PHILADELPHIA (WLVT) — Pennsylvanians were hit hard with disinformation on Election Day, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Online posts falsely claiming that ballots were tossed out, or that voting machines were malfunctioning in places like Erie, Scranton and Philly, zigzagged across social media feeds.
"Pennsylvania was billed as a tipping-point state, or a crucial place for either Biden or Trump to win. So, disinformation operations were thinking, we want to target Pennsylvania," said Matt Krayton of Publitics. His group manages digital campaigns for political groups in the region.
Krayton pointed to a Facebook group called “Stop The Steal Pennsylvania," which was part of a number of disinformation efforts on Election Day. The group has since been removed by Facebook.
"When you have a large Facebook group, you can gain a critical mass of attention," said Krayton. "This group in particular was growing at a rate of thousands of people an hour."
Before Election Day even started, Pennsylvania seemed poised to be a hotspot for misinformation. In October, the commonwealth was mentioned more than 200,000 times in misleading claims of voter fraud on websites and social media platforms. That’s according to data gathered by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.
"This was something that was coordinated in advance. There was intent to confuse voters and make them think that things were not safe or rigged," said Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington think tank.
Schafer, who studies disinformation, explained why Twitter and Facebook couldn’t scrap the posts fast enough.
"There was just too much, and it was moving too fast for them to react quickly enough," he said. "It doesn’t help that many times, it’s real people pushing out this information."
Since Election Day, Twitter has flagged over a dozen of President Trump’s tweets about the election results, including claims about voter fraud.
"When some of the disinformation narratives are coming from the top, that’s really challenging," said Schafer.
He's hopeful that efforts to sow doubt about the election process will cease in a few weeks.
Watch the video version of this PBS39 story in the player below.