In the morning hours of Oct. 30, as most of the country slept, President Trump was binge tweeting again.
At 2:32 a.m., he told his 87.3 million Twitter followers: “Way ahead in Texas! Watch the Great Red Wave!”
Minutes later, he tweeted the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamiily, with a typo in the word “family.” That was it. No context, no link.
#BidenCrimeFamily is part of a yearlong, effective disinformation campaign against Joe Biden. In the final days of the presidential race, the hashtag was used on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the darker parts of the web, including 4chan and Parler. It was repeated in the right-wing media ecosystem, like Steve Bannon’s podcast and The Gateway Pundit.
In the last month, on Facebook alone, it reached at least 277,000 people, according to CrowdTangle — and that’s only on non-private pages. Without the hashtag, the slogan has had more than a million public interactions this month on Facebook.
On Wednesday afternoon, with the presidential race unresolved, a protester in Nevada interrupted an election official’s news conference by yelling, “The Biden crime family is stealing the election!”
#BidenCrimeFamily, and the typo, is a crash course in how to rally supporters around a conspiracy theory — while neutering the attempts of social media companies to stop it. Mr. Trump has used this same tactic to sow doubt about mail-in ballots and the integrity of the election.
It’s effective because it’s simple. The hashtag took a complicated issue with legitimate questions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine and China — and reduced it to a slogan that could also be used to spread falsehoods about Joe Biden. (An election-year investigation by Senate Republicans found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by Mr. Biden.)
Constant repetition makes the charge sound true, and blunts accusations of unethical behavior against Mr. Trump’s own children. With the hashtag, Mr. Trump found a way to tell supporters: Here is all you need to know about the Democratic nominee.
And Mr. Trump’s typo? It was surely not accidental. That extra “i” circumvented Twitter’s efforts to hide the hashtag in search results. Called #typosquatting, this tactic is often used by trolls and media manipulators to get around the rules of social media platforms.
To understand the power of this disinformation campaign, let’s study its life cycle.
Stage 1: Origins
For more than a year, right-wing media and partisans have pushed “Biden crime family” as a viral slogan. Media manipulation campaigns are usually conjured in small, hidden spaces by a few operators with an agenda. But in this case, it was influential media and political personalities who got the ball rolling.
At the time, Mr. Biden had not yet won the Democratic nomination, and with so many other potential presidential contenders, disinformation about him tended to remain in the right-wing media ecosystem.
As the Biden campaign picked up steam, the slogan started showing up more in the spring and summer of 2020 on talk radio and social media.
Stage 2: Seeding on Social Media
In any manipulation campaign, the second stage involves campaign operators strategically spreading the hashtag across the media ecosystem.
In this case, the hashtag served two purposes: It made the phrase itself more common, and it amplified The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop report.
In early October, Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, used the hashtag repeatedly, hinting at what would later be revealed by The Post: that the F.B.I. had seized a computer that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden.
Mr. Giuliani’s tweet, with the hashtag, served as a conduit for the story. People sharing the Post article used the hashtag to collate all the information across social media platforms.
The hashtag seeded itself on alternative social networking sites. It was popular on Parler, which advertises itself as a home for people censored by mainstream social media. By Monday, there were 21,000 “parleys,” or posts, using the term. It went viral on Gab, another fringe social network popular among the right, and was mentioned on 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” board (a haven for far-right activists), Facebook, Reddit and thedonald.win, a popular former subreddit that got kicked off Reddit.
This effort became more urgent when Twitter took the rare step that day of blocking posts with the link to the Post article, explaining that it contained private information and hacked documents, which the company said violated its policies. (Twitter later reversed its decision.) People began tweeting #BidenCrimeFamily, accusing Twitter of censorship, and in some cases linking to another news site, GNews, that had also been pushing Hunter Biden disinformation.
GNews is part of GTV Media, which is linked to Mr. Bannon and the billionaire Guo Wengui, an opponent of the Chinese Communist Party. When the Post report didn’t receive enough attention, GNews pushed even harder.
