Why “Stop the Steal” is So Dangerous
Four years ago, a few weeks after Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton, I got a panicked phone call from a friend in the tech world. He was in Bali, finishing a global speaking tour. His attention wasn’t on tech, however. It was another piece of political engineering, the Electoral College. And what he wanted to know was, did I think we could stop it from voting Trump formally into the presidency when it was to meet in December?
I told him that he was on a fool’s errand. Trump had won the Electoral College, albeit by narrow margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It was crazy to think that individual Electors, bound by state law and their own political allegiances, would break with Trump. My friend pressed me, wondering if was even safe to come back to America. I told him that of course it was safe, and that furthermore that privileged white men like him and me had every obligation to stay here and fight for democracy, not run away.
My friend was, in fairness, freaking out. He wanted to do things like crowdfund security for potential faithless electors, and even if the effort had only a tiny chance of succeeding, he felt it was worth it because of the greater risk, in his view, of Trump causing Armageddon. And he wasn’t alone. In a follow up email he sent me, he pointed to the website HamiltonElectors.com, an effort to put pressure on the Electoral College, as well as this column by tech investor Mark Goldenson in Medium, praising the five million people who had signed a petition on Change.org urging the Electoral College to make Clinton president. A Sunday’s brunch of Hollywood liberal celebrities led by Martin Sheen starred in a YouTube video begging Electors to pick someone other than Trump that got more than 1.4 million views. Rallies were organized in state capitols for December 19, the day of the College’s meeting.
Like another hyperbolic reaction to Trump’s election—a push by California tech VC Sherwin Pishevar to get the Golden State to secede from the Union—which went nowhere, the movement to stop the Electoral College from affirming Trump as President fizzled. But if you are reading this newsletter and identify as someone on the liberal-left spectrum, you probably remember the frenzy of those months, which continued into the early days of Trump’s presidency.
I bring up these memories first to show that some of what’s happening right now on the right isn’t unique. A lot of Clinton voters in 2016 really didn’t want to have to accept Trump’s election. But here’s what is different. They didn’t act like it never happened. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, actually conceded. So while Trump began his presidency with a lot of voters opposed to him, they didn’t act like he was illegitimate—even though he got a minority of the total national vote.
The Present Danger
Now the shoe is on the other foot. As I write, not only has Trump not congratulated his successor, Joe Biden, but a large chunk of the Republican party is also either claiming fraud (with no serious evidence) or hedging its bets, as Tim Alberta reports for Politico Magazine. “What is the downside for humoring [Trump] him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” a top Republican official commented to the Washington Post. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
“The downside is potentially irreparable damage to our democracy,” Laura Rosenberger, the director of Secure Democracy, commented on Twitter.
And the social network platforms seem to only be making things worse.
Since the weekend, I’ve been hanging out in a couple of online hotspots for the “Stop the Steal” movement that has quickly gotten traction as one of the main rallying points for people who refuse to accept Biden’s victory. One, a public group on Facebook, had 88,000 members as of Monday mid-afternoon. This morning it has 96,000. A larger “Stop the Steal” group on Facebook grew to more than 320,000 members between Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon, when it was taken down by the company, as Sheera Frenkel reported for The New York Times. The other group I’m monitoring, on MeWe.com, has about 5,000 people, a small number that is commensurate with MeWe’s modest overall size, but also a number that has doubled in each of the last two days. The third, Parler, is a conservative alternative to Twitter where people like far-right talk show host Mark Levin has 2.6 million followers and the hashtag #StoptheSteal has already accumulated more than 71,000 posts.
