Hate communities targeted the Democratic Party and Joe Biden in over 12,000 posts during this period. In particular, this week saw widely shared narratives that claim Democrats and Biden are un-Catholic and oppose religious freedom for Christians. One video in particular was used to support this claim.
Fr. Ed Meeks, a Catholic priest from Maryland, released a video sermon on October 11 in which he said he did not wish to tell voters who to support in the presidential election, but labelled the Democratic Party as “the party of death and Joe Biden as their standard bearer”, singling out their pro-choice views on abortion. The video has been viewed 1.6 million times since being posted and was picked up by conservative media figures and communities online.
A post linking to the video, from a newly-created website that labels Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris as the “most anti-Catholic presidential ticket in history”, was shared over 5,000 times among our observed hate communities. The website is run by a Minnesota-based conservative organisation that separately used the video in 18 ads across Facebook and Instagram targeting voters in swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Infowars Content Promoting Hunter Biden Disinformation Shared Widely on Facebook Despite Platform Ban
Fringe communities continued to discuss a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden and what files or incriminating evidence it may or may not contain. Among our observed communities, QAnon supporters and wider conspiracy communities have amplified the claim that Biden’s hard drive contains thousands of images and videos showing him sexually abusing underage Chinese girls and that President Trump plans to release the files to the public before the election. There is no evidence to support these claims.
The main voices promoting this narrative have been the conspiracy websites Natural News and Infowars. A report on 2020 Election Center, a website recently launched by Infowars, stating these claims are “confirmed”, was shared 77 times among users in our observed communities. The same report was also published on Infowars’ main site and shared widely across Facebook, despite the platform announcing it had banned Infowars content in 2018.
Beyond our observed communities, the Infowars article has been shared over 3,250 times on Facebook, including among numerous pro-Trump groups. Activity among these communities suggests that many users believe the claims to be true. ISD could find no evidence of the Natural News report being shared on Facebook.
Disinformation Narrative Claims Democratic Party Order BLM Protests to Stop Ahead of Election
There was a 22% rise in conspiracies, hatred and disinformation targeting the Black community during this period. This primarily took the form of posts critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, claiming it is violent, anti-white, and being controlled by the Democratic Party.
While the claim is regularly promoted among anti-BLM communities, in this period, these communities questioned why there have been no large scale BLM protests in the run up to the election. A popular post in this narrative, shared 606 times among conspiracy and far-right communities, states: “Black Lives Matter protests suddenly stopped, as if turned off by a switch”. Users have promoted this post to spread the claim that the Democrats “turned off the switch” because the protests were bad for Biden’s campaign.
Separately, a far-right account directed hate towards the Black community in a tweet criticising a piece of art depicting Black women holding the heads of white people. The account said there is a war being waged against white people and claimed that “every major organisation supports Black violence” against white people. The tweet was shared 588 among users in our data set.
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