Recommendations for journalists covering election rumors in 2024

2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG

By Melinda McClure Haughey, Rachel Moran-Prestridge and Emma S. Spiro
Center for an Informed Public
University of Washington

This is part of an ongoing series of rapid research blog posts and rapid research analysis about the 2024 U.S. elections from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. This article is crossposted on the CIP’s election rumor research Substack newsletter. 

Introduction

Reporting on rumors is a difficult task — rumors spread quickly and widely in both online and offline spaces. They can often be difficult or impossible to fact-check. Additionally, reporting can sometimes amplify later discredited information in an effort to provide fast answers. This challenge is further amplified in the context of elections given the high stakes and polarized context. This post aims to help journalists covering election rumors navigate the murkiness of reporting by (1) laying out the foundational challenges faced by journalists on the mis/disinformation beat, (2) laying out a framework for reporting on election uncertainty, and (3) highlighting some of the novel challenges journalists can expect in the current election cycle. 

Our team of researchers has been studying rumors for nearly a decade and in that time they have worked with hundreds of journalists to clearly communicate the spread, nature, and impact of rumors in real time. Drawing on this expertise, our researchers have produced several academic articles that lay out some of the resource and knowledge gaps for journalists and discuss how academics can help fill these gaps with more timely, publicly available data and research. In 2024, we’re continuing these partnerships, and recently announced our Election Journalism Help Desk — a way for any journalist to get connected with an expert researcher to ask specific questions about election administration rumors. 

Foundational Challenges 

Discovering, understanding, and explaining election rumors requires an immense amount of legal, contextual and technical knowledge, in addition to significant time and resources. This is a big ask for journalists working with tight deadlines and on increasingly tight budgets. Rumor spread increasingly happens across a growing number of social media platforms, many of which have curtailed data access for reporters and researchers in recent months. Even if reporters do have limited access to data regarding social media conversations, understanding how to search and access specific election-related conversations is not straightforward, nor is it clear how to assess impact or popularity of a certain narrative. 

On top of this, the U.S electoral system is complex, with different laws and protocols governing every stage and process of voting at a state and local level. Journalists must therefore navigate both the technological and legal landscape surrounding the election in order to accurately report on emerging rumors. Challenges then arise in how to best report on rumors in order to avoid unnecessarily amplifying falsehoods while informing readers about misleading information they may encounter in their information environments. Finally, covering election rumors can be fraught — bad actors may seek to undermine authoritative reporting to amplify misleading frames, or to attack a journalist’s credibility. Reporters must therefore think about how their election reporting may be decontextualized to incite further rumors. 

Taken together, election rumor reporting is a daunting task, but a hugely necessary one. And reporters are not alone — academics, election officials and civil society groups have emerged to aid journalists in understanding and explaining election rumors to the public. Below we outline some important considerations for reporting and offer journalists concrete advice and resources for navigating the challenges we’ve outlined. 

Finding Your Story

The first challenge to reporting on rumors and misinformation, is finding topical information in the first place. To find stories and get close to the concerns of your community, we recommend three primary strategies: 

Get Embedded and Learn How to Do Advanced Searches

Rumors spread in all kinds of ways in local communities: in social media groups and posts, by word of mouth, friend-of-a-friend texts, parenting forums, conversations overheard at the coffee shop and more. The more embedded you are in these spaces, the more information you will have access to. One way to find these groups on Facebook, for example, is to navigate to Facebook Groups and then type in the name (and possible nicknames) for your community. Usually, you’ll be able to see the activity level of the group and request to join. Once you’ve joined groups in your area, you can use things like the search box in Facebook to search for keywords in posts across your groups. Keywords could be things like “ballot,” “fraud,” “election,” etc. Other social platforms like X, Reddit, WhatsApp have similar structures and some search capabilities. You can learn more about tips on doing advanced searching here. Finally, don’t forget about doing reverse image searches — we know that many of the images shared with misinformation are simply old images shared out of context. 

