A tweet from liberal activists touting Elizabeth Warren drew what seemed like a typical response from one of the Democratic presidential candidate’s fans this September:
“Thank you for endorsing Elizabeth Warren!!!” the user wrote, sharing a photo of black women holding “African Americans with Warren” signs.
The post gained only a single retweet at the time. But it found new life this past weekend, making its way to sharp-eyed Twitter users who realized it was fake, with the campaign placards photoshopped over Black Lives Matter signs.
Twitter users seized on a side-by-side comparison of the doctored version and the original, assailing the Warren campaign for the apparent misrepresentation. What they did not realize was that the account that had propagated the photo has been identified by the Warren campaign as a “troll,” only feigning support for the Massachusetts Democrat as it pushed out falsified content in an apparent effort to undermine her candidacy.
As the image solidified negative views of Warren among some who favor other Democratic candidates, the incident offered a fresh lesson about political disinformation: Homespun operations on social media represent a rising threat, capable of inciting conflict among voters and turning unwitting users into agents of online deception.
Four years after Russian agents weaponized social media during the 2016 election, tech giants are grappling not just with foreign meddling but also with falsehoods spread by less sophisticated, and frequently U.S.-based, online sources. Such actors already have circulated misleading posts, doctored photos and manipulated video around the 2020 race.
The threat is especially acute as Twitter and its Silicon Valley peers maintain a mostly hands-off approach to deceptively edited content, so long as the originating account isn’t engaging in behavior designed to “artificially amplify or suppress information,” as Twitter’s rules state.
Relying on the anonymity and amplification that social media offers, such subterfuge “doesn’t necessarily change minds, but it certainly pushes us farther apart and it entrenches us in our existing positions,” said Darren Linvill, an associate professor at Clemson University who studies disinformation. “With these little home-grown cases that are clearly fake, and that a reasonable person can observe to be fake, someone who is already inclined to believe that thing is going to believe it.”
