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An influencer thought someone dropping off ballots was ‘suspect.’ It was the postman

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An influencer thought someone dropping off ballots was ‘suspect.’ It was the postman

A voter enters the Bucks County Administration building in Doylestown, Pa. on Oct. 31, 2024.

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Two days before Halloween, a Pennsylvania postal worker was delivering a box of mailed-in ballots to the Northampton County Courthouse. A man filming with his phone began asking questions and followed the postal worker into the building.

The man doing filming was told that the man with the box of ballots was a postal worker.

“I dunno, apparently he’s with the post office, but that looks very suspect,” said the man filming, zooming in on what he said was “an obscene amount of ballots.”

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The video then zoomed in for a closeup of the postal worker’s face. As of Nov. 2, it had nearly six million views.

County officials in Pennsylvania confirmed to local news outlets that the man filmed in the video was an acting postmaster, doing his job. After the video went online, he began receiving threats.

Even before Election Day, unsubstantiated rumors about voter fraud are beginning to focus on specific public servants and voters. In 2020, this kind of online activity led to harassment, threats and ultimately, played a role in fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

But this year, videos like these are appearing in a dedicated community on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, formerly Twitter, and inviting more of the same type of speculation that can result in threats and harassment.

Sharing concerns and trying to make sense of the voting process is a normal part of a free and fair electoral process, said Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University and an expert on election disinformation. “But there’s a really big difference between discussing a concern and putting somebody’s face up and accusing them of treason.”

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In 2020, DiResta said many major social media platforms did more to try to add context and amplify information from credible sources. Under pressure from Republicans, many platforms have backed off on those policies since then. Perhaps the most important factor has been Twitter’s transformation into X since billionaire Elon Musk bought it in 2022 and has steadily turned the platform into pro-conservative social media site with minimal moderation policies.

“I would say the major difference this time, though, is that X is hosting the communities where this sort of effort at sense-making is taking place,” said DiResta.

Over this past year, Musk has become a major backer of Donald Trump’s campaign and himself become an avid sharer of election fraud rumors on X. This month, the super PAC Musk founded to support Trump created a dedicated space on the social media platform to share crowdsourced instances of potential election fraud, where it has quickly amassed a large following of more than 60,000 users.

“Most of the people who are responding to the posts are convinced that the election is being stolen and so feels a little bit more like a place where they’re trying to just gather evidence to prove the thing that they’ve already decided has happened,” said DiResta. “And they’re concerned about that because they keep hearing it from political elites that they trust – people like Donald Trump and people like Elon Musk.”

Each individual post, DiResta said, is woven into a much broader narrative by politicians and pro-Trump influencers, often with conspiratorial overtones. The amalgamation is meant to imply that evidence of voter fraud is massive and insurmountable, despite more than 60 court cases, multiple recounts and ballot audits, that found no evidence of significant voting irregularities in 2020.

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X did not respond to a request for comment from NPR.

Burned by election lies

The impact on the everyday people who get tangled up in these conspiracy theories is profound.

The legal nonprofit Protect Democracy helped file a number of defamation lawsuits against election deniers after the 2020 election, “on behalf of people who found themselves suddenly being lied about in the public sphere for claims that they were breaking the law when they were not breaking the law,” said Protect Democracy counsel Jane Bentrott.

Pro-Trump figures and partisan media organizations like One America News publicly retracted allegations and reached settlements with the people they had falsely accused of election fraud.

Georgia election worker Shaye Moss , right, leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. District Courthouse on Dec. 15, 2023 in Washington, DC. A jury ordered Rudy Giuliani, the former personal lawyer for former U.S. President Donald Trump, to pay $148 million in damages to the two Fulton County election workers, Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman.

Georgia election worker Shaye Moss , right, leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. District Courthouse on Dec. 15, 2023 in Washington, DC. A jury ordered Rudy Giuliani, the former personal lawyer for former U.S. President Donald Trump, to pay $148 million in damages to the two Fulton County election workers, Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman.

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One prominent case Protect Democracy is involved with is a defamation suit against Trump’s then-attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who baselessly accused two Georgia election workers by name of manipulating ballots.

Giuliani was found liable for defamation and a jury awarded the pair $148 million last year.

“The flame that Giuliani lit with those lies and passed to so many others changed every aspect of our lives. Our homes, our family, our work, our sense of safety, our mental health,” said Shaye Moss, one of the workers, after the jury handed down its verdict.

“As he learned,” said Bentrott, “and hopefully others who are paying attention learned, folks who accuse others falsely of breaking the law can have substantial consequences for those lies.”

But even successful defamation cases often take years to resolve and Giuliani has yet to pay the women anything.

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Protect Democracy made an effort to hold high profile figures like Giuliani accountable for spreading false accusations. But overall, the media landscape those influencers are part of has remained intact, according to DiResta.

“What you’re seeing is a pipeline by which somebody makes an allegation, usually a small account, a person with a very concern that feels very real to them, but it’s picked up by a person who has maybe tens to hundreds of thousands of followers.”

DiResta has studied the way the January 6th Capitol riot was motivated in part by beliefs in the messages this pipeline generated.

The day after posting the video of the Pennsylvania postal worker, its creator wrote on X that if the subject of his video did turn out to be just a public servant doing his job, “I’ll take this down and issue a correcting statement. We are after the truth, whatever that may be.” As of Nov. 2, the video remains online.

DiResta said she’s confident American election officials are better prepared for what’s coming this election, but ultimately, “The tone is set still at the top. The people on social media are able to come up with evidence, but they’re doing it to fit the frame set by the political leaders.”

