Gateway Pundit Still Pushing for an Alternate Reality

Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website with a history of spreading lies about election fraud, recently posted something unusual. He paused his coverage of the 2024 presidential election (sample headlines: “KAMALA COLLAPSES“”KAMALA FUNDED THE NAZIS”) to publish three sentences Notes It offers some factual information about previous presidential elections from the site’s founder and editor, Jim Hoft.

In his brief statement, delivered without any fanfare, Hoft writes that election officials in Georgia have concluded that widespread voter fraud did not occur at Atlanta State Farm Arena on Election Day 2020. Hoft states that they concluded that there were two election workers specifically processing the votes that night. , Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss were not involved in “ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.” And it explains: “A legal matter involving this news organization and two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable resolution.”

In fact, the blog post appeared just a few days after the Gateway Pundit. defamation case concluded Freeman and Moss sued the outlet for promoting false claims that they participated in mass voter fraud. (These claims, which were quickly debunked, focused on video footage of the mother-daughter pair storing ballots in appropriate carriers; conspiracy theorists requested instead, he said, they stuffed them into suitcases for a nefarious purpose.) Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but after they were announced, almost 70 articles previously published in Gateway Pundit and cited in the lawsuit were no longer available. accordingly An analysis by the Associated Press.

Despite this, the site has highlighted many lies and conspiracy theories in the past and is still facing problems. A case from Eric CoomerA former executive at Dominion Voting Systems shows no signs of backing down as he pushes false claims that he helped rig the 2020 election. (Gateway Pundit fought the case, including a motion to dismiss. Although the site filed for bankruptcy in April, a judge threw him outHe concluded that the application was as follows:malice”) The site continued to post and promote on one site with impunity. number Sometimes Democrats “openly steal2024 elections with fraudulent overseas votes. A political science professor recently told my colleague Matteo Wong that this particular claim is one of the following:dominant narratives”This year, as supporters of Donald Trump seek to undermine faith in the democratic process.

This is to be expected: Gateway Pundit has been around since 2004 and has always beenestablishment media.” Comment sections on any website, let alone those openly appealing to the far right, have never had a reputation for sobriety and thoughtfulness. And Gateway Pundit’s is particularly vivid. One recent commenter expressed a desire to see Democratic officials “stripped naked and sprayed with a fire hose like Rambo in First Blood.” Still, data recently shared with me by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that studies disinformation and online abuse and reports on companies it believes are allowing such content to spread, shows just how ugly these communities can get. Despite the fragmentation of online ecosystems in recent years—that is, 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 has remained strikingly relevant on the subject. social media, according to CCDH. And as seen in the comments, its user base has been regularly supporting political violence over the past few months, despite the site’s own policy. policies Prohibiting such sharing.

Researchers from CCDH recently examined the comment sections below 120 Gateway Pundit articles about election fraud allegations published between May and September. They found that 75 percent of these episodes contained “threats or calls for violence.” One of the comments quoted in the report read: “Beat any Democrat you come across today just for the sake of it.”

Another said: “They could show/televise the executions or be lined up and executed by firing squad and let that be a reminder that they shouldn’t try to overthrow our constitution.” Overall, researchers found more than 200 violent comments on Gateway Pundit.

Sites like Gateway Pundit often try to justify the harsh criticism they host on their platforms by arguing in terms of free speech. But even free-speech absolutists can understand legitimate concerns about incitement to violence. Local election officials in Georgia and Arizona have blamed the site and its comments section for threats of election violence in the past. 2021 Reuters report found links between the site and more than 80 “threatening” messages sent to election workers. According to Reuters, after Gateway Pundit published a fake report about ballot fraud in Wisconsin, an election official saw himself identified in the comments section and calls for his death. “He found one post particularly galling,” write Reuters reporters Peter Eisler and Jason Szep. “A special bullet was suggested to kill him; a 7.62-millimeter bullet for an AK-47 assault rifle.”

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

John Burns, an attorney representing Hoft and Gateway Pundit, told me in response to a request for comment that the site relies on users reporting “offending” comments, including those that contain violence or threats. “If a few slip through the cracks, we’ll investigate,” Burns said. CCDH did not comment on the details of its report or the recent lawsuits filed against the company.

The site uses a popular third-party commenting platform called Disqus. non-invasive approach To moderate far-right and racist content in the past. Disqus offers customers AI-powered, customizable features inspection tools It allows them to filter toxic or inappropriate comments on their site or ban users. CCDH report on violent comments It’s against Disqus’ own terms of service. “Publishers monitor and enforce their own community guidelines,” a Disqus spokesperson wrote in an email statement. “Only when a comment is flagged directly to the Disqus team do we review it against our terms of service. Once flagged, we aim to review it within 24 hours and determine if action is warranted according to our rules and terms of service.”

Gateway Pundit is just one of the right-wing sites offering readers an alternative reality. Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told me that these sites push the range of acceptable speech “far to the right,” and in some cases, away from traditional, “fact-based” expressions. “media. They began to become more popular with the rise of algorithmic recommendation systems and social networking, where conservative influencers distribute their articles to large numbers of users.

The real power of these sites may not come from their broad reach, but from how they shape the ideas of a relatively small, radical subgroup of people. Accordingly An article published in Nature this summerFalse and inflammatory content tends to reach a “narrow segment” of highly motivated users. Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth and one of the paper’s authors, told me via email that sites like Gateway Pundit are “effective in a very small area.” As my colleague Charlie Warzel did recently notedThe effect of this disinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subgroup of people cling to their own alternative realities.

I asked Pasha Dashtgard, research director at American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Laboratory, what exactly is the relationship between sites like Gateway Pundit and political violence. “This is the million-dollar question,” he said. “That’s hard to say.” What this means is that it is difficult for researchers and law enforcement to know when online threats will escalate into armed vigilantes descending on government buildings. There are social media platforms I just bought less transparent This, along with their data from the previous cycle, makes it difficult for researchers to understand what’s going on with them.

“The path to radicalization is non-linear,” Dashtgard explained. “I would certainly like anyone to give up on this idea: You go to this site and it makes you want to kill people.” People may have other risk factors that make them more likely to engage in violence, such as feeling alienated or depressed, he said. These sites represent just another potential push mechanism.

And they don’t seem to be slowing down. Three hours after publishing the blog post correcting the record in the Freeman and Moss case, Hoft issued another statement. This was intended for readers. “Many of you may know that The Gateway Pundit has been in the news this week. We have resolved an ongoing lawsuit against us,” reads part of the post. “Despite all their efforts, we are still standing.”