76 Jim Hoft, “UPDATED: California Man Finds THOUSANDS of Unopened Ballots in Garbage Dumpster—Workers Quickly Try to Cover Them Up—County Says Returned Ballots from 2018?,” Gateway Pundit, September 29, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20200925152834/https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/exclusive-california-man-finds-thousands-unopened-ballots-garbage-dumpster-workers-quickly-try-cover-photos.
77 Joe Bak-Coleman et al., “Foreign vs Domestic: An Examination of Amplification in a Ballot Misinformation Story,” Election Integrity Partnership, June 24, 2022, https://www.eipartnership.net/2020/vast-majority-of-discarded-ballot-amplification-isnt-from-foreign-sources.
78 Angelo Fichera, “Photos of Recycled Election Materials in California Prompt False Claim,” FactCheck.org, September 29, 2020, https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/photos-of-recycled-election-materials-in-california-prompt-false-claim.
79 Hoft, “UPDATED: California Man Finds THOUSANDS.”
80 “Two Iranian Nationals Charged for Cyber-enabled Disinformation and Threat Campaign Designed to Influence the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election,” US Justice Department, January 25, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-iranian-nationals-charged-cyber-enabled-disinformation-and-threat-campaign-designed.
81 Emma S. Spiro and Kate Starbird, “Rumors Have Rules,” Issues in Science and Technology 39, no. 3 (Spring 2023): 47–49, https://doi.org/10.58875/CXGL5395.
82 Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia, “Rumor, Gossip and Urban Legends,” Diogenes 54, no. 1 (February 1, 2007): 19–35, https://doi.org/10.1177/0392192107073433.
83 “Election Security Rumor vs. Reality,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, n.d., https://www.cisa.gov/rumor-vs-reality#rumor18.
84 One interesting thing about the repetitive pathways we observed in our 2020 analysis of election rumors was that even sensational, blatantly conspiratorial ideas—CIA supercomputers changing votes, MaidenGate, other outlandish-seeming conspiracy theories—appeared to have already gone from something that one might expect to fall under complex contagion (something that might be a reputational concern for the influencer propagating it) and instead moved via simple-contagion pathways, suggesting the presence of an echo chamber. The influencers behaved as if the audience was already receptive even to truly outlandish claims, and indeed there was little sign of pushback to any claim of fraud. In the case of Sharpiegate, for example, the primed audience no longer needed extensive additional confirmation or evidence to believe that deliberate fraud had occurred, and so the narrative did move from the periphery to the influencer, but then was quickly boosted by a series of credentialed, large influencers.
85 Kate Starbird, Renée DiResta, and Matt DeButts, “Influence and Improvisation: Participatory Disinformation During the 2020 US Election,” Social Media and Society 9, no. 2 (2023): 205630512311779–205630512311779, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177943.
86 Jean-Noel Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretation, and Necessity (London: Routledge, 2013), 69.
87 Brian Slodysko, “How Trump’s MAGA Movement Helped a 29-Year-Old Activist Become a Millionaire,” ABC News, October 10, 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/trumps-maga-movement-helped-29-year-activist-become-103849365.
88 University of Washington research scholar Michael Caulfield has written about this process extensively in a series of case studies on his blog: Michael Caulfield, “Tropes and Networked Digital Activism #1: Trope-Field Fit,” Hapgood, June 12, 2021, https://hapgood.us/2021/06/12/participatory-propaganda-tropes-and-trope-field-fit-part-one. For more of Caulfield’s work on how tropes and evidence are related, see Charlie Warzel, “‘Evidence Maximalism’ Is How the Internet Argues Now,” Atlantic, February 8, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive /2024/02/evidence-maximalism-conspiracy-theories-taylor-swift/677390/.
89 Natalie Dagenhardt, “Maidengate Scandal Breaks: Democrats Allegedly Registered Women Under Their Previous Names,” Right Journalism, November 11, 2020, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20201111150137/https://www.rightjournalism.com/maidengate-scandal-breaks-democrats-allegedly-registered-women-under-their-previous-names.
90 For an overview of “Sharpiegate” in Maricopa County, see Rachel Leingang and McKenzie Sadeghi, “Fact Check: Arizona Election Departments Confirm Sharpies Can Be Used on Ballots,” USA Today, November 5, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/04/fact-check-sharpiegate-controversy-arizona-false-claim/6164820002.
91 Ibid.
92 Bill Goodykoontz, “Fox News Correctly Called Arizona for Joe Biden a Year Ago. That Night Changed Everything,” Arizona Republic, November 3, 2021, https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/media/2021/11/03/fox-news-biden-arizona-call-election-night/8544699002.