Set Up and Share a Local Tipline

One of the most effective ways to have information come to you is through a local tipline. If possible, you can embed a form on the homepage of your news organization’s website or even advertise it at physical locations with a QR code that opens the form. A simple Google Form will do the trick. You can ask people about the rumor, have them upload images, and even adjust the settings to require an email address or not. One important consideration is what you name the tipline. Something like “election tipline” might be more likely to collect rumors than one called “misinformation hub,” for example. Keeping the name general may make the public more likely to submit to it. Additionally, if people in your area speak languages other than English, try setting up a tip line for those languages, or ensuring that people are able to submit concerns in the language that is most appropriate for them, or the language that the rumor is in. 

People are only likely to submit and share information if they trust you and your organization. Creating and associating the tipline with official channels such as your website is important. Keeping it professional is key, since disinformation actors have set up their own “tiplines” in the past.

Review the submissions regularly (you can even set it up where you get an email any time a submission is made) and look for patterns. Questions and uncertainty about specific stories can be early signals of rumors. 

Follow National Misinformation Reporting and Response 

We know it’s hard — there’s so much information about the election coming out each day. It is hard to keep track. Still, national reports on misinformation trends and rapid response research blogs from organizations like ours and Votebeat can be a great source of information on what is happening nationally. After reading an article, if you suspect these trends are happening in your community, you can then use the keywords from these blogs to do the social media searches we mentioned earlier and see how they might apply to your community. 

Scoping Can Help Simplify

Finally, by narrowing your focus — like the CIP’s commitment to a narrow scope of election processes and procedures — you can simplify your reporting efforts and avoid getting bogged down or distracted by whatever bizarre rumors of the day emerge (cats and dogs). Your scope will likely be different than ours but articulating it can help you stay on track and focused on the most pertinent election uncertainty issues affecting your community. Ask yourself: ‘what is my goal?’ Perhaps you will focus on fact checking, rumors impacting voter turnout, certification challenges, or something entirely different. 

Know What You Know 

When covering rumors and election uncertainty, it is important for journalists to recognize the limits of their legal, technical and cultural expertise. Some reporters in the past have faced scrutiny for overlooking local context in their coverage, which underscores the importance of local journalists addressing false and misleading information within their own communities. Cultural norms, community satire, and election-related legal processes can vary significantly between cities, counties, and states, making it essential for those closest to the issues to lead the charge. 

Legal

When covering local election rumors, ensure that you build relationships with local election officials to fill gaps in your legal expertise. Never assume that legal frameworks are uniform — take the time to verify how election rules apply to the specific area that you are covering. Be aware that rules can change by jurisdiction, not just state to state. As we will discuss later in this post, getting this wrong can become fodder for discrediting you and your organization’s work. 

Technical

When investigating an online rumor and its origins, recognizing your technical limits is important. Accurately tracing the source or spread of misinformation requires a keen eye for detail and familiarity with digital forensics and platform-specific algorithms. If you’re unsure how to investigate a claim, consider two options: you can adjust the scope of your story to acknowledge the rumor and potentially debunk it if appropriate, or you can reach out to organizations with digital expertise that provide rapid response support for journalists during elections — like us at the Center for an Informed Public. These organizations can offer valuable resources, tools, and expertise to help you navigate the technical complexities of your reporting.

Cultural

Finally, if you find yourself reporting on rumors related to a geographic community or cultural community that you are unfamiliar with, we suggest that you try to find a co-author in that community to do research with and write alongside, their expertise will be invaluable. This partnership can help you navigate nuances and avoid misunderstandings, particularly around sensitive topics like satire, language barriers, identity issues, or other sensitive topics.

Questions to Ask

One place we’ve seen journalists get stuck after finding a piece of false or misleading information circulating in their community is “what next”? The following outlines some common themes of these stories and questions that you may consider when doing your investigation.  

