Please y'all remember that the Coli is very visible and vulnerable to agents...
The analysis identified core areas that, it says, represent the “most significant” drivers of spreading false and misleading narratives for millions of Black Americans.
www.nbcnews.com
Influencers and popular podcasts fuel election disinformation among Black voters, report shows
The analysis identified core areas that, it says, represent the “most significant” drivers of spreading false and misleading narratives for millions of Black Americans.
June 25, 2024, 4:00 PM EDT
By
Marquise Francis
At least 40 million Americans may be regularly targeted and fed disinformation within Black online spaces by a host of sources across social media, fueling false information around the election, according to a
new report published Tuesday.
Touted as the first deep dive into understanding disinformation targeting Black America, the report, published by
Onyx Impact, a nonprofit organization working to combat disinformation within the Black community, identified half a dozen core online networks “reaching or targeting” Black Americans online with false and misleading narratives.
Conservative commentators like Candace Owens are among the most influential distributors of false information, according to the report, followed by a variety of sources, such as platforms geared toward the Black manosphere, like the “Fresh and Fit” podcast. Some episodes of the show have outright challenged women’s intelligence and allowed guests to share false and harmful narratives without pushback.
The report identifies some platforms like the nationally syndicated radio show, “The Breakfast Club,” as a "gateway influencer” or an authentic online space that holds critical space for stemming the tide of disinformation. These platforms, however, are also often targets for “bad actors to introduce harmful narratives,” according to the report.
Three other effective sources of disinformation, the report notes, are extreme Black nativists and separatists, like Foundational Black Americans who don’t believe in the concept of pan-Africanism and have stressed that people who are not descendants of enslaved people should not speak for or on behalf of Black Americans, as well as health skeptics such as Rizza Islam, an activist and self-proclaimed intellectual extremist, who has said without evidence that childhood vaccines “destroy the brain chemistry” and lead to autism and other disabilities.
According to the CDC, this is not true. None of the other individuals or platforms listed above responded to requests for comment.
The report also identified foreign actors “that seek to influence U.S. political discourse,” like the digital media company African Stream.
African Stream denied spreading misinformation, adding that they “present an authentically African perspective.”
“We have a vigorous fact-checking process, which means work is checked by three different trained journalists three times before posting on our platforms,” the Nairobi-based company said in a statement, describing their work as a “Pan-African digital media platform covering affairs concerning Africans at home and in the diaspora.”
Onyx Impact found those six sources collectively have a potential reach of nearly 41 million Americans, adding that each represents spaces where skepticism, anti-Black rhetoric and deception of truth run rampant. For context, that figure is equivalent to nearly every Black person in the country, according to the latest census data.
Over four months, a team of researchers for Onyx Impact identified 2,500 online accounts creating, sharing or amplifying disinformation to Black communities. The researchers also held seven national focus groups of Black audiences to understand how those narratives were showing up in offline spaces. The point of the effort was to gauge the impact of the information, said the founder of Onyx Impact, Esosa Osa, an alumnus of the voting rights group Fair Fight.
Constant repetition of false or misleading information, “no matter how kind of absurd that disinformation is,” said Osa, can be effective across audiences, regardless of income, education or class. “Disinformation works because the more times that we hear something, the more likely we are to believe that it is true,” she said.
Narratives with the highest reach and impact across the networks, the report says, include misleading narratives focused on promises that these networks say President Joe Biden has broken, civic engagement and issues that stoke division.