Leftist disinformation is having its moment

Several elected officials, including a top political adviser to billionaire Reid Hoffman, recently suggested, without evidence, that former President Donald Trump may have made an assassination attempt on him in July.

Mark Hamill, an actor and Democratic rights advocate with more than 5 million followers on social media platform X, criticized the conservative policy proposal, arguing against ideas that were not part of the document.

And last month, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign misleadingly suggested in a post viewed millions of times that Trump was confused about his whereabouts during a campaign post. Her supporters used the posts to claim that Trump was suffering from cognitive decline.

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For years, the discussion about online disinformation has focused on falsehoods circulating on the American right. But in recent weeks, conspiracy theories and false narratives have also circulated on the left.

Some disinformation researchers worry that a new wave of left-wing conspiracy theories could further polarize political discourse ahead of the November election. More than a third of President Joe Biden’s supporters believed the attempted attack may have been staged, according to a July poll by Morning Consult.

“I don’t expect us to collectively become less conspiratorial,” said Adam Enders, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville. “If anything, it’s going to get more intense as we get closer to Election Day.”

The researchers stressed that the falsehoods and exaggerations were not as ingrained or as toxic as those that permeate right-wing spaces online. Several studies have shown that the political right is more likely to share false narratives and disinformation. Researchers at Northeastern University found that Democrats were generally better than Republicans at distinguishing real news from fake news.

But it’s not the first time disinformation has circulated on the left. In 2004, for example, a group of disaffected Democrats claimed that President George W. Bush’s reelection over Senator John Kerry was marred by election fraud. Pundits quickly dismissed those accusations.

Neither Mark Hamill nor the Harris campaign commented for this article. Hoffman’s assistant apologized for questioning whether the Trump attack was staged. He parted ways with the billionaire shortly after.

The Pennsylvania rally shooting became a lightning rod for conspiracy theories almost immediately after the shots were fired. Unfounded rumors that Trump himself orchestrated the shooting have turned into enduring conspiracy theories that continue to be shared by both anonymous users and liberal influencers with hundreds of thousands of social media followers.

Secret Service agents, some popular influencers on X and Threads claimed, were privy to the plan. Others theorized that the blood from the bullet that hit Trump in the ear was actually ketchup. Never mind that there was no evidence to support those claims.

Mentions of the word “staged” spiked on X in the days after the shooting, with more than 300,000 mentions, according to a report by NewsGuard, a company that monitors online disinformation. Many users said the shooting was staged, while others criticized the idea as absurd. Some left-wing users who shared conspiracy theories about the attempted attack saw their followers grow, sometimes significantly, NewsGuard found.

Joy Reid, an MSNBC host with more than 340,000 followers on Threads, raised questions about Trump’s injuries in the shooting, concerns that some of her followers interpreted when his medical records were not released as suggesting a cover-up. Majid M. Padellan, known as “Brooklyn Dad Defiant” on X and with more than 1.3 million followers, reinforced those suspicions by raising his own concerns about Trump’s injuries. (The FBI later concluded that Trump was struck by a bullet.)

MSNBC did not respond to requests for comment. In an emailed response, Padellan defended his questions about the nature and treatment of Trump’s injury and the actions of the Secret Service that day.

The attempted coup has sparked a similar wave of conspiracy theories from the American right — echoed by prominent Republicans — that Democrats ordered the attack. As the presidential campaign has progressed, Harris has become the target of a barrage of racist and sexist lies from conservatives, who have also come up with lies about Gov. Tim Walz, her vice presidential running mate from Minnesota. Trump himself has unleashed a barrage of debunked claims in just the past month.

Studies have shown that Trump plays a major role in spreading falsehoods on the right, acting as a megaphone that encourages influential people and politicians to spread falsehoods in unison. Left-wing disinformation, by contrast, tends to spread more loosely and organically among a diverse group of users and organizations, the researchers found.

“There’s a huge difference between what we hear episodically from the left and the systematic production of pretty disgusting and dangerous things that we’ve been witnessing for years in the right-wing ecosystem,” said Steven Livingston, founding director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics at George Washington University.

Researchers believe that the whiplash of the current campaign season has helped create the perfect conditions for voters of all political persuasions to feel distrustful and confused. Studies have shown that conspiracy theories tend to take hold in moments of anxiety and upheaval.

“When you get information that you don’t know what to do with, you have to fill in the gaps in the narrative,” said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of media and digital platform ethics at the University of Oregon.

Social media has become the primary source of news for many Americans, allowing voters to entrench themselves in their own ideological silos that value virality — and exaggeration — over nuance. Meanwhile, fact-checkers and their colleagues struggle to make a dent in misinformation while also fighting for more support.

Those conditions paved the way for even outlandish claims that drew national attention. A vulgar, untrue joke about Senator J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, spread quickly after he was added to the candidate list, with nearly 400,000 mentions and 4.6 million interactions from July 15 to July 31, according to online and social media data analyzed by Hootsuite. The joke became fodder for late-night TV hosts and even the Harris campaign, which referenced it on social media and at a rally.

The articles debunking leftist misinformation have been met with resistance from critics and online journalism watchdogs who say the traditional fact-checking process is inadequate to combat leftist falsehoods. The Associated Press was roundly ridiculed online for attempting to debunk the hoax by writing a crude fact-check that was soon removed. The news agency said the fact-check did not go through “standard editing.”

“Since most of what Democrats say is true at best and worst, fact-checkers have become nitpicky,” wrote Dan Froomkin, founder of Press Watch, a nonprofit political journalism website.

Snopes, the fact-checking website, is used to facing backlash for its frequent debunking of right-wing disinformation. But since the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip — and during this year’s presidential election — the website has also faced criticism after publishing fact-checking articles about leftist falsehoods, according to Doreen Marchionni, the site’s executive and managing editor.

“Whenever what we report on doesn’t align with certain views of the left or right, we are attacked from all sides,” she said.

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