Considerations When Drafting

Once your research has come together, the next challenge is writing it, and avoiding common pitfalls. This section, and the following, cover some considerations to keep in mind as you are drafting your coverage. 

When does sharing this rumor make it worse?

When reporting on rumors, try to understand the kind of traction they have gained already. Reporting and amplifying claims (or not reporting on them carefully) can in some cases do more harm than good. Expert opinions on when to publish pieces about misinformation have changed throughout recent years. In 2018, Whitney Philips wrote ‘The Oxygen of Amplification’, which covered, among other things, the risk of actually amplifying conspiracies by reporting on them and how some online actors would bait reporters into actually giving their extremist ideas oxygen by sharing something fringe, that would be amplified via the reporting to the public. This offered reach to ideas that normally had very little attention.  

Generally, avoid reporting on a rumor until you confirm that it has spread significantly within your community. Determining what “significantly spread” means can be challenging and depends on the local context. If you’re unsure about the reach of a rumor or cannot find an expert to help analyze it, consider writing a pre-bunking story on the broader topic. Most election-related rumors fall into well-known tropes, so you may be able to write about how these types of rumors typically emerge during elections or how they are emerging nationally. Then you could add on how they apply to your community.

Anonymization 

When you have decided to include details or screenshots of a rumor in your writing, consider how you will anonymize the image or text. To prevent further spread of the rumor, we suggest that you do not link to the post and that you anonymize the information of the poster unless they are otherwise famous, well-known, or in a position of power. Because misinformation jumps from place to place, by not anonymizing the user you may be violating their privacy or embarrassing someone who was repeating information that they genuinely thought was true. Once you’ve covered up their name and/or screen name on your image, flatten it or take a screenshot of it to ensure that people can’t download the image and see the image without the anonymization.

Terms Matter

Finally, consider the language you use as you write your piece. Uncertainty, rumor, misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theory are all terms that can be used to describe information in this context, all which come with their own connotations and implications. “Disinformation” for example has a definition that includes the intention to deceive, which can be hard to prove. The overuse of the word “misinformation” in recent years has saddled it with political baggage and can feel heavy handed when we don’t actually know for sure that the claims are untrue yet. At the Center for an Informed Public, we have shifted our focus on using the term “rumor.” We use the term “rumors” for three reasons: they can be false, true, or partly true, which helps us address uncertainty; even false rumors reveal important public concerns about elections; and there is a lot of research on rumors that helps us understand how uncertainty and anxiety contribute to them. This approach has proven effective in facilitating clearer communication and fostering a more constructive dialog around these issues. It also leaves open the possibility that the claim can turn out to be true, which happens occasionally.

Beware of Trolls and Bad Actors

Future-proofing Stories Against Decontextualization

Past research has highlighted how factual news reporting can often be used as evidence in future misleading stories. This is usually done by decontextualizing original reporting, cherry-picking and selectively editing expert quotes and by repurposing visuals from an authoritative article without their original context. While this may be somewhat unavoidable — bad actors will always try to leverage the credibility of authoritative sources for their own gain — there are actions reporters can take to make this more difficult for bad actors to achieve. For example, this can be done by adding clear visual signs that an image is misleading (rather than just sharing the image on its own), ensuring that quotations from official sources are clear and do not require caveats in reporting that can be cut in resharing, and making sure that headlines are not sensationalized and closely match the content of the article. 

An example of using visual overlays (e.g., red crosses) to mark shared images as misleading

Safeguarding Against Harassment

A growing distrust of news outlets has led to an increase in harassment of journalists both offline and online. Several professional organizations have put out useful resources for journalists including information about digital hygiene (ensuring online privacy and minimizing vectors for doxing), practical tips for female-identifying journalists and resources for journalists facing legal attacks. This may be especially a consideration for local journalists who are an active part of the communities that they live in. Foregrounding mental health and wellbeing is an important consideration for reporters working within the election rumor space. NBCU academy has collated resources specifically for reporting on community trauma. If you do find yourself in a lawsuit as a result of your reporting, there may be resources available to you. 

