Racist disinformation threatens US democracy
As baseless rumours and divisive rhetoric dominate the presidential race, minority communities are feeling the consequences
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In August, when an unfounded social media post related to the Southport stabbings sparked nationwide riots targeting Muslims and other minority groups, the UK was forced to grapple with the offline consequences of online disinformation. The country was not alone. In recent years, inflammatory and deliberately counterfactual political messaging has caused chaos from Brazil to India, particularly during election seasons.
Political disinformation is nothing new in US politics, but the amplifying capabilities of social media and the divisive rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump have turbo-charged its reach and turned minority communities into targets. As US voters head to the polls on 5 November, we look into this increasingly pressing concern.
The myth of the “non-citizen voter”
A cornerstone of the Trump campaign has been the false narrative that the Democratic party is illegally ushering immigrants with criminal records over the southern border and encouraging them to vote in the upcoming election. Rumours of so-called “non-citizen voters” have been spread repeatedly by Trump and his running mate for vice president JD Vance.
Democrats are not allowing immigrants unfettered access to the country. While the Biden-Harris administration started off by reversing some of the more extreme immigration policies initiated by Trump between 2017 and 2021, it has kept others in place, and hardened those that prevent asylum seekers from entering the US.
The idea that undocumented immigrants are voting in large numbers is similarly unsupported. Analysis of the 2016 presidential election by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice found such instances of voter fraud to be exceedingly rare. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation found just 23 instances of non-citizens attempting to vote between 2003 and 2022.
Nevertheless, such claims have reached millions of voters via social media. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), has spread racially targeted political falsehoods to his 202 million X followers, making allegations of organised voter fraud and reposting recent baseless accusations that members of the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating residents’ pets. Musk also endorsed Trump in July and has since appeared on stage at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
“We’re talking hundreds of millions of views, and that’s just from Musk alone,” says Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a Washington-based advocacy group. “It’s villainising migrants who can’t actually vote. It’s also building a narrative that could be used to assert that the election coming up is not legitimate.”
A long-standing strategy
Racist disinformation has been deployed by those in power throughout history to reinforce social divisions and structural inequalities.
“Disinformation has been a weapon to sway popular opinion for centuries,” says Marwa Abdalla, a PhD candidate specialising in anti-Muslim racism in US media and political discourse at University of California San Diego. “The example we can start with is this idea that enslaved people were not human. That was false information that had no basis in reality, but it was used to support the political interests of slave owners.”
A more recent example is the 1994 federal crime bill that many public policy experts say has played a decisive role in the mass incarceration of Black and Latino youth in the US. Democrat president Bill Clinton championed the legislation. First lady Hillary Clinton also promoted the law as a necessary measure against a scourge of “superpredators”, a thinly veiled allusion to alleged criminality among young Black and Hispanic men.
Today, social media and other online networks have exacerbated the problem, increasing the audience for disinformation and granting its purveyors an evergreen platform.
“A lot of the rhetoric we see from Donald Trump, people take it seriously even when they know he’s lying,” says Abdalla. “Some of his supporters acknowledge that, but because he is able to reinforce a sense of the victimisation they feel, they’re willing to stand by him even when he lies.”
Targeting Muslims
Racialised disinformation campaigns directly threaten democratic processes and are often aimed at political candidates of colour.
In September, in Darien, Illinois, a Syrian-American candidate for the state legislature, Suzanne Akhras, was targeted by a survey that asked likely voters “Would you vote for Suzanne Akhras if you knew she belonged to Islamic terrorist groups?”.
The survey, sent to voters via text message, claimed to have come from a group called Political Opinion Research, but offered no further information about its origins. Local media reporting on the issue could not confirm its source.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in the US, has called for an investigation into the campaign.
“We’re seeing it in mailers, we’re seeing it on TV,” said Maggie Slavin, operations manager at CAIR-Chicago. “I’ve seen local ads saying that Suzanne Akhras is affiliated with Hamas. Her opponent has also sent out print mailers saying she is too radical.”
Similar smear campaigns have been used against other Muslim candidates and lawmakers. In 2019 an Israel-based far-right fake news operation targeted Muslim congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib via 21 Facebook pages, sent to more than a million followers around the world.
The campaign against Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American, has intensified since October 2023. In September, just days after the Israeli pager and walkie-talkie attacks that killed 37 people in Lebanon, the conservative National Review magazine ran a cartoon that showed Tlaib with a device exploding on her desk, implying ties to Hezbollah.
“After 9/11, the American public was used to hearing these media narratives reducing Muslims to radical extremists,” says Slavin. “We’re seeing that rise again. It sets a precedent that you can attack someone on a sensitive issue like their religion without doing research or fear of retribution. It also puts the communities at risk too.”
Incidents of anti-Muslim violence have also risen sharply in the past year, with CAIR recording a 200% increase in hate crimes in Chicago alone. Just over a year ago, a Palestinian boy in a Chicago suburb was stabbed to death by his family’s landlord, who shouted “you Muslims must die” during the attack. Earlier in October, a seven-year-old Yemeni girl survived a gruesome assault in Detroit, Michigan, in which a 73-year-old white man cut her throat.
“The violence has escalated so significantly,” says Slavin. “We’re not just talking about comments anymore. We’re talking murders and violent attacks because the perpetrators think people are Muslim.”
It’s even worse for women
Recent research suggests that women — and particularly women of colour — are disproportionately the targets of political disinformation. A 2022 report by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) investigating the 2020 US Congressional elections found women of colour were twice as likely as other candidates to be the subject of misinformation and disinformation.
The study, which drew on a large sample of posts from X, also found that women of colour were five times more likely than all other candidates to face negative online posts specifically relating to their race or gender.
“The lives of women of colour candidates in the US have been so much more impacted,” says Dr Müge Finkel, co-director of the Gender Inequality Research Lab at Pittsburgh University.
During her relatively short presidential campaign, Kamala Harris has faced a deluge of fabricated images and narratives. Widely shared fake images show Harris posing with Sean “Diddy” Combs and Jeffrey Epstein — wealthy and powerful men accused of sex crimes, neither of whom there is any proof of her ever having met. Another viral image was captioned with a claim that Harris had worked as a prostitute in the 1980s. The woman in the photograph is not Harris.
“Once the narrative gets out it has a life of its own, whether real or not,” said Finkel. “The damage has been done. And these are not just words in every instance — these are real threats.”
One such example is the relentless harassment faced by former Vermont state representative Kiah Morris, including break-ins to her home in the middle of the night. Morris reported to police at least 26 incidents where she and her family felt threatened between 2016 and 2018. She resigned in 2018.
Women candidates who are BIPOC – Black, Indigenous or people of colour – are particularly vulnerable, says Slavin. “We definitely see the disparity and that women carry a lot more of the burden. For example, it’s easy to attack a Black woman, or a Muslim woman if she wears a hijab. They have targets on their backs.”
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