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Video: The County That Got Every President Right (Since 1980)

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Video: The County That Got Every President Right (Since 1980)

One county in Washington State has picked the winner in every presidential election since 1980. Astead W. Herndon, a national politics reporter and the host of the politics podcast “The Run-Up,” visited the county last year. Now, he returns in the last days before Election Day to see if voters’ views have changed.

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Warren Buffett’s Apple trade exposes Berkshire’s dilemma

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Warren Buffett’s Apple trade exposes Berkshire’s dilemma

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What is the next great investment idea? And what are the chances that Warren Buffett will be the person to identify it? Wall Street likes his odds. Shares in the class B of Berkshire Hathaway are up 25 per cent so far in 2024. And the rally comes as Buffett has been rapidly paring back his blockbuster win in Apple stock.

On Saturday, Berkshire Hathaway reported its third-quarter results, most notably that its cash and marketable securities balance had swelled to $325bn. A big chunk of that has come from share sales of Apple whose value for Berkshire now stands at $70bn, down from a peak of $178bn. Berkshire invested initially in Apple in 2016 when its share price was around $25 a share. Today Apple trades above $200.

Berkshire’s total book value through the third quarter was $631bn, while its public equity market capitalisation is just shy of $1tn. That premium to net asset value reflects a vote of confidence from shareholders that Buffett, at 94, has another similar masterstroke in him.

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Buffett for now, however, is increasingly content to clip US Treasury coupons earning a few percentage points, risk free, with no dividends or real buybacks for Berkshire shareholders. 

It comes as other big pools of capital — alternative asset managers as well as BlackRock — are pouring funds into all types of plain and exotic private credit as well as long-tailed infrastructure and data centre deals. Blackstone, for example, has deployed $123bn in the past 12 months mostly away from either public or even private equity.

To be sure, Berkshire’s property and casualty insurance business carries out all sorts of sophisticated trading and hedging activities. But the investment group is best known for largely buying public, large-cap equities as well as mega operating business platforms such as power utilities and railroads. In the absence of a financial markets crisis where Buffett could play white knight to handsome reward, there is a question in calm markets if he needs to choose less vanilla securities.

The sheer size of Berkshire now makes it hard to find single investments that can move the needle. Its securities portfolio of more than $300bn has fewer than 30 stocks and the next Apple probably needs to be an up-and-coming Big Tech luminary. Buffett’s Apple bonanza helped obscure the dearth of juicy opportunities for Berkshire. That dilemma is now back on the table.

sujeet.indap@ft.com

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Quincy Jones, pop mastermind and 'Thriller' producer, dies At 91

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Quincy Jones, pop mastermind and 'Thriller' producer, dies At 91

Quincy Jones pictured in Beverly Hills in 2017.

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Quincy Jones pictured in Beverly Hills in 2017.

Quincy Jones pictured in Beverly Hills in 2017.

Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

Quincy Jones, whose decorated music career ran from the early 1950s through the best-known works of Michael Jackson and beyond, died Sunday. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by his publicist in a statement to NPR that did not mention the cause of death. The statement said that Jones died peacefully at his home in Bel Air, California, surrounded by his family.

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“Tonight, with full but broken hearts, we must share the news of our father and brother Quincy Jones’ passing,” the family said in the statement provided by Jones’ publicist, Arnold Robinson. “And although this is an incredible loss for our family, we celebrate the great life that he lived and know there will never be another like him.”

In the 1980s, Jones helped oversee some of music’s biggest and most widely loved moments: He produced or co-produced three of Michael Jackson’s best-selling albums, including 1982’s record-setting Thriller, and was heavily involved in crafting USA for Africa’s 1985 charity single “We Are the World.” But his career extended for decades in each direction. Jones long held the record for most Grammy nominations with 80, before Jay-Z and Beyoncé surpassed the total earlier this decade, and his 28 wins rank him third behind Beyoncé (32) and conductor Georg Solti (31).

Born Quincy Delight Jones in 1933, Jones got his start in jazz — at 19, he played trumpet in Lionel Hampton’s band — and soon performed on stages with some of the world’s best-known stars: Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley.

In the 1960s, Jones became a decorated film composer — he collected three of his seven career Academy Award nominations in 1968 and ’69 — as well as a high-profile music-industry executive, arranger and producer. On albums like The Great Wide World of Quincy Jones and Quincy Jones Plays Hip Hits, he was the headliner, but he also worked behind the scenes, producing (among many others) a string of bestselling hits for Lesley Gore.

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In the ’70s, Jones remained in the spotlight as a performer and executive, expanding his reach with high-profile projects such as the soundtrack to The Wiz. But the 1980s found his name attached to a remarkable string of successes, from “We Are the World” and Thriller to his first foray into film production: 1985’s The Color Purple, which made movie stars of Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg. Jones’ star-packed Back on the Block, released in 1989, won the Grammy for album of the year in 1991.

Jones’ successes extended well beyond music and film. Shortly after launching Quincy Jones Entertainment in 1990, he was presiding over long-running TV hits such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and MADtv. His 2001 book Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones detailed his many intersections with music’s biggest moments and stars, as well as his mental-health battles and rocky upbringing in Chicago. Jones’ philanthropic works extended well beyond USA for Africa and benefited causes such as music preservation, arts education and aid for underprivileged youth.

Jones’ tumultuous personal life included three marriages and seven children, including actresses Kidada and Rashida Jones — his daughters with actress Peggy Lipton — and Kenya Kinski-Jones, a fashion model whose mother is German actress and model Nastassja Kinski.

NPR’s Ayana Archie contributed reporting.

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