Social media is being used to target the disenfranchised in swing states. During the presidential primaries in early 2020, disinformation regarding election dates was circulated to target certain groups of the population.
The argument
Disinformation about voting was circulated online during the 2020 presidential primaries. This is especially pertinent as many more voters than usual have been reliant on the internet for election information due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which means the channel carrying the false information was, for a great many people, the main channel they were checking. A voter with fewer offline ways to confirm a polling date has fewer chances to catch an error before it costs them their vote. The examples are specific. On "Super Tuesday", the US presidential primary election day in March when a number of US states hold primary elections and caucuses, disinformation across several states was spread. For example, one tweet targeted supporters of Kentucky candidate Matt Bevin read, "Bevin supporters do not forget to vote on Wednesday, November 6th!" — giving his supporters a date on which they could not cast the vote it was urging them to cast. During a Florida congressional primary in August, a number of voters also received texts with a link to a YouTube video falsely presented as a Republican candidates' announcement that he had dropped out. What these have in common is their mechanism. Neither attempts to change a voter's mind about a candidate; both attempt to stop a supporter from voting at all, by supplying a wrong date or a false reason to stay home. That is a precise and inexpensive form of interference, because it can be aimed at the followers of one candidate in one state and needs only to be believed once, on a day that cannot be repeated. The voters least able to absorb that kind of error are those with the fewest resources for checking a claim against another source or recovering from a missed deadline. Because disinformation of this kind was circulated online during the 2020 presidential primaries, social media is being used to target the disenfranchised in swing states.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The examples establish that voting disinformation circulated online in 2020, but not the specific claim at issue — that social media is being used to target the disenfranchised in swing states. A tweet giving Kentucky voters the wrong date and a spoofed 'candidate dropped out' text in Florida show generic election misinformation aimed at broad audiences; neither demonstrates deliberate targeting of disenfranchised communities, nor a focus on swing states, since Kentucky was not a 2020 battleground. To support the position, one would need evidence that such content was selectively directed at particular vulnerable or marginalised groups in decisive states — micro-targeted by demographics — rather than simply present in the general online environment. Showing that disinformation exists is a weaker claim than showing it is strategically weaponised against a specific disenfranchised population, and the argument supplies the former while the position asserts the latter.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] That disinformation circulated online in 2020 does not show it was aimed at the disenfranchised specifically rather than at voters generally. [Rejecting P2] The Kentucky and Florida examples targeted broad audiences and were not swing-state-specific — Kentucky was not a battleground — so they do not evidence targeting of the disenfranchised in swing states.