“We’re taking each alternative to attach folks to dependable details about the election,” Mr. McAlister stated. He stated the corporate was additionally “deploying the groups and know-how we used within the normal elections to combat voter suppression, misinformation and interference within the Georgia runoff elections.”
Not one of the prime misinformation spreaders responded to requests for remark.
Their claims ran the gamut from insults — that the Democratic Senate candidates, Mr. Warnock and Jon Ossoff, are corrupt — to the often-repeated false declare that voting machines that run on software program from the corporate Dominion Voting Methods flipped votes from President Trump to Mr. Biden.
Mr. Quran stated the accounts additionally gave the impression to be “professionalized” in how they unfold misinformation.
“We see them repeatedly testing new narratives to see the place they will hit a sure nerve, after which appearing on it,” he stated. Misinformation that efficiently focused Latino voters in the course of the November presidential election, for instance, was additionally being repurposed for Georgia, he stated.
One declare, that Mr. Warnock, a pastor in an Atlanta church the place the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as soon as preached, “celebrated Fidel Castro and welcomed him to his church” was not correct. The declare refers to Mr. Castro’s look at a New York Metropolis church the place Mr. Warnock was a pastor 25 years in the past, and there’s no proof that Mr. Warnock was concerned in arranging the go to. There may be additionally no proof that he welcomed Mr. Castro.
It was a variation of claims that circulated in Florida in the course of the presidential election that linked Democratic candidates to the Communist Occasion in Cuba. A few of these claims have additionally been translated into Spanish to focus on the greater than 300,000 voters with Latino backgrounds in Georgia, Mr. Quran stated.
Voters in Georgia are additionally being focused with deceptive data by new media start-ups. A conservative native information community, Star Information group, which already runs information websites in Tennessee, Virginia and Minnesota, introduced in November that it was opening a enterprise referred to as the Georgia Star Information, in accordance with the liberal media watchdog group Media Issues for America.
