Countering Election Falsehoods: Lessons from the Hurricanes
More plain talk, and more websites rebutting lies.
THE WILD ALLEGATIONS that Hurricanes Helene and Milton were somehow engineered by the government and that the FEMA response is some kind of authoritarian crackdown are just the latest examples in a long line of outlandish information circulating online about major news stories. The responses to these natural disasters—and the responses to the responses—offer important lessons for the home stretch of election 2024, which could generate more false information than any event since the COVID pandemic.
This year, as in 2020, “Election Night” may very well take more than one night—it may include days or even weeks before there is a declared winner. That period of uncertainty will be an especially important time to adopt clear messaging to counter all the bad information that will pour into the public domain, ranging from mistakes to rumors to deliberate lies.
Hurricanes Helene and Milton required the Biden administration and state and local officials to respond quickly to incorrect information and outright lunacy about federal emergency response and disaster assistance. FEMA took a page from the playbook of another agency in the Department of Homeland Security, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), by publishing a “Hurricane Rumor Response” page on its website. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, CISA had published a new and effective rumor-control page on its website to bat down election-security conspiracy theories and provide authoritative facts about election system mechanics and security. CISA’s updated site is on standby to correct false information that may circulate about the 2024 election.
But there is a critical difference between CISA of 2020 and FEMA of 2024. In 2020, CISA was in the nearly impossible situation of fact-checking its own out-of-control executive and his political surrogates, who were claiming that voter fraud was rampant and election systems were compromised. CISA designed and executed a strategy that effectively provided accurate information about the security of election systems in a concise, timely way.
The situation that FEMA finds itself in this fall is different in one important respect: It sits in an executive branch with a president, vice president, and departmental and political leadership who can effectively share accurate information about disaster response efforts and rebut false information. President Joe Biden’s public address on October 9—in which he countered what he described as Donald Trump’s “onslaught of lies” about disaster assistance and clearly refuted false information that was “simply not true”—is a recent example.
THAT COMBINATION OF POLITICAL TOP COVER and factual clarity will be needed before, during, and after the election. To counter domestic political disinformation (or misinformation, or malinformation), people in positions of public trust and authority will have to share accurate information and debunk falsehoods that others are likely to dump into the information environment like toxic sludge.
But it’s not enough that politicians and public servants spread the truth and contradict lies—how they do so also matters.
The jargon of “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and more lately “malinformation” gained widespread use after Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election were exposed. These terms are useful for experts, in particular, when analyzing and discussing the activities of foreign adversaries. Even there, however, the older term “propaganda” is a good alternative, when appropriate. A nearly century-old law is instructive on this point: The primary law intended to address foreign influence in the United States is the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938, the original full title of which was “An Act to require the registration of certain persons by agencies to disseminate propaganda in the United States” and the House Judiciary Committee’s 1937 report on the bill mentions “propaganda” several times. FARA was originally intended to provide transparency into domestic sources of Nazi propaganda. We shouldn’t be afraid to use the label “propaganda” for foreign-influenced disinformation when that’s what it is.
Domestic politics is another matter. It would benefit us all, when possible, to distinguish foreign influence from toxic domestic politics. A better approach would be to call information exactly what it is: If the information is incorrect by mistake or ignorance, call it inaccurate or false information. If it is intentionally incorrect when the speaker knows what is actually correct, call it lies. If it is outlandish and outrageous, perhaps just call it made-up . . . stuff.
Americans are going to be bombarded in the coming days and weeks with information about the election through every possible medium. In some cases, the information delivered to the device in the palm of their hand will be intended to scare them, other times to intimidate them, and often to confuse them. With an election as critical as this one, with the future direction of the country and the rule of law on the line, everyone in a position to influence the information the public receives has one overarching obligation: Give people the information they need to make an informed decision, and give it to them straight.
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