Brookings Inst Finds:Missinformation on Political Podcasts Surged Before Attack
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| About half of political podcast episodes released between the election and the Jan. 6 riot contained election misinformation, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times |
Political podcasts played a major role in promoting lies and misinformation about the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which later fueled deadly protests on Jan. 6 at the Capitol, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.
The report, which was released on Tuesday, is the first comprehensive look at how political podcasts played a role in shaping theories of electoral fraud. The planting of misinformation began as a slow drip in the weeks before the Nov. 3 vote, and then ramped up in the weeks leading to the attack, according to the study. None of those predictions of fraud came true.
Election Misinformation by Podcast
The podcast by Stephen K. Bannon was flagged for election misinformation more than other podcasts tracked by the Brookings Institution.
Episodes sharing electoral misinformation
Researchers at Brookings reviewed transcripts of nearly 1,500 episodes from 20 of the most popular political podcasts. Among episodes released between the election and the Jan. 6 riot, about half contained election misinformation, according to the analysis.
In some weeks, 60 percent of episodes mentioned the election fraud conspiracy theories tracked by Brookings. Those included false claims that software glitches interfered with the count, that fake ballots were used, and that voting machines run by Dominion Voting Systems were rigged to help Democrats. Those kinds of theories gained currency in Republican circles and would later be leveraged to justify additional election audits across the country.
The new research underscores the extent to which podcasts have spread misinformation using platforms operated by Apple, Google, Spotify and others, often with little content moderation. While social media companies have been widely criticized for their role in spreading misinformation about the election and Covid-19 vaccines, they have cracked down on both in the last year. Podcasts and the companies distributing them have been spared similar scrutiny, researchers say, in large part because podcasts are harder to analyze and review.
“People just have no sense of how bad this problem is on podcasts,” said Valerie Wirtschafter, a senior data analyst at Brookings who co-wrote the report with
Chris Meserole, a director of research at Brookings.
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