Specific Considerations for 2024

Each new election cycle brings up both familiar tropes and novel challenges. Our rapid response work in the early stages of the 2024 election cycle has highlighted several new or emerging issues journalists should consider in their election rumor reporting. 

AI-Generated Misinformation

While we have yet to see a significant number of prominent examples of AI-generated content related to this year’s election cycle, it is important to consider how the ease of access to AI tools like chatbots may be used to create evidence for, or amplify, election rumors. For example, back in May 2024 the Federal Communications Commission proposed a $6 million fine against Democrat political consultants for the creation of robocall technology that used AI to impersonate President Biden. It is thus important for reporters to be aware of how genAI technology may be used to impersonate and/or fabricate election information. Further, the stage is set for public distrust around the use of AI in elections, which could lead to accusations that real evidence is AI-generated in order to discredit it. To get ahead of these uncertainties, journalists should look to resources and techniques that assist in spotting AI-generated content, and additionally, should consider communicating these techniques to their audiences. For example, Foreign Press Correspondents USA has compiled a useful framework for interrogating AI-generated and altered images. In addition, new tools are being developed that aid in detecting whether text has been generated using GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. 

Common Tropes to Expect

In an ongoing “What to Expect When We’re Electing” Series our team is highlighting the narratives, topics and evidence we anticipate (and are already seeing) being prominent in this election cycle. These posts help journalists get ahead of what election rumors are likely to be spreading in their communities and give a sense of the kinds of “evidence” posters will use to substantiate misleading narratives. In doing this work we expect reporters will see an uptick in the following election-related narratives:

1. Non-Citizen Voters: We’re seeing the emergence of a range of rumors related to non-citizens voting — from misleading information about non-citizens being registered on voting rolls to claims that candidates are encouraging immigrants to enter the US in order to vote for them. These claims mobilize a number of different forms of perceived evidence from mischaracterizing voter roll data to visual “evidence” allegedly taken at the U.S. border. We’ve published several articles outlining these types of rumors as they’ve emerged.
2. Ballot Processing and Certification Procedures: Given the contentious nature of the Presidential ticket, it’s likely that challenges to election integrity will occur well past election day as votes are counted, certified and the Electoral College meets. In our recent “What To Expect” post on the election rumoring timeline we outline the sources of rumoring around these post-election procedures and what reporters can likely expect to see as ballots are counted.
3. Non-English Language Rumoring: Around 24 million voters in the U.S. are expected to rely upon language translations of voting materials while casting their votes. Accordingly, it’s vital for journalists to consider how rumors are spreading in non-English speaking communities in their localities. We continue to publish research examining the spread of election-specific rumors in Spanish, Vietnamese and other languages. In addition, there exists a growing number of community-led organizations working to tackle misinformation in their communities and home languages that can provide vital insights for journalists looking to expand their reporting. 

Conclusion

As we continue with the 2024 election period, journalists continue to play a crucial role in informing the public and addressing the spread of rumors that can undermine the electoral process. The challenges outlined in this piece—from navigating complex legal frameworks and technological nuances to understanding local cultural contexts—underscore the importance of a thoughtful and strategic approach to reporting on election-related rumors. By leveraging community engagement strategies, collaborating with local experts, and staying informed about emerging trends, journalists can more effectively uncover and address these issues.

Additional Resources

• Melinda McClure Haughey is a University of Washington Center for an Informed Public graduate research assistant and a UW Human Centered Design & Engineering doctoral student.
• Rachel Moran-Prestridge is a CIP senior research scientist and UW Information School affiliate assistant professor. 
• Emma S. Spiro, an iSchool associate professor, is a CIP co-founder and the CIP’s faculty director.
• IMAGE AT TOP: Photo by John Schnobrich via Unsplash