By Zac Cunningham Posted on

Wavelength Weekly

— a weekly collection of reporting and research on disinformation —

Americans Were Primed To Believe The Current Onslaught Of Disinformation

By Kaleigh Rogers
Nov. 12, 2020

Protesters like these in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, have been primed to believe disinformation about the outcome of the 2020 election, which Joe Biden won. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

It started with a drizzle but quickly turned into a downpour: Disinformation about the election, and in particular unfounded claims of election fraud, has flooded the internet over the past week. And Americans were primed to believe it . . .

Election Officials Spent Four Years Beefing Up Voting Security. It Paid Off.

By Lawrence Norden and Gowri Ramachandran
Nov. 12, 2020 2:34 PM

An election worker at the King County Elections office in Renton, Washington, on Nov. 3 (Jason Redmond/Getty Images)

We have made it through Election Day (or month) without signs of a significant cyberattack on our voting systems. That nightmare scenario had been at the forefront of election security experts’ minds ever since operatives connected to the Russian government targeted our election infrastructure in 2016. Election officials, federal agencies, security experts, and private vendors spent the next four years working to prevent or minimize the impact of such an attack: . . .

Misinformation 2020: What the Data Tells Us About Election-Related Falsehoods

Here are urgent lessons from the year’s most-spread false themes — and the ones going viral right now.

By Peter W. Singer
Nov. 5, 2020

On Nov. 3, the #stopthesteal false narrative took just minutes to spike and start to spread. (ZIGNAL LABS)

We can’t fully understand the 2020 election and its current aftermath without understanding how misinformation flowed — and continues to flow — through the body politic. So what does the hard data tell us about the online information warfare that targeted American voters?

U.S. Tried a More Aggressive Cyberstrategy, and the Feared Attacks Never Came

The 2020 election was the biggest test yet of a new approach of pre-emptive action against adversaries trying to hack election infrastructure or wage disinformation campaigns.

By David E. Sanger and Julian E. Barnes
Nov. 9, 2020

The United States is beginning to figure out how to deter cyberattacks on its elections, Democrats and Republicans said after the 2020 campaign. (Andrew Seng for The New York Times)

From its sprawling new war room inside Fort Meade, not far from Baltimore-Washington International Airport in Maryland, United States Cyber Command dived deep into Russian and Iranian networks in the months before the election, temporarily paralyzing some and knocking ransomware tools offline . . . .