93 Meg Warner et al., “Presidential Election Results 2020,” CNN Politics, November 23, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/election-results-and-news-11-03-20/index.html.
94 Fox announces that Biden has won Arizona at 11:20 p.m. EST. Trump tweets at 12:45 a.m., “I will be making a statement tonight. A big WIN!” and again around 1:25 a.m., “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election,” which Twitter labels shortly after. He spoke just before 2:30 a.m. EST. Christina Wilkie, “Trump Tries to Claim Victory Even as Ballots Are Being Counted in Several States—NBC Has Not Made a Call,” CNBC, November 6, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/04/trump-tries-to-claim-victory-even-as-ballots-are-being-counted-in-several-states-nbc-has-not-made-a-call.html.
95 David Bauder, Randall Chase, and Geoff Mulvihill, “Fox, Dominion Reach $787.5M Settlement over False Election Claims,” AP News, April 20, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-trump-2020-0ac71f75acfacc52ea80b3e747fb0afe.
96 Olivia Rubin, “What Fox News Hosts Allegedly Said Privately Versus On-Air About False Election Fraud Claims,” ABC News, April 24, 2023, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fox-news-hosts-allegedly-privately-versus-air-false/story?id=97662551.
97 Center for an Informed Public, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graphika, and Stanford Internet Observatory, “The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Stanford Digital Repository: Election Integrity Partnership, March 3, 2021, https://purl.stanford.edu/tr171zs0069.
98 Joey Garrison and Jessica Guynn, “Facebook Readying ‘Break-Glass’ Tools to Restrict Content if Violence Erupts After Election,” USA Today, September 23, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/09/22/election-2020-facebook-has-break-glass-measures-if-violence-erupts/5866803002.
99 Jeff Horwitz, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023), 214.
100 Bauder, Chase, and Mulvihill, “Fox, Dominion Reach $787.5M Settlement.”
101 Davey Alba, “No Proof People Stole Maiden Names to Vote,” New York Times, November 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/technology/no-proof-maiden-names-vote.html.
102 Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, Dennis Montgomery, and Steve Bannon, “What Is THE HAMMER What Is The Scorecard War Room Pandemic Episode 470,” November 2, 2020, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/what-is-the-hammer-what-is-the-scorecard-war-room-pandemic-episode.
103 Nicole Leaver and Joan Donovan, “Viral Slogan: Hammer and Scorecard,” Media Manipulation Casebook, February 10, 2021, https://mediamanipulation.org/case-studies/viral-slogan-hammer-and-scorecard.
104 Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad,” New York Post, October 14, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad.
105 Fox News reportedly passed on the story and, interestingly, even the New York Post attributed the explosive story to two reporters who may not have been the ones to actually author it. According to two anonymous Post employees who spoke with the New York Times, the article was written by staff reporter Bruce Golding, who didn’t want his byline used because he “had concerns over the article’s credibility.” Katie Robertson, “New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report amid Newsroom Doubts,” New York Times, October 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-post-hunter-biden.html.
106 The Hunter Biden laptop story was out of scope for EIP because it didn’t relate to voting or election delegitimization—but I found it interesting as an example of two companies taking different moderation approaches to the same incident. I thought Facebook had made the right call by reducing distribution while allowing the story to remain and be shared by users and that Twitter had made the wrong one. The calls were made under the “hacked materials” policy. Blocking the nudes seemed fully reasonable, under the hacked materials policy as well as from an individual privacy standpoint—there is no free speech argument that justifies propagating someone else’s leaked private photos—but blocking the sharing of the newspaper URL was the wrong call. Twitter, responding to outcry, reversed the call several hours later.
107 “‘This Will Be Awesome’: Musk Leaks Twitter’s Hunter Biden Files,” Politico, December 2, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/02/musk-leak-twitter-hunter-biden-files-00072015.
108 Jessica Bursztynsky, “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Says Blocking New York Post Story Was ‘Wrong,’” CNBC, October 16, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/16/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-says-blocking-post-story-was-wrong.html.
