By Caitlin Sievers | AZ Mirror
Disinformation and misinformation about the Nov. 5 election have reached a fever pitch, and Maricopa County is right at the center of it.
Election officials and experts, as well as people devoted to fighting election falsehoods, are worried that their ubiquity this election cycle will lead to voter suppression and will contribute to unfounded demands for the results to be overturned.
“I think Arizona and specifically Maricopa County is potentially ground zero of misinformation about the election,” Zarine Kharazian, a researcher for the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, told the Arizona Mirror on Thursday.
CIP brings together researchers to investigate disinformation and misinformation and to educate the public about it.
Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, told the Mirror that the combination of a highly polarized electorate and a lack of accountability on social media have created a “petri dish of falsehoods” that spread from social media sites like X, formerly Twitter, to be amplified on podcasts and YouTube.
MediaWise is a nonprofit that focuses on spreading media literacy so that people can identify misinformation on their own.
“Now you can just post a clip of anyone doing anything and slap a message on it saying you’ve witnessed election fraud,” Mahadevan said.
