Left-wing misinformation is having a moment

Several elected officials, along with a top political aide for billionaire Reid Hoffman, recently suggested, without proof, that former President Donald Trump may have staged an attempt to assassinate him in July.

Mark Hamill, an actor and advocate for Democratic causes with more than 5 million followers on social platform X, criticised a conservative policy proposal by railing against ideas that were not part of the document.

And last month, Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign misleadingly suggested, in posts viewed millions of times, that Trump was confused about his whereabouts during a campaign stop. Her followers seized on the posts to claim that Trump was suffering from cognitive decline.

For years, the discussion about misinformation online has focused on falsehoods circulating on the American right. But in recent weeks, a flurry of conspiracy theories and false narratives have also been swirling on the left.

Some misinformation researchers are worried that the new spate of left-leaning conspiracy theories could further polarise political discourse before the November election. More than one-third of President Joe Biden’s supporters believed the assassination attempt may have been staged, according to a poll in July by Morning Consult.

“I don’t anticipate that we will collectively become less conspiratorial,” said Adam Enders, an associate professor of political science at the University of Louisville. “If anything, the closer we get to Election Day, the more it’ll increase.”

The researchers emphasized that the falsehoods and exaggerations were not as entrenched or as toxic as those permeating right-wing spaces online. Several studies have shown that the political right is more likely to share false narratives and misinformation. Researchers at Northeastern University found that Democrats were generally better than Republicans at discerning true from false news.

This is not, however, the first time misinformation has circulated on the left. In 2004, for example, a contingent of disheartened Democrats claimed that President George W. Bush’s reelection over Sen. John Kerry had been marred by election fraud. Experts quickly issued rebuttals to the accusations.

Neither Mark Hamill nor the Harris campaign provided a comment for this article. Hoffman’s aide apologized for questioning whether the assassination attempt against Trump had been staged. He parted ways with the billionaire soon afterward.

The shooting at the Pennsylvania rally became a lightning rod for conspiracy theories almost as soon as shots were fired. Unfounded rumors that Trump had staged his own shooting festered into lasting conspiracy theories, which are still shared both by anonymous users and by liberal influencers with hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

Secret Service agents, some popular influencers on X and Threads have claimed, were in on the plan. The blood from the bullet that hit Trump’s ear was actually ketchup, others theorized. Never mind that there was no evidence behind these claims.

Mentions of the word “staged” surged on X in the days after the shooting, with more than 300,000 mentions, according to a report by NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation. Many users claimed the shooting had been staged, while others criticized the idea as preposterous. Some left-leaning users who shared conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt saw their number of followers grow, sometimes substantially, NewsGuard found.

Joy Reid, a host on MSNBC with more than 340,000 followers on Threads, raised questions about Trump’s injury from the shooting, doubts that some of her followers interpreted, when his medical details were not released, as implying a cover-up. Majid M. Padellan, who is known as “Brooklyn Dad Defiant” on X and has more than 1.3 million followers, amplified such suspicions by offering his own doubts about Trump’s injury. (The FBI later said a bullet had struck Trump.)

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MSNBC did not respond to requests for comment. In an emailed response, Padellan defended his questions about the nature and treatment of Trump’s injury and about Secret Service actions that day.

The assassination attempt prompted a similar wave of conspiracy theories from America’s right flank — echoed by prominent Republicans — including that Democrats had ordered the attack. As the presidential campaign continued, Harris was targeted by a barrage of racist and sexist falsehoods from conservatives, who have also invented falsehoods about Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate from Minnesota. Trump has personally unleashed a barrage of disproved claims in just the past month.

Research has shown that Trump plays an important role in spreading falsehoods on the right, acting as a megaphone that prompts influencers and politicians to spread falsehoods in lock-step with one another. Left-wing misinformation, in contrast, tends to spread more loosely and organically among a varied collection of users and organizations, researchers have found.

“There’s just a world of difference between what you’re hearing episodically out of the left and the systemic production of pretty vile and dangerous stuff that we have seen now for years coming out of that right-wing ecosystem,” said Steven Livingston, the founding director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University.

Researchers believe the whiplash of the current campaign season helped create the ideal conditions for voters of all political persuasions to feel distrustful and bewildered. Conspiracy theories tend to take hold in moments of distress and upheaval, research has shown.

“When you’re presented with information you don’t really know what to do with, you fill in the narrative blanks,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of media ethics and digital platforms at the University of Oregon.

Social media have become a major source of news for many Americans, allowing voters to nestle into their own ideological silos, which prize virality — and exaggeration — over nuance. Fact-checkers and their peers, meanwhile, are struggling to make a dent in misinformation while fighting for more support.

These conditions have paved the way for even bizarre claims to catch national attention. A vulgar, untrue joke about Sen. J D Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, spread rapidly after he was added to the ticket, with nearly 400,000 mentions and 4.6 million interactions from July 15-31, according to online and social media data analyzed by Hootsuite. The joke became fodder for late-night television hosts and even for the Harris campaign, which alluded to it on social media and during a rally.

Articles debunking left-wing misinformation have faced pushback online from critics and journalism watchdogs, who have claimed that the traditional fact-checking process is not suited to tackling falsehoods from the left. The Associated Press was roundly mocked online for trying to debunk the joke by writing a staid fact check that was soon deleted. The news agency said the fact check had not gone through its “standard editing process.”

“Since most of what Democrats are saying is provably — or at least arguably — true, fact-checkers have descended to hairsplitting at best and worst,” wrote Dan Froomkin, the founder of Press Watch, a nonprofit website covering political journalism.

Snopes, the fact-checking website, is used to seeing pushback over its frequent debunking of right-wing disinformation. But since the war started between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip — and through this year’s presidential election — the website has also faced scrutiny after running fact-check articles about left-wing falsehoods, according to Doreen Marchionni, the executive and managing editor for the site.

“We kind of get hit by all sides whenever what we report doesn’t conform to certain left or right talking points,” she said.

—International New York Times