A threat to an American Democracy: Digital Voter Suppression A key influence in the 2020 elections Digital Voter Suppression, as we define it, includes several aspects; the use of online services/platforms to distribute inaccurate, misinformation, disinformation, false data, mobile messages, and/or images for the purpose of suppressing the vote during any election season. This is often used in conjunction with or addition to physical voter suppression activities that have a digital, social networking, technical or mobile component. The report outlines both past and present disinformation campaigns used during the election cycles starting from 2016 leading up to today. It includes descriptions of disinformation campaigns as well as examples of digital voter suppression. The report offers multiple examples of images, political ads and data visualizations of current social networks that have the intent to suppress voters and target candidates. Outline Why the Black Voters? (a crucial determinate of the direction of elections) Data on Black Voters Digital Voter Suppression Online Meddling Through Social Media Companies Conclusions Suggested Counter-Measures Resources Why Black Voters? Since before the voting rights act of 1964 the black vote has been targeted for voter suppression. Black women's right to vote was challenged although women got the right to vote in 1920. There are many aspects of the physical voter suppression from literacy tests to lynchings. Many of the forms of voter suppression seen today include gerrymandering, moving polling places, voter id requirements and removing voters from the rolls by exact match systems. What is different today is that social media has become an integral part of the landscape. It's been used to get out the vote or suppress the vote. What makes digital voter suppression different is it's harder to track and more insidious. Some aspects of both digital and physical voter suppression are legal making it harder to fight these injustices. However, digital voter suppression is exacerbated by tech companies like Facebook and other company policies that will not remove false information political ads. In 2016 based on several reports, including the Mueller report Volume I, there were instances of targeting communities, specifically democratic voters, to get them not to vote. There were key themes to decrease the black vote with utilizing the issue area of criminal justice system. During the debates there were clips of Hillary Clinton that circulated with her saying “super predator.” This led to disinformation campaigns that inferred she had something to do with the crime bill of 1994. She was the first lady at the time. President Bill Clinton signed it, Joe Biden wrote it and Bernie Sanders voted for it. However this disinformation campaign was successful in implying that she had authority over the bill when she did not. Yet, candidate Trump running against her had placed ads in newspapers across NYC to get five innocent Black and Latino boys lynched in central park for rape before their trials. This was never discussed online nor during any debates. With disinformation campaigns, highly shared content is released and then used to distribute false information. These false narratives are used in digital voter suppression campaigns. In this case the issues of police brutality, criminal justice reform, and mass incarceration were the topics targeted. These were also key topics used in the Russian IRA ads on Facebook released by the Senate. In an article by Errin Haines for the Associated Press states, “This cycle, many black voters are also making a pragmatic choice — driven as much or more by who can defeat President Donald Trump as the issues they care about — and sitting back to see which candidate white voters are comfortable with before deciding whom they will back. At the same time, the early courtship of black voters, overt and subtle, is part of a primary within the primary that includes detailed plans on issues like criminal justice reform, reparations, maternal mortality among black women, voter suppression and systemic racism.” As the 2020 election cycle heats up these same issue areas will be key aspects to addressing Black voters. However, there will be more creative disinformation campaigns. Data on Black Voters “Even though their confidence in the Democratic Party is high, the 73 percent in the 2019 results is a comedown from 85 percent in 2016 and 74 percent in 2017. But here come the warning bells. First, 23.6 percent of the black women surveyed “identified as Independents or non-affiliated.” More alarming data comes from black women ages 25 to 35. The survey notes that “only 45% agreed that the Democrats best represented their interest[s], with nearly ⅓ indicating that no party represents them.” What this tells me is that the Democratic National Committee better spend more time trying to court these voters than the electoral unicorn that white working-class voters have become for the party.” Johnathan Capehart, Washington Post When it comes to the issues that impact democracy, racism and Voter Suppression tactics are key concerns to black women voters. This includes that 46% are also concerned about foreign meddling though many have denied the impact. Black women are clear that it's an issue for them during the election. It's also why they are the main targets online and off. Black women don't just go vote they make sure they get others to vote. This was evident in 2018 when Latosha Brown started the Black Voters Matter project with a bus. Her goals: helping voters to get to the polls. This had a major impact on the shift in the House of Representatives flipping to become more Democratic. Below are the key data points on the issues important to Black Women. This report on the 5th annual power of the sister vote survey from the Black Women's Roundtable. The data from this report doesn't just outline that Black Women are frustrated with the current public outreach by the Democratic Party and candidates to attract not only the white working class but also reported white nationalists. It's one of the top three voting concerns that seems to be ignored by media and political candidates. Criminal justice reform is top of mind and the candidate for the Republican party has already begun working on targeting the black community with it's First Step Act. The act has three major components: (1) correctional reform via the establishment of a risk and needs assessment system at the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), (2) sentencing reform via changes to penalties for some federal offenses, and (3) the re-authorization of the Second Chance Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-199). The act also contains a series of other criminal justice-related provisions. Trump's campaigns has also used media attention to help specific black celebrities. One highly public example was the case of A$AP Rocky which was recently mentioned in the Impeachment hearings. This is why fake accounts pretending to be black women matter. Not only in the disinformation campaigns but in every election. There has been a consistent number of fake accounts posing as black women since 2013. These fake accounts, who pretend to be black women, seem to be real people with real concerns. They connect with the American Black community online attempting to learn black vernacular and key issue areas. Once the election ramps up they've gained enough following and trust that's when they begin to share disinformation. The goal is to make sure they have enough of a following before the shift to disseminate the disinformation. White voters are coveted by the Democratic party. However, white voters are the most unpredictable demographic for the Democratic Party to plan on securing an election win. This data reveals that none of the democrats elected to the Presidency won over the white voters. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59% of the white vote and did not win. Barack Obama only secured 39% and won. Yet, George W. Bush won both years with white voters 55 and 58% respectively. Digital Voter Suppression In the Mueller report Volume I, Russian “active measures” was a key social media campaign. These are quotes directly from the report: “IRA employees traveled to the United States in mid-2014 on an intelligence-gathering mission to obtain information and photographs for use in their social media posts.” “Some IRA employees, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated electronically with individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities, “ including the staging of political rallies. “U.S. media outlets also quoted tweets from IRA-controlled accounts and attributed them to the reactions of real U.S. persons.” Addressing voter suppression is an challenge on a state to state level. However there are differences between physical voter suppression and digital voter suppression. For example, in North Carolina a judge ruled against what they considered a laser focus on suppressing the black vote. “In what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race—specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise,” wrote Judge Diana Gribbon Motz. Although many of the tactics may change the overall outcomes are the same, the targeting of black voters to win elections. Digital voter suppression is used mostly through social networking platforms. The use of reflexive control and psyops as the strategy. Reflexive control is to ‘control’ the ‘reflex’ of the opponent by creating a certain model of behavior in the system it seeks to control.