The Gateway Pundit is still pushing an alternate reality

The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website with a history of spreading lies about election fraud, recently posted something out of the ordinary. Took a hiatus from covering the 2024 presidential election (example headlines: “KAMALA IS COLLAPSED,” “KAMALA FUNDS NAZIS”) to post a three-sentence sentence note from the site’s founder and editor, Jim Hoft, providing some factual information about past presidential elections.

In his brief statement, delivered without any particular fanfare, Hoft writes that Georgia election officials have concluded that no general voter fraud occurred at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena on Election Day 2020. He specifically notes that they concluded that two election workers were processing votes that night. , Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, did not engage “in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.” And it explains that “a legal matter with this news organization and the two poll workers 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 defamation suit brought by Freeman and Moss, who sued the media for promoting false claims that they participated in mass voter fraud. (These claims, quickly debunked, centered on video footage of the mother-daughter pair storing the ballots in their proper holders—conspiracy theorists had alleged (that instead they were packing them in suitcases for a nefarious purpose.) Terms of the settlement were not disclosed, but after it was announced, nearly 70 articles previously published on Gateway Pundit and cited in the lawsuit were no longer available, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Even so, the site — which has promoted numerous lies and conspiracy theories in the past and still faces a lawsuit from Eric Coomera former executive at Dominion Voting Systems, for making false claims that he helped rig the 2020 election — shows no signs of backing down. (The Gateway Pundit fought the lawsuit, including by filing a motion to dismiss. Although the site filed for bankruptcy in April, a judge threw her outconcluding that the file was in “bad faith.””) The site continued to post with impunity, promoting a number on occasion, the conspiracy that the Democrats are “stealing openly” the 2024 election with fraudulent overseas votes. A political science professor recently told my colleague Matteo Wong that this particular statement was one of the “dominant narratives” this year, as supporters of Donald Trump look for ways to undermine trust 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 dissatisfied with “establishment media.” Comment sections—on any website, let alone those explicitly aimed at the far-right fringe—have never had a reputation for sobriety and thoughtfulness. And Gateway Pundit’s is particularly vivid. One recent commentator described the desire to see Democratic officials “stripped down and hosed down like Rambo in First Blood.” Even so, data recently shared with me by the Center for Countering Digital Hate—a nonprofit organization that studies misinformation and abuse online and reports on companies it believes are enabling such content to spread—shows just how ugly these communities can get. Despite the fracturing 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 has remained strikingly relevant on social media, according to CCDH. And its user base, as seen in the comments, has regularly endorsed political violence over the past few months, despite its own site. POLICIES banning such posts.

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

Another: “They could show/televise hangings or being lined up and executed by firing squad and be a reminder not to try to overthrow our constitution.” Overall, the researchers found more than 200 violent comments hosted on Gateway Pundit.

Sites like Gateway Pundit often try to justify the vitriol they host on their platforms by arguing in free speech terms. 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. A 2021 Reuters report they found links between the site and more than 80 “threatening” messages sent to poll workers. According to Reuters, after Gateway Pundit published a fake report about ballot fraud in Wisconsin, an election official found herself identified in the comments section, along with calls for her to be killed. “He found the post particularly disturbing,” Reuters reporters Peter Eisler and Jason Szep write. “He recommended a specific bullet to kill her — a 7.62-millimeter round 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 was second Breitbart As a source of election disinformation 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 from the start of the year to October 2.

In response to a request for comment, John Burns, an attorney representing Hoft and Gateway Pundit, told me the site relies on users reporting “offensive” comments, including those expressing violence or threats. “If a few slipped through the cracks, we’ll look at it,” Burns said. He did not comment on the specifics of the CCDH report, nor the recent lawsuits against the company.

The site uses a popular third-party commenting platform called Disqus, which has taken a hands-free approach to control racist far-right content in the past. Disqus offers customers AI-powered, customizable moderation tools which allow them to filter toxic or inappropriate comments from their site or ban users. The CCDH report points out that violent comments are against Disqus terms and conditions. “Publishers monitor and enforce their own community rules,” a Disqus spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “Only if a comment is flagged directly to the Disqus team do we review it against our terms of service. Once flagged, we aim to review within 24 hours and determine whether or not action is required based on our terms and conditions.”

The Gateway Pundit is just one of a constellation of right-wing sites offering readers an alternate reality. Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told me that these sites have pushed the gamut of what’s considered acceptable “quite far to the right” and, in some cases, far from traditional, “based on facts”. ” mass media. They began to become more popular with the rise of the social web, where algorithmic recommendation systems and conservative influencers pushed their articles to legions of users.

The real power of these sites may come not from their broad reach, but from the way they shape the opinions of a relatively small and radical subset of people. Conformable a paper published in Nature this summerfalse and inflammatory content tends to reach a “narrow fringe” 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 paper’s authors, told me via email. Like my colleague Charlie Warzel recently RECORDEDthe effect of this misinformation is not necessarily to deceive people, but rather to help this small subset of people stay anchored in their alternate reality.

We asked Pasha Dashtgard, director of research for the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, what exactly is the relationship between sites like Gateway Pundit and political violence. “That’s a million dollar question,” he said. “It’s hard to say.” By this, he means it’s hard for researchers and law enforcement to know when online threats will translate into armed vigilantes descending on government buildings. Social media platforms have just received less transparent with their data from the previous cycle, making it more difficult for researchers to know what is happening to them.

“The path to radicalization is not linear,” Dashtgard explained. “I would definitely want to disabuse anyone of the idea that it’s like, 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 commit violence, such as feeling alienated or depressed, he said. These sites are just another potential push mechanism.

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