Political jokes and rumors are going viral in a busy presidential campaign season, making it even harder to tell truth from falsehood. Candidates on both sides of the aisle are feeling the effects.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
In the last couple weeks, the presidential race has been a whirlwind – and not just on the campaign trail. On social media, jokes and rumors have gone viral, making it hard to tell what’s true. NPR’s Jude Joffe-Block is here to explain how some of these rumors are playing out online. Hi, Jude.
JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK, BYLINE: Hello.
SHAPIRO: I don’t know if we need to start with a content warning, but will you begin by explaining a totally false story about Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, that blew up last week involving a couch?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Right. So a user on X just simply made up this story that Vance’s memoir included a passage about him having sex with a couch. And to be clear, there is no such mention in Vance’s book. It was a joke. But the post included a fake citation with page numbers, which made it seem plausible. And the AP even wrote a fact-check debunking it. But that only seemed to amplify the joke. The AP later retracted their article, saying it hadn’t gone through the standard editorial process, which, again, added more oxygen. And even once it was quite clear that this couch story was satire, the internet and late-night shows just kept talking about it.
SHAPIRO: Right. It really calls into question that old adage about there being no such thing as bad publicity. Is Vance different from the long line of other politicians who have been the target of misinformation and jokes on social media? Like, how is X, among other platforms, handling this?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Well, I want to just back up and talk about, in general, how X is handling the issue because, you know, Elon Musk has been accused of being part of the problem. That’s the owner of X. It’s worth noting that Musk has endorsed Trump and Vance. And recently, he shared a fake campaign video for Vice President Kamala Harris that some believe violates his own platform’s rules about labeling manipulated media. And so the fake ad he shared uses artificial intelligence to mimic Harris’s voice. And it was originally shared with a label, calling it parody. But when Musk initially shared it, he left off that label.
And so I spoke to Renee DiResta about both of these cases. She’s the author of the book, “Invisible Rulers,” about how online influencers spread propaganda and rumors.
RENEE DIRESTA: We’re just going to hit a point where you are going to have a proliferation of fake political speech, and the audience – the onus will be on them to sort out what’s real and what’s not real.
JOFFE-BLOCK: And as for Musk, he’s defended his post – the video – as parody and made jokes about it, which seems to be the overarching theme here.
SHAPIRO: Doesn’t X have something called Community Notes that are supposed to address these kinds of posts?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Yeah. And so when there are misleading posts out there, X users themselves can sign up to be part of this program, and they can propose notes that give additional context to clarify if something is misleading or what the truth is or if it’s satire. But no community notes appear on Musk’s post, where he shared the manipulated, fake Harris campaign ad, and very few of the posts about Vance and the couches have community notes either.
So what’s happening is, behind the scenes, X users are proposing notes. But in order for them to appear publicly, other users with different perspectives have to vote for those notes as helpful. And that consensus just isn’t happening in these cases, and that shows that there’s some real limitations to this tool.
SHAPIRO: That’s NPR’s Jude Joffe-Block. Thank you.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Thank you.
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