Misinformation Watch

In his first interview since Donald Trump fired him by tweet earlier this month, Christopher Krebs, the former top cybersecurity official, reaffirmed his stance that the 2020 Election was the “most secure in history.”

On CBS' "60 Minutes" Sunday, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was charged with protecting the election against hacking and other disruptions, said his team “did a good job. We did it right. I’d do it a thousand times over.”

President Donald Trump and has allies have peddled a range of conspiracy theories around voter fraud, often focusing on Dominion Voting Systems, a company that provides software to many local governments. They have claimed, without evidence, that glitches in the Dominion software led to miscast ballots, that it counted phony ballots, and that it ran an algorithm “to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden.”

CBS’ Scott Pelley asked Krebs for his reaction to some of the unfounded claims of fraud, and specifically the conspiracy theory vocalized by attorney Sidney Powell at the recent press conference led by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani about an alleged algorithm used by Dominion to swing votes in favor of President-elect Joe Biden.  Powell said that Dominion software "can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden.” (The Trump campaign has since cut ties with Powell.) 

“If there was an algorithm that was flipping votes or changing votes, it didn’t work,” said Krebs. “I think the more likely explanation though is that there was no algorithm, that the systems performed as intended, that the series of security controls before, during, and after an election protected those systems from any sort of misbehavior,” he added.

There have been no credible reports that the company's machines affected vote counts. As CNN previously reported, one county in Georgia experienced delays reporting its results due to apparent problems with Dominion software but other issues that were allegedly connected to Dominion were actually caused by human error.

Trump has used his Twitter account to perpetuate theories around unproven misuse of Dominion software as part of his broader voter fraud claims, which continue.

The President has been fixated on Georgia, where a statewide audit recently concluded and confirmed a victory for President-elect Joe Biden and found no widespread fraud. Trump, who objected to the recount in a Tweet on November 16, calling it “fake” and adding misleading claims about the state’s signature-matching processes. 

Trump reiterated misleading claims about the processes on Twitter Monday, suggesting that Governor Brian Kemp should “quickly check the number of envelopes versus the number of ballots. You may just find that there are many more ballots than there are envelopes. So simple, and so easy to do.” 

Twitter labeled all of the above Trump tweets as disputed.

All eyes are on the state as it gears up for runoff elections in January that will determine which party rules the Senate.

After a day picking cranberries at a California farm, Josefino Cervantes Alvarado sat down for dinner to a unique mix of voices and music filling the room.

"Greetings to everybody tuning in to Radio Indígena 94.1 FM," said a voice coming from the radio's speakers in Spanish. Moments later, he heard another voice speaking in Mixteco — one of several indigenous languages from southern Mexico.

"I used to feel ashamed of speaking Mixteco," Cervantes Alvarado, 40, whose first language is Mixteco, said in Spanish. "Whenever I listen to (the radio), I feel proud of who I am and don't want my children to forget that."

When the Covid-19 pandemic first hit the United States, the hosts of Radio Indígena were among the first people who could explain Covid-19 to indigenous Mexican farmworkers in Ventura County, thanks to their ability to switch between Spanish, Mixteco and other indigenous languages. As the months passed, they took to debunking coronavirus misinformation.

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Trump is Trump. There's nothing new to say about the man. But there is still lots to learn about his enablers. So many people, from GOP functionaries to Fox News hosts, are helping him to undermine democracy by denying the election and attacking reality. So many people are complicit.

People like Maria Bartiromo. Formerly an acclaimed journalist, known around the world for making CEOs tell the truth, now she tees up Trump to recite lie after lie. Her Sunday morning call with Trump on Fox News was his first "interview" since he lost the election, but it wasn't a real interview at all. He wasn't ready to acknowledge that he lost, and neither was she. He displayed delusional weakness. She was complicit. And she's far from the only one.

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While many Americans were enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, President Trump was tweeting against a law known as Section 230 and railing against Twitter's trending section.

"For purposes of National Security, Section 230 must be immediately terminated!!!" Trump tweeted on Thursday evening.

The reasoning behind Trump's claim -- without evidence or further detail -- that Section 230 must be repealed for national security reasons is unclear. Section 230 protects tech companies' ability to moderate content as they see fit.

For years, many of the biggest names in tech have relied on the little-known law to avoid being held responsible for some of the most controversial content on their platforms. But as social media networks have become hotbeds for hate and misinformation, an increasing number of voices, including Republicans, are advocating for changes to the law.