In the past two weeks, GNews pushed salacious conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, with videos and photos. Twitter accounts with “Himalaya” in the handle used the #BidenCrimeFamily hashtag to spread those photos across Twitter. Many of these accounts are now suspended.
On Oct. 16, The Daily Beast reported that these Himalaya accounts were a connected network affiliated with Mr. Bannon. Twitter confirmed to Foreign Policy magazine that it had taken down a network of connected accounts pushing Hunter Biden disinformation.
Stage 3: Amplification by Journalists, Politicians and Activists
Despite the hashtag’s popularity on the right, it received little notice in the mainstream media. This is known as “hidden virality,” meaning something extremely popular in one part of the internet is going unnoticed by the mainstream news media.
The asymmetry of attention mirrored that of the Hunter Biden laptop story; while the far-right press was copiously covering it, mainstream news publications were much more careful, largely because most newsrooms were not given access to the documents. The few that were, like The Wall Street Journal, concluded the material wasn’t all that significant.
But since Oct. 14, conservative radio talk shows used the slogan in more than 150 broadcasts. One segment, from Larry Elder on Oct. 28, is simply titled, “The New York Post vs. the Biden Crime Family.” Conservative news outlets used the slogan in headlines. Pundits used it on TV. The phrase, repeated over and over, drilled into people’s heads the idea of Joe Biden’s corruption.
Stage 4: Mitigation
The more people hear something, the more likely they are to believe it, whether it’s true or not. And false news can spread further and faster than the truth, especially on social media. Mr. Trump seems to understand this.
That’s why it’s crucial to find ways to break the circuit of disinformation. Sometime between Oct. 14 and Oct. 16, Twitter tried.
While users could still tweet the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamily, Twitter stopped showing any results if the hashtag was clicked or searched. This strategy, called de-indexing, is a step short of censorship, and can be a powerful tool in reducing a hashtag’s ability to spread specific disinformation and to become a rallying place for coordinating action. Twitter did not respond to questions about this action.
Most social media, however, appears to have taken no action. We found no evidence of similar strategies on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, or less moderated spaces, like Parler, Gab, and 4chan or 8kun (formerly known as 8chan), which cumulatively have had thousands of Biden Crime Family posts. Raki Wane, a spokeswoman for Facebook, said the company took no direct action against the hashtag. All the social media platforms make it difficult to measure the reach of a hashtag like this, which leaves us in the dark about how far it spread and to whom.
Instagram, starting on Oct. 29, suppressed all recent results for every hashtag, showing only a few top posts rather than everything, which had the effect of slowing the spread of #BidenCrimeFamily in the final days of the election.
Stage 5: Adaptation
A hallmark of a successful disinformation campaign is adaptation — when proponents of the campaign adjust their tactics to get around efforts that journalists, government officials or tech companies have taken to stem its spread. On Oct. 16, campaign operators began adapting to Twitter’s curbs.
Finally, Mr. Trump tweeted the typosquatted hashtag the Friday before Election Day.
QAnon believers and anonymous trolls certainly took notice. Qanoners, enamored of numerology, read Mr. Trump’s tweet like a tarot card, interpreting its meaning in threads on 8kun.
Even though Parler or Gab did not censor the original hashtag, people posted the “ii” version of the hashtag there, too. Like all great memes, those who are in the know get it, while others assume it’s a dumb mistake.
Over the last few weeks, posters have used adaptations of the slogan. There was #BidenCrimeFamilly, #BidenCrimeFamilyExposed, #BidenCrimeSyndicate.
On Election Day, 17,000 people were posting about #BidenCrimeFamily on Facebook. On Twitter at midday, the slogan was being tweeted 3,500 times an hour.
Emily Dreyfuss (@EmilyDreyfuss), a journalist working on the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Media Manipulation Casebook, is a former editorial director of Protocol and a senior writer at Wired.
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