A Statement from the Election Integrity Partnership
There has been a lot of recent interest in the work of the Election Integrity Partnership, and we are thrilled that a much larger audience of citizens is interested in hearing about our efforts to detect and research election-related disinformation. Unfortunately, not everything written or said on TV about us has been correct, so we wanted to present some basic facts:
The Election Integrity Partnership is a non-partisan collaboration with a tightly defined mission to find and investigate false rumors and disinformation about election processes and procedures. Evaluating claims about candidates, their positions, and political parties – whether true or false – is not part of EIP’s mission. Our focus, as described in multiple posts and our final report, has been on identifying attempts to interfere in the running of an election, to encourage fraud, or to delegitimize the results using false or misleading claims. For example, the controversy over Hunter Biden’s laptop is an example of a topic that would not be in scope for EIP, and we had no part in the discussion around the appropriate treatment of that story. A table from our final report:
A grid showing the four categories of election disinformation in scope for the EIP, from The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election (stanford.edu)
The Election Integrity Partnership has always operated openly and transparently. We published multiple public blog posts in the run-up to the 2020 election, hosted daily webinars immediately before and after the election, and published our results in a 290-page final report and multiple peer-reviewed academic journals. Any insinuation that information about our operations or findings were secret up to this point is disproven by the two years of free, public content we have created.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was created by the CISA Act, passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed by President Trump in November 2018. Its mission is to protect critical infrastructure (including that around elections) in the United States from cyber threats — including both hacking and what the federal government refers to as “MDM” (misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation). A core part of CISA’s work is forging collaborations between government and industry to help defend our critical infrastructure against cybersecurity threats. CISA’s website describes how the organization connects “stakeholders in industry and government to each other and to resources, analyses, and tools to help them build their own cyber, communications, and physical security and resilience, in turn helping to ensure a secure and resilient infrastructure for the American people.”
EIP’s partnership with CISA began under the Trump administration. The EIP partnered with CISA in 2020, both to help them understand rumors and disinformation around the 2020 election and so CISA could provide corrective and/or clarifying information from election officials. At the time of that partnership, the agency was run by an appointee of President Trump, and CISA’s relationship with EIP was reviewed and approved by Trump Administration attorneys as compatible with CISA’s congressionally approved authorities.
CISA did not send any examples of potential misinformation to EIP. EIP was in contact with the nearly 10,000 bipartisan local election officials around the country via the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). Local officials of either or no party could send issues to EIP for us to investigate so they could respond to disinformation through the media or CISA via the “Rumor Control” website. To be clear, EIP did not send any reports of false rumors or disinformation to social media companies on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Most incidents EIP analyzed were discovered internally. Though EIP allowed several outside groups to send in reports of potential election disinformation, the vast majority (79%) of the incidents we investigated were first discovered by our own analysts. External reports generated tickets that were investigated by our analysts in the same manner as potential disinformation discovered internally. The judgment of whether something qualified as mis- or disinformation and was “in scope” for our project was made by EIP’s leadership, and information that was sent to us was not treated differently than any report generated internally by our analysts.
Social-media platforms, not EIP, decided which action to take. The EIP collected examples of falsehoods about the election into consolidated reports and, when we believed that these falsehoods violated the policies of social media platforms, we sent along our reports. Each company made their own determinations on how to treat our reports. Here is an example of one of those reports, drawn from our public report of March 2021:
A screenshot of a ticket reporting the Sharpiegate misinformation to several platforms, from The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election (stanford.edu)
The EIP was able to communicate with a bipartisan group of local election officials on this issue via the EI-ISAC. After our referral, many examples of the false “Sharpiegate” rumors continued to exist on social media (and still do) but were possibly labeled or demonetized.
Both the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee were invited to submit tickets. We offered a wide set of organizations the ability to send in potentially false claims for us to investigate, including both the Republican and Democratic National Committees. The Republican National Committee was contacted on July 28, 2020. They did not respond to our inquiry and did not submit any referrals.
The Democratic National Committee ended up sending four reports to the EIP:
One report involved a claim about voting-by-mail that received little traction and was closed without action.
One report was for a political ad on Facebook that made false claims about vote-by-mail fraud in an attempt to raise money. This ad was identical to an ad that had already been disabled by Facebook and was referred to Facebook as such.
One report listed several spammy content farms with extreme political content. The majority of the content was not within the tight scope of the EIP and discarded, and a handful of posts were monitored but did not have significant traction. No referrals were made to social media platforms.
One report led our team to discovering two linked Facebook pages attempting to mislead American voters using Facebook Ads. One of these ads incorrectly claimed that completed ballots had been thrown out. We alerted Facebook to this ad, and they suspended it. We observed that even after being suspended, shares of the ad remained visible and unlabeled on the platform. This investigation was immediately written up in this blog post.
