” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!” - a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory.

What validates the new conspiracism is not evidence but repetition. When Trump tweeted the accusation that President Barack Obama had ordered the FBI to tap his phones in October before the 2016 election, no evidence of the charge was forthcoming. What mattered was not evidence but the number of retweets the president’s post would enjoy: the more retweets, the more credible the charge. Forwarding, reposting, retweeting, and “liking”: these are how doubts are instilled and accusations are validated in the new media. The new conspiracism - all accusation, no evidence - substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough. [my emphasis]

In Hendrix' six post-election disinformation threats, the last three items could be taken as the propaganda conditions required if they first three more directly substantive threats to succeed in stealing the election for Trump and the Republicans. The "militias" and the FOX News/QAnon bubble will b e stewing in conspracism if Biden wins, no matter what. But not only the first three elements but official moves by the Republican Party like bringing court cases to stop the vote count and legislative overrides of popular votes in individual states would have to fall in place for the latter three to have a significant effect in deciding the practical outcome of the Presidential contest.