All three of these online hubs are a mix of angry venting and calls for action to reverse the election. MeWe’s looser rules means I’ve seen posts implicitly threatening the life of Mark Zuckerberg along with a wide range of posts essentially blowing off steam, insisting that the election was rigged and touting various conspiracy theories meant to explain how. So far, all this noise hasn’t congealed into anything as focused as the pressure campaign on the Electoral College was in 2016, though there is currently a push to hold a “Million MAGA Rally” in Washington, DC on Saturday that bears watching. As long as the Stop the Steal phenomenon flails around, it will fail in just the same way the liberal anti-Trump push of late 2016 didn’t move the Electoral College. But deeper damage is being done, because a counter-narrative is being built that will potentially be much stronger than the “birther” movement was in hurting Barack Obama’s presidency.
It’s notable that when both Facebook and Twitter took strong action to reduce the spread of disinformation about the election, it worked—to the degree that the top ten most-shared posts on Facebook shifted briefly from places like the Daily Caller and Breitbart to the mainstream news of the Washington Post and the New York Times. As Kevin Roose, who has tracked this phenomenon closely, noted in The New York Times last week, Facebook and Twitter had to deliberately degrade the normal performance of their platforms to do so, installing more human editing, slapping warning labels on many of President’s Trump’s pronouncements and reducing how much their algorithms spread clear lies. The fact that Facebook and Twitter did this to reduce the threat to democracy ought to contain a lesson for the people who work at these companies: Why do you work for platforms that in the normal course of functioning have been deemed, by your own bosses, to be corrosive to democracy?
Even more important: Should the big social networks go back to business as usual after the election hubbub calms down? Because right now Facebook is “teeming” with rightwing misinformation, Roose reports. I have no idea why Facebook is allowing the current Stop the Steal group, which succeeded the first one it shut down, to continue to exist. And if you don’t think this has real world effects, consider this: Dana Coester, the editor in chief of 100 Days in Appalachia, a local media site, tweeted yesterday that “I live in two worlds. One that accepts a Biden presidency and one where my son’s high school teacher told everyone in class today that the election is a fraud.”
Even if big platforms like Facebook and Twitter continue to make serious efforts to block disinformation from spreading, the genie is out of the bottle because smaller social networks like MeWe and Parler are explicitly choosing to look the other way at the problem, and profit from it. When I emailed MeWe founder Mark Weinstein about his site’s tolerant attitude toward the Stop the Steal group, he didn’t answer directly. Instead, he pointed me to a previously written statement, which noted that “MeWe’s TOS is clear: haters, bullies, lawbreakers, and people promoting threats and violence are not welcome.” It also argued that false or inflammatory beliefs, while free to be expressed on MeWe, aren’t amplified by the site since it doesn’t have any advertising, targeting or newsfeed algorithm. In other words, “people promoting threats or violence” are not welcome on MeWe, but people posting false information are OK because the platform doesn’t do anything to help spread that. I’ve known Weinstein for a number of years and I know he hates how Facebook monetizes people’s data, but it strikes me that this policy amounts to saying that it’s OK if people use MeWe to pollute minds, because at least it’s not an industrial-strength mind-pollution machine, unlike Facebook.
What is to be Done?
I asked a number of researchers who are experts in dealing with organized online disinformation campaigns and activists who work on cross-partisan dialogue what they thought would happen to the Stop the Steal movement and how this kind of political echo chamber could be defused, and their answers were unfulfilling. Debilyn Molineaux, who runs a wonderful network called the Bridge Alliance, which comprises about 100 organizations across the political spectrum dedicated to stewarding our democracy, drew a blank. Renee Diresta, one of the hardest working folks in this business, who is now at the Stanford Internet Observatory, wrote me, “I think it will begin to die out, particularly as Trump eventually concedes or is made to leave (I personally assume the former) but there will be some percentage of people who operate in echo chambers and continue to believe the election was stolen. The only way to counter these things that seems to work is trusted community, media, or other influential figures repudiating the conspiracy, and then 1:1 dialogue, again with someone trusted, for people who continue to believe it. I don’t think we’ve found any kind of deradicalization-at-scale methods that work.”