One ticket was sent to the DNC to enlist their help in stopping election misinformation being spread by Democrats. The EIP received reports from the Maryland State Board of Elections and the National Association of State Election Directors that a graphic containing incorrect vote-by-mail request deadlines had been shared by Democratic party affiliates; the DNC was tagged to alert them to the mistakes in the content as EIP analysts looked into the material. A follow-up indicated that Facebook had been independently notified and took action on the posts with incorrect dates.
An NAACP referral exposed a false claim against the Proud Boys. We also reached out to multiple civil society groups concerned with election rumors in their communities, including the NAACP. There was only one referral from the NAACP, expressing concern about their membership receiving threatening emails that claimed to be sent by the Proud Boys on behalf of President Trump. We immediately investigated both the emails and a related video, which claimed to show Proud Boys hackers creating fake mail-in ballots to rig the election for President Trump. During our analysis, we discovered discrepancies in the video that proved that the targets for this attack were not actually U.S. election systems but a virtual machine hosted in Moldova. We immediately sent our analysis to the team at CISA, who forwarded it to the FBI and other government agencies. Soon afterward, a united team of leadership from across the Trump Administration announced that this campaign had originated in Iran, and two Iranian individuals have since been indicted for attempting to interfere in the U.S. election. We are pleased to have played a small role in helping prevent Iranian agents from creating a false belief that President Trump was stealing the 2020 election in concert with the Proud Boys. We promptly shared our research in a blog post here.
Claims that our work was designed to target conservative voices are false. Contrary to assertions that we ignored false rumors and disinformation on the political left, we worked hard to be balanced in our work. We reported on election rumors and disinformation targeting and spreading within Democrat-voting audiences — for example, in a blog post that covered rumors emerging from criticism of the U.S. Postal Service. However, the vast majority of false rumors and disinformation about the 2020 election spread primarily through far-right influencers catering to Trump-voting audiences, reflecting the asymmetrical nature of the phenomenon. Our research — which has been peer-reviewed in academic journals and aligns with other research and reporting by journalists and news organizations — reflects that trend.
The EIP does not “target” individual influencers, but we do factually report on their impact. Through careful analysis of hundreds of “incidents” of false/misleading claims, our research team identified high-profile accounts of media and political figures who were repeatedly influential in the spread of false and misleading claims questioning the integrity of the 2020 U.S. election. We identified a similar list of media domains that were similarly influential in the spread of false and misleading election claims. These lists were not provided directly to any partner organization. We published them through our website, public presentations, our “Long Fuse” report, and most recently in a peer-reviewed paper — as well as a statement to the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.
Claims that the Biden Administration funded the EIP and that the research funding we have received was motivated by the federal government seeking to censor specific voices are patently false.
The operations of the EIP are primarily funded through philanthropic grants to partner organizations. However, the work of the EIP generated a rich dataset for research into the spread of rumors and disinformation, and some of the post hoc work analyzing the data generated by the EIP has been funded by the National Science Foundation, initially through a grant to study online disinformation that preceded the formation of the EIP and now through a grant that specifically supports this research.
In August 2021, the National Science Foundation, through its Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, awarded a $3 million collaborative grant to a team led by the University of Washington and Stanford University for research that is developing and evaluating "rapid response” methods for studying and communicating about disinformation at a sophistication and pace on par with the dynamic and interdisciplinary nature of the challenge, like that currently being done through our research partnership. This grant supports translating the EIP’s work into research contributions, including frameworks for other groups to use to identify, analyze, and communicate about disinformation.
Our researchers have a long track record of receiving research funding from the National Science Foundation to study online rumoring and disinformation. Our application to the NSF was reviewed by a panel of outside experts and awarded based on the strength of the research. Any claim that the funding of this work emerged as a “reward” for “censoring” specific voices or a commitment to do the same in the future, is false.
As researchers who spend our days dealing with false claims, propaganda, and disinformation, we are not surprised when our work is targeted, including by some of the same people and organizations who are weakening American democracy by spreading or supporting baseless claims of non-existent election fraud. Dealing with such false claims is a part of doing this research. But in the wake of these false reports, members of our team, which includes students, have received threatening emails and social media messages for participating in an academic research project. That isn’t right.
There has also been some interest expressed in our work by members of Congress. Several of our leaders have testified repeatedly on these topics, and we would be happy to return to Congress to discuss our work and how domestic disinformation actors are damaging the long-term health of American democracy.
The EIP is continuing its nonpartisan and collaborative work in the 2022 election cycle. Our aim is not to fact-check, nor to decide what is or isn’t “misinformation.” We aim to understand how bad-faith actors manipulate the information environment, how corrections flow through the network, and how genuine confusions might be reduced. Our mission is to pass our insights on to the public and our partners to strengthen our shared democracy.
Thank you for your interest in the work of the Election Integrity Partnership.
