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Introduction – Nov 13, 2020

The media is desperate to shore up the illusion of a clear Biden “win”. Paying attention to allegations that Biden’s win was fraudulent will only fuel them, the Guardian maintains. So instead of investigating the claims to determine if they are true or false, the Guardian talks to disinformation experts instead.
I don’t know what qualifies someone to be a “disinformation expert” but none of those the Guardian talks with bothers to even analyse claims that Biden’s win was questionable.
Instead, the Guardian concludes that the allegations are “lies” and the best way to deal with them is to avoid paying them attention. Seriously, the Guardian is urging readers to ignore allegations of voting malpractice without examining them.
Regardless of whether you are a Trump supporter or not, this really is an example of disinformation deliberately intended to psychologically induce readers to ignore potential crimes. Ed.

‘Don’t fuel the fire’: disinformation experts on how Biden should deal with Trump’s election lies

Lois Beckett – The Guardian Nov 13, 2020

In the days since Joe Biden won the US presidential election, Donald Trump has rejected the results, spread lies about voter fraud, replaced key military leaders with loyalists, and encouraged Republicans at every level of the party to contest the vote counts showing that he lost.

Americans are now debating how Biden should respond.

Biden has called Trump’s refusal to concede an “embarrassment” and told voters that “the fact that they’re not willing to acknowledge that we won at this point is not of much consequence”.

But some have called on the president-elect to go further, and furiously sound the alarm about an American politician adopting the tactics of a dictator.

Some experts on disinformation say that Biden’s current strategy of downplaying Trump’s behavior may be the correct one at the moment, even if it can be “frustrating to watch”, said Becca Lewis, a research affiliate at Data & Society Research Institute, who studies misinformation.

“By not giving Trump the attention that he craves, it deflates a lot of the strength and power that Trump and his supporters have in this moment,” Lewis said.

The Biden campaign used a similar approach during the campaign in response to Republicans’ attempts to turn a story about emails from Biden’s son Hunter into a major scandal.

Rather than attempting to respond point-by-point, the Biden campaign bluntly dismissed the story as “a conspiracy theory”, said Whitney Phillips, a professor of communications at Syracuse University. “It was done in a tone of, ‘We’re responding to this because we have to. We’re not giving it very much mental energy,’ whether or not that’s how they felt behind the scenes.”

“That particular strategy really did seem to work,” she said.

Having Biden acknowledge Trump’s norm-shattering behavior since the election, rather than try to ignore it, was important, Phillips said, but his quick pivot to talking about the issues facing Americans next, and the challenges the government needed to start dealing with, was “effective rhetorically, but also emotionally”.

Biden was responding “like an adult,” she said.

For the Biden team, “directly responding to any of these allegations at this stage is just adding more oxygen to the fire”, said Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

Continues …