Trump also attacked Twitter's "Trends" section, saying it has "absolutely nothing to do with what is really trending in the world. They make it up, and only negative 'stuff'. Same thing will happen to Twitter as is happening to @FoxNews daytime. Also, big Conservative discrimination!"

And he was still at it on Friday morning, retweeting and tweeting a spate of falsehoods.

He retweeted his own post from Thursday, which said: "Just saw the vote tabulations. There is NO WAY Biden got 80,000,000 votes!!! This was a 100% RIGGED ELECTION."

There is no evidence of widespread election fraud. Joe Biden received 80,026,721 votes. Twitter quickly added a label to the tweet that said, "This claim about election fraud is disputed."

Even as key states certify election results indicating — as national news networks have reported — that Joe Biden will be the next President, Donald Trump continues to spread baseless claims of voter fraud on Twitter.

On Tuesday, Trump reposted a tweet from a user falsely claiming that “fake Biden votes” were uncovered in Arizona. 

“Report: 6K fake Biden votes found in Arizona ‘lead’ drops to 4K,” the Twitter user posted, later adding a screenshot of the pro-Trump outlet One America News Network with the same “report” in text running along the bottom of the screen. 

The report, however, is absolute bunk, and the Tweet has been labeled as "disputed" by Twitter. The claim appears to refer to a temporary tally change that occurred in the unofficial election results because of an uploading issue with one county’s results, according to election officials.

A tweet from Arizona’s Secretary of State Katie Hobbs clarified the issue hours before the claim was posted.

“Unofficial election results were displaying incorrectly briefly today due to an uploading error that posted Greenlee County's results multiple times while uploading write-in candidate info,” she posted on Twitter Tuesday. “The error has been corrected.”

Garrett Archer, a data analyst for ABC15 in Arizona, also posted about the uploading error on Tuesday, noting in a follow-up tweet that “Stuff like this happens from time to time. No, the results didn't change.” 

Archer’s original tweet flagging the issue has been incorrectly used by many Trump supporters to falsely allege fraud in the Arizona election.

Arizona will certify its election results on November 30. Biden currently holds a narrow margin of more than 10,000 votes.

Few holidays underscore America's unhealthy info diet more than Thanksgiving. While this year's holiday will certainly be different, and hopefully gatherings will be kept small or scrubbed entirely to limit the health risk, my suspicion is that in one way or another, this will prove true yet again, either through Zoom gatherings or at in-person dinners.

In fact, fresh off the heels of a heated election and amid a surging pandemic, it might even prove to be worse than usual. I suspect that quite a few families will have relatives who believe that the election was rigged or stolen. Other families might encounter members who refuse to wear masks or abide by other safety protocols. And some might see their loved ones espouse QAnon-related rhetoric.

Certainly, Fox News and talk radio certainly play a role in this. There is no question about that. But social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube also factor heavily into the equation. Not only do these platforms empower bad faith and dishonest actors, but they algorithmically encourage them. These sites were once places that you'd sign on to and see some family photos or a funny viral video. Now, they're both loaded with disinformation and hyper-partisan rhetoric that circulates and influences the people we care most about.

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One America News Network, one of President Trump’s favorite media outlets, has been banned from posting new videos to YouTube for a week for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, YouTube said on Tuesday.

News of the temporary ban was first reported by Axios.

"After careful review, we removed a video from OANN and issued a strike on the channel for violating our Covid-19 misinformation policy, which prohibits content claiming there’s a guaranteed cure," Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, told CNN in a statement.

"Additionally, due to repeated violations of our Covid-19 misinformation policy and other channel monetization policies, we've suspended the channel from the YouTube Partner Program and as a result, its monetization on YouTube,” Choi added.

OANN, which has become a hub of conspiracy theories undermining the integrity of the election, is also carried by major cable operators, including DirecTV, which is owned by CNN’s parent company AT&T. 

CNN has reached out to OANN for comment.

A few weeks before the election, I went to a meeting of QAnon fanatics in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The groupthink there: President Trump was not only going to win the election — he was going to win it in a landslide. Anything other than that result would be evidence of mass election fraud.

That, of course, didn't happen. And on Monday evening the Trump administration green-lit the transition to the Biden presidency.

But for some Trump supporters, especially those who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories either knowingly or not, that move is meaningless. For three weeks they've been clinging to the idea that a miracle was coming, that Trump would emerge victorious and liberals would be left in tears. They haven't changed their minds yet.

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