Post-election disinfo: weaponized unreliable exit polls targeting marginalized communities

"People are lashing out in all directions, solidifying rifts with people they will ultimately need, if they plan to participate in the work of collective survival."

– Kelly Hayes, Beyond the Blame: Fighting for Each Other in the Face of Fascism, on Organizing my thoughts

Emotions are high in the aftermath of the US Presidential election, and disinformation continues to flow. Many of us are angry, scared, and shocked. Others are trying to take advantage of the situation to incite hate and violence, weaken the resistance to fascism, and avoid accountability.

"Think before you engage or share."

– Shireen Mitchell, All of us have been targeted by disinformation (2020)

Well-crafted disinfo takes advantage of our emotions by getting us to amplify false and misleading messages. And as always there's a lot of racialized disinformation, reinforcing white supremacy by spreading false or misleading information about communities of color.

A specific example of post-election racialized disinfo that I'm seeing a lot of is weaponizing exit poll data to target Latinos, Black men, trans people, and other marginalized demographics. Like a lot of disinfo, this combines a kernel of truth with misleading omissions, exaggeration, misleading framing, and decontextualization ... it seems plausible, so even people who aren't intentionally trying to spread disinfo will amplify it.

Please don't do that! 5 ways to fight post-election disinformation on Bluesky and the Fediverse, on the IFTAS blog, has a deep dive into useful tactic ... but really the basics come down to these key points.

The kernel of truth with weaponized exit poll result is that people are generally quoting exit polls accurately. But now lets look at the misleading omissions ...

• The framing of pointing to voting patterns of a specific minority group as responsible for the results is misleading, because it omits the crucial fact that the overwhelming majority of people who voted for white supremacy are white.
• The exit poll data itself is notoriuously. In 2016 and 2020, there were major flaws in the data – and these problems are especially acute when it comes to race and ethnicity.

"The exit poll reports of Latino vote are profoundly and demonstrably incorrect."

– Latino Decisions wrote in Lies, Damn Lies, and Exit Polls (2016)

"Specifically, the NEP’s estimates of who voted — what percentage of voters fall into any given demographic group — appear to be wrong. This kind of problem has plagued the NEP in the past and, apparently, it is an issue again this year."

– Robert Griffin, Don’t trust the exit polls (2020)

Methodologies haven't changed since then, so we're likely to see similar problems this year. But it takes months to do the detailed analysis, and right now the unreliable exit polls are all we have. So, at best, these "analyses" are using data that is almost certain to be inaccurate and racially baised to obscure that it was primarily white people who voted for white supremacy – and instead scapegoat other groups.

And with Latino voters, there's another set of critically important misleading omissions.

"you can make it all up in more ways than one. who are those latinos? they wont break them down by country and race and that's by design."

– liza sabater, the og blogdiva & resident afroboricua

The way the exit poll results are presented misleadingly gives the impression that communities are monolithic. In reality, "Latino voters" includes Black, Indigenous, white, and multi-racial people from many different countries living in many different places. White Cubans in Miami are very different from Afro-Latino Haitians in Springfield Ohio. By lumping them together in a single category, the exit polls obscure these critical distinctions.

"now they’ll go after us Black and brown ones while los blanquitos stand by, complicit. "

– liza sabater, the og blogdiva & resident afroboricua

Weaponizing exit polls to target Latinos – or Black men, or any other marginalized group – is classic example of a racialized disinformation campaign. One of the goals of a campaign like this is to drive wedges between communities – for example, by getting white Democrats to scapegoat Black and Latino people, or to highlight their racism by implying that this must show that Latinos are too stupid or uninformed to realize that the new administration is boasting loudly about its plans for mass deportation.

Another goal of this kind of campaign is to falsely exaggerate support from marginalized communities for policies that hurt the community. When the new administration follow through on its plans for mass deportation, you just know we're going to see all kinds of press misleadingly claiming that most Latinos voted for this. Of course, no community is monolithic; many Latinos whose families have been in the US for generations and live in counties in South Texas whose local economies rely on ICE and ICE contractors may well support mass deportation! But no matter what the misleading exit polls say, that doesn't mean that most Latinios in the US – or even most Latino voters – support this heinous anti-immigrant policy.

At any rate, the people who designed this campaign did a good job. It seems plausible, so it's easy to amplify it without thinking. As always, the #1 tactic for fighting disinformation is to think before you engage or share. 5 ways to fight post-election disinformation on Bluesky and the Fediverse, on the IFTAS blog, has a deep dive into useful tactics ... and here's an excellent short video from Shireen Mitchell of Stop Online Violence Against Women.