The Gateway Pundit is still promoting alternate reality

The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website with a history of spreading lies about election fraud, recently published something unusual. He’s taking a break from covering the 2024 presidential election (sample headlines: “KAMALA IS DESTROYED“, “KAMALA FINANCES THE NAZIS“) to post a three-sentence message note from the site’s founder and editor, Jim Hoeft, offering some factual information about previous presidential elections.

In a brief statement delivered with little fanfare, Hoeft wrote that election officials in Georgia concluded there was no widespread voter fraud at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta on Election Day 2020. He specifically notes that they concluded that two election officials were processing votes that night. Ruby Freeman and Vandrea Moss did not engage in “ballot tampering or criminal misconduct.” And he explains that “the legal matter with this news organization and two election officials has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”

Indeed, the blog post appeared just days after the Gateway Pundit settled a libel suit initiated by Freeman and Moss, who sued the publication for spreading false claims that they were involved in widespread voter fraud. (These claims, quickly debunked, centered on video footage of a mother-daughter pair storing ballots in matching cases – conspiracy theorists declared that they were instead packing them in suitcases for some evil purpose.) Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but after it was announced, nearly 70 articles previously published in Gateway Pundit and cited in the lawsuit were no longer available. in accordance with Associated Press analysis.

Despite this, the site, which has promoted numerous lies and conspiracy theories in the past and which is still facing lawsuit from Eric Coomerformer Dominion Voting Systems executive for making false claims that he helped rig the 2020 election—shows no signs of backing down. (The Gateway Pundit fought the lawsuit, including filing a motion to dismiss. Although the site filed for bankruptcy in April, a judge threw it awayconcluding that the filing was in “bad faith.”) The site continues to publish messages with impunity, advertising number in many cases the conspiracy is that the Democrats “openly steals2024 elections with vote rigging abroad. A political science professor recently told my colleague Matteo Wong that this particular statement was one of the “dominant narrativesthis year as Donald Trump’s supporters look for ways to undermine faith in the democratic process.

This is to be expected: The Gateway Pundit has been around since 2004 and has always been a destination for those who have been disappointed”media establishment” Comment sections—on any website, let alone those that clearly cater to the far right—have never had a reputation for sobriety or thoughtfulness. And Gateway Pundit’s opinion is especially striking. One recent commentator described wanting to see Democratic officials “stripped naked and doused with a fire hose like Rambo in First Blood.” Even so, data recently provided to me by the Center to Counter Digital Hate — a nonprofit that studies disinformation and abuse online and that reports on the companies it finds enabling the spread of such content — shows just how troubling this can be. communities. Despite the collapse of online ecosystems in recent years, namely the rise and fall of various social platforms and the restructuring of Google search, both of which have led to an overall decline in traffic to news sites, Gateway Pundit remains strikingly relevant to social media, according to CCDH. And its user base, as seen in the comments, has regularly endorsed political violence in recent months, despite its own criticism of the site. policy ban such posts.

CCDH researchers recently examined the comment sections of 120 Gateway Pundit articles about alleged election fraud published between May and September. They found that 75 percent of these sections contained “threats or incitement to violence.” One comment quoted in the report reads: “Beat up any Democrat you meet today, just for the sake of it.”

Another: “They could show/televise hangings or lining up and shooting and make it a reminder not to try to overthrow our constitution.” In total, researchers found more than 200 hateful comments posted on Gateway Pundit.

Sites like Gateway Pundit often try to justify the vitriol they post on their platforms by arguing in terms of free speech. But even free speech advocates can understand legitimate concerns about incitement to violence. Local election officials in Georgia and Arizona have in the past accused the site and its comments section of threatening election violence. Reuters Report 2021 found links between the site and more than 80 “threatening” messages sent to election officials. According to Reuters, after the Gateway Pundit published a phony report about voter fraud in Wisconsin, the name of an election official appeared in the comments section along with calls for her to be killed. “One post in particular unnerved her,” write Reuters reporters Peter Eisler and Jason Shep. “The specific bullet recommended to kill her was a 7.62mm AK-47 caliber cartridge.”

CCDH researchers used data from a social media monitoring tool called Newswhip to measure social media engagement with election-related content from Gateway Pundit and similar sites. Although Gateway Pundit was second to Breitbart As a source of election misinformation on social media in general, the researchers found that Gateway Pundit was actually the most popular on X, where its content was shared more than 800,000 times year-to-date through October 2.

In response to a request for comment, John Burns, a lawyer representing Hooft and Gateway Pundit, told me that the site relies on users to report “offensive” comments, including those expressing violence or threats. “If someone has slipped through the cracks, we’ll take care of it,” Burns said. He would not comment on the details of the CCDH report or the recent lawsuits against the company.

The site uses a popular third-party commenting platform called Disqus, which has become widely used. hands-off approach for policing far-right and racist content in the past. Disqus offers clients customizable experiences powered by artificial intelligence. moderation tools which allow them to filter toxic or inappropriate comments from their site or block users. The CCDH report notes that hateful comments against Disqus’ own terms of service. “Publishers monitor and enforce their own community guidelines,” a Disqus spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “Only if a comment is flagged directly to the Disqus team will we review it against our terms of service. Once flagged, we will endeavor to review within 24 hours to determine whether action is required under our terms and conditions of service.”

The Gateway Pundit is just one of a constellation of right-wing sites offering readers an alternative reality. Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told me that these sites have shifted the range of what is considered acceptable speech “pretty far to the right,” and in some cases away from traditional, “fact-based” speech. Media. They began to become increasingly popular with the advent of social media, where algorithmic recommendation engines and conservative influencers disseminated their articles to legions of users.

The real power of these sites may not be their wide reach, but the way they shape the opinions of a relatively small, radical group of people. According to document published in Nature this summerFalse and inflammatory content tends to reach a small circle of highly motivated users. Sites like Gateway Pundit “are influential in a very small niche,” Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the paper, told me by email. As my colleague Charlie Warzel recently said markedthe effect of this misinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small group of people remain in their alternate reality.

I asked Pasha Dashtgard, research director at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, what exactly is the connection between sites like Gateway Pundit and political violence. “That’s the million-dollar question,” he said. “It’s hard to say.” By this, he means that it is difficult for researchers and law enforcement to understand when online threats will lead to armed vigilantes attacking government buildings. Social media platforms have just received less transparent with their data since the previous cycle, making it harder for researchers to figure out what’s going on with them.

“The path to radicalization is not linear,” Dashtgard explained. “Of course, I would like to dissuade anyone from the idea that this is like you come to this site and you want to kill people” People may also have other risk factors that make them more likely to commit violence, such as feelings of alienation or depression, he said. These sites simply represent another potential promotion mechanism.

And they don’t seem to be slowing down. Three hours after Hoft posted a blog post correcting the record in the Freeman-Moss case, he released another statement. This appeal was addressed to readers. “Many of you may know that The Gateway Pundit has been in the news this week. We have settled the current lawsuit against us,” the statement reads in part. “Despite all their efforts, we are still standing.”