Unfortunately, if America has any chance at coming together to solve the real problems of the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, economic need and climate change, we are going to need more civic projects that explicitly work to build relationships across the political divide. And right now there are very few, especially when one looks for anything working at the scale of the internet. The Bridging Divides Initiative of Princeton University has a beautiful map of local organizations that do peacebuilding, but there’s not much happening right now that appears to address the actual divide since the election. For example, BridgeUSA is holding a student forum tomorrow called “Burst Your Bubble” that is meant to be a crosspartisan post-election conversation. But that’s literally all I found.
In some ideal universe, we’d come up with something as contagious as the Ice Bucket Challenge, but centered on helping Americans talk to each other across the great divide. Ten years ago, I actually tried to do this with the help of a few friends from both sides of the aisle. It was early 2010, and President Obama had just visited the House Republican Caucus for a question-and-answer session that was fortuitously aired live on TV. The session was surprisingly direct and free of rancor, a rare case of cross-partisan dialogue. So with David Corn of Mother Jones, Mike Moffo (an Obama campaign staffer), conversative bloggers Glenn Reynolds and Jon Henke, and Republican consultant Mindy Finn, we launched “Demand Question Time” as an online petition calling on both parties to continue the practice and make it into something like the British tradition of parliamentary question time, when the prime minister takes questions from the opposition party. With some timely news plugs in places like Mike Allen’s Politico column, we got 20,000 signatures in a matter of days. Supporters included Grover Norquist, Joe Trippi, Mark McKinnon, Ed Morrissey, Ari Melber, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Eli Pariser, Mark McKinnon, Markos Moulitsas and Ed Morrissey.
But here’s the less satisfying part of that story. When we surveyed that list of 20,000 to see who was interested in making cross-partisan dialogue into a regular feature of our politics, we discovered something troubling. About sixty percent of the people who had signed up were Democrats. A quarter were independents. Just 4% were self-identified Republicans. This might have been because the biggest source of traffic to our petition front-page story in the Huffington Post. But our plans to lobby Congress to make Question Time into an ongoing process were stymied. If only one side of the political spectrum wanted to engage in dialogue with the other side, we had a problem. And that may be the same problem that we have today.
It’s a shame the Biden campaign is now in the process of shutting down, because the same digitally distributed army that it built to win the election (see below on its heft) could now be deployed to try to intervene in the rising Stop the Steal narrative. One would have thought that getting an absolute majority of the national vote, along with an Electoral College majority, would be enough to put this nonsense to bed. But as Trump’s rise taught us, one of the two major political parties in America is badly broken. And that is going to continue to hurt the country going forward.
Readers, if you have any ideas or pointers to efforts to address this problem, hit reply and let me know! I’ll share them in my next issue.
Odds and Ends
Early data looking at the youth vote in 2020 done by the Tufts Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) indicates that turnout was as high as 51-53% in eleven key swing states, compared to 42-44% in 2016. Approximately 62% of people ages 18-29 voted for Biden, a higher level of support than seen for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Within those numbers are some striking variations—young white men broke for Trump 51-45, while young white women went for Biden 55-42, and young Black, Asian, and Latino voters, respectively, supported Biden by overwhelming margins of 77, 72, and 49 points. (We should all take this kind of data with a grain of salt, because it is based largely on exit polls that are inherently less trustworthy than in past years, since a large portion of them consist of phone interviews of people who pollsters think voted but can’t be sure.)
Caitlin Mitchell, Biden’s digital director, shares some impressive facts about the distributed organizing campaign she and her team built: 5.7 million donors, $800 million raised, a national volunteer base of 200,000 on Slack, producing 700 million voter contacts overall and 128 million in the last four days before Election Day. (In 2012, the vaunted Obama machine tallied 25 million contacts in the last four days, she notes.)
Will Biden be more of a party-builder than Obama? That’s the question political scientists Daniel Galvin, Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld ask in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage section. They say Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is right to insist that Democrats haven’t done anywhere near enough to institutionalize the support the party has latent at the grass-roots level.