Yes, the Russians are working hard to disrupt the 2020 U.S. elections and guide voters toward the result they want. So said American intelligence officials in a recent briefing to Congress.
And what does this Russian election interference look like? Picture hundreds of Portlanders making a bonfire out of Bibles and American flags.
“Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland,” Malaysia-based Donald Trump supporter Ian Miles Cheong wrote in a tweet on Aug. 1, with a video attached.
The same day, the conservative news outlet The Federalist wrote: “A video posted to Twitter on Saturday shows rioters holding Black Lives Matter signs tossing Bibles into a fire. Bystanders stood and watched as the flames licked away at the pages of the books.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate, soon weighed in. “This is who they are,” he tweeted.
The video that started a rolling viral outrage across mostly right-wing news platforms and social-media timelines shows a gaggle of young people in masks chanting anti-Trump slogans as one person lights aflame what looks like a graphic novel. Another masked individual then drops an American flag on top of it. Twigs and newspapers are later added to the fire.
The video came from Ruptly, a Russian-government-backed news agency. “[T]he Portland Bible burnings appear to be one of the first viral Russian disinformation hits of the 2020 presidential campaign,” The New York Times reported Tuesday.
That doesn’t mean the book in the video wasn’t a Bible.
The respected fact-checking website Snopes noted last week that it isn’t clear in the various relevant Portland protest videos from Aug. 1 whether the items “being burned were, in fact, Bibles,” but it ultimately determined that one Bible did get torched that night, pointing to reporting by KOIN 6 reporter Danny Peterson.
But that’s the thing about disinformation:
It leverages social media to create a snowball effect, a mammoth virtual version of the children’s game Telephone. A Bible possibly is burned in a small fire, apparently with almost all of the protesters in the vicinity that night unaware of it, and online this quickly becomes a bonfire, with “rioters holding Black Lives Matter signs tossing Bibles” into the blaze.
A Portland protester lights cardboard to add to a small fire on July 27, a few days before another such fire went viral on right-wing media. (Beth Nakamura/The Oregonian)
The point of this Information Age disinformation is to pump out online content that has been edited with a specific purpose in mind -- in this case, to give the false impression that Portland protesters commonly burn Bibles -- and then let the targeted audience’s imaginations take flight. The Ruptly video doesn’t show that a group of protesters that night tried to put out the fire.
The video of the Aug. 1 “Bible fire” in Portland might be, as The New York Times put it, “one of the first viral Russian disinformation hits of the 2020 presidential campaign.” But it almost certainly isn’t among the most effective.
Those would be tweets and Facebook memes that reinforce biases and misperceptions, and spark anger, but can’t be debunked because they don’t rely on specific news events or because they’re presented as everyday Americans’ opinions. Millions of us are seeing them every day.
-- Douglas Perry
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