False Context

False Context

On the night of November 3, 2020, election workers in Fulton County, Georgia, were tired. Up early to help with Election Day, by ten o’clock at night, many were exhausted and decided to go home and get some rest. A number stayed at the vote-counting center, packing the ballots in the standard black security bins used to protect them from being tampered with overnight. Shortly after they had finished, they received a call. Under pressure to announce a result as soon as possible, the state wanted them to continue counting through the night. After letting out what we imagine was the huge sigh all workers know when bosses reverse direction, registration officer Wandrea “Shaye” Moss went and retrieved the security box from under the table where it was stored. Under the eyes of an independent state investigator and 24/7 surveillance cameras, she and others restarted the counting process.[5]

Those cameras were there to build confidence in the process, but the video they produced was put to a more devious use. If you were to have encountered a video snippet of that event in one of hundreds of viral YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok videos circulated about a month later, here’s how it would have been described:

“Video shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave”[6]

“Suitcases Filled With Ballots; Hidden Under Table; Counted Without Oversight”[7]

“Fulton County supervisors in Georgia tell poll workers, press and observers to leave the room . . . And then pull out SUITCASES of ballots.”[8]

Attached to most of these lurid headlines? A short video showing the worker pulling the security bins out and coordinating the resumed count according to standard procedure. But to the viewer, convinced by the framing text and shortened clip that these were secret suitcases filled with fake ballots, to the person who was told the count was not supervised or made to believe that other workers had been sneakily sent home—to all these people—the video, so innocuous to one who knows what it actually shows, was an outrage. It seemed to show an election being stolen in plain sight.

What happened next was sadly predictable. Threats against the worker and her mother (who was featured in another miscontextualized video) began to propagate on social media. Further photos and claims were presented, with similar skewing. As Moss and her mother went into hiding, fearing for their lives, many citizens watched video after video of this sort, on Facebook, on Twitter, on less-than-honest television programs.

That sensational coverage of events would circumvent our critical faculties is hardly novel. Going back to the example of nuclear power: in the United States, perceptions of nuclear power changed rapidly in the late 1970s; this change was partly the result of sensational coverage of the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979. People watching TV at that time watched an event that bypassed formal debate and formed lasting impressions of the danger of nuclear power, and, in the words of one writer, sent the American romance with nuclear power into a “deep freeze.”[9] The effects were substantial and durable, and it is possible that the impressions formed may have had unfortunate social consequences. In that case, at least, the event being experienced was real—there really had been an accident at Three Mile Island.

But here was another thing entirely. A substantial portion of the country was experiencing nightly events that were largely fabricated. To these viewers, the election was being stolen in front of them. They could see it, right there in the video.