Influencers and popular podcasts fuel election disinformation among Black voters, report shows

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At least 40 million Americans may be regularly targeted and fed disinformation within Black online spaces by a host of sources across social media, fueling false information around the election, according to a new report published Tuesday.

Touted as the first deep dive into understanding disinformation targeting Black America, the report, published by Onyx Impact, a nonprofit organization working to combat disinformation within the Black community, identified half a dozen core online networks “reaching or targeting” Black Americans online with false and misleading narratives.

Conservative commentators like Candace Owens are among the most influential distributors of false information, according to the report, followed by a variety of sources, such as platforms geared toward the Black manosphere, like the “Fresh and Fit” podcast. Some episodes of the show have outright challenged women’s intelligence and allowed guests to share false and harmful narratives without pushback.

The report identifies some platforms like the nationally syndicated radio show, “The Breakfast Club,” as a "gateway influencer” or an authentic online space that holds critical space for stemming the tide of disinformation. These platforms, however, are also often targets for “bad actors to introduce harmful narratives,” according to the report.

Three other effective sources of disinformation, the report notes, are extreme Black nativists and separatists, like Foundational Black Americans who don’t believe in the concept of pan-Africanism and have stressed that people who are not descendants of enslaved people should speak for or on behalf of Black Americans, as well as health skeptics such as Rizza Islam, an activist and self-proclaimed intellectual extremist, who has said without evidence that childhood vaccines “destroy the brain chemistry” and lead to autism and other disabilities. According to the CDC, this is not true. None of the other individuals or platforms listed above responded to requests for comment.

The report also identified foreign actors “that seek to influence U.S. political discourse,” like the digital media company African Stream.

African Stream denied spreading misinformation, adding that they “present an authentically African perspective.”

“We have a vigorous fact-checking process, which means work is checked by three different trained journalists three times before posting on our platforms,” the Nairobi-based company said in a statement, describing their work as a “Pan-African digital media platform covering affairs concerning Africans at home and in the diaspora.”

Onyx Impact found those six sources collectively have a potential reach of nearly 41 million Americans, adding that each represents spaces where skepticism, anti-Black rhetoric and deception of truth run rampant. For context, that figure is equivalent to nearly every Black person in the country, according to the latest census data.

Over four months, a team of researchers for Onyx Impact identified 2,500 online accounts creating, sharing or amplifying disinformation to Black communities. The researchers also held seven national focus groups of Black audiences to understand how those narratives were showing up in offline spaces. The point of the effort was to gauge the impact of the information, said the founder of Onyx Impact, Esosa Osa, an alumnus of the voting rights group Fair Fight.

Constant repetition of false or misleading information, “no matter how kind of absurd that disinformation is,” said Osa, can be effective across audiences, regardless of income, education or class. “Disinformation works because the more times that we hear something, the more likely we are to believe that it is true,” she said.

Narratives with the highest reach and impact across the networks, the report says, include misleading narratives focused on promises that these networks say President Joe Biden has broken, civic engagement and issues that stoke division.

Earlier this year, for example, Owens tweeted without evidence that vaccines cause an “explosion” of childhood cancer. But experts, through data, have denied that any link exists. In another instance, Owens shared inaccurate information that the shooter that killed 21 people, including 19 children, at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 was transgender, an assertion that was based on the wrong photos of the shooter.

Critics have also repeatedly slammed the popular gossip site The Shade Room for being a hub for disinformation, particularly on issues related to Biden. The outlet once reported about a Biden-backed program to distribute “crack pipes” to promote health equity. The site ran with an article by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website. The post quickly went viral, and the White House called it “misleading and misinformed.” In reality, the program was harm-reduction program meant to reduce drug overdoses. The Shade Room corrected the information in a follow-up post and took the original post down, but for many, the misinformation had already spread further than the truth.

The Shade Room did not respond to a request for comment.

The report noted that “confronting the challenges created by misinformation” is “crucial to ensuring the health and stability of our democracy.”

When it is left unchecked, experts said, disinformation can have devastating effects on the most marginalized communities, including harming physical and mental health.

Timothy Welbeck, a civil rights attorney and director of the Center for Anti-Racism at Temple University, said disinformation presented as fact has the “heightened ability” to influence Black communities’ decision-making in ways never before seen, particularly less than five months from a presidential election.

“It can either encourage [voter] apathy or potentially encourage people to vote differently than they would have already,” Welbeck said, noting that Americans’ biggest issues, from the economy to Israel’s war with Hamas to federal judicial appointments, will greatly be affected by who becomes president in November — in his eyes, a direct byproduct of how successful disinformation continues to spread.

Onyx Impact offered strategic guidance in the report to those combating disinformation to engage with those platforms by identifying trusted messengers and discrediting bad actors. While there is no evidence that African Americans are more susceptible to disinformation than any other ethnic group, Osa said, consistent targeting of any group has a way of breaking through.

“Black voters are likely less susceptible to many disinformation narratives given their deserved higher levels of skepticism in institutions and government overall,” she said, “but just like other communities, when disinformation is targeted and comes from messengers with standing, it can be incredibly effective and dangerous.”

Polling shows that disinformation remains a concern for most Americans.

A national survey published this month by the media reform group Free Press found that 79% of adults in the U.S. worry that what they read online includes “fake” or “false” information with the deliberate goal to “confuse.” The poll of 3,000 people across the U.S. also found that 76% of respondents are concerned that they were reading misleading information online about the presidential election. Black Americans, in particular, are also disproportionately more likely to get their news from social media, the Free Press survey found.

Osa said there is nothing new about increased disinformation and misinformation ahead of recent presidential elections. In 2016, Russia set out to interfere with the election by spreading propaganda on social media, hacking into campaigns and probing state voter databases, according to a Senate report. In 2020, there were coordinated efforts to deter Black voters from going to the polls more systematically, including conservative activists’ making more than a thousand fake robocalls to deter Detroit voters, who are overwhelmingly Black, from voting by mail.

Today, however, Osa said, the way disinformation is presented to a population with outsize political power and influence continues to be more sophisticated. Black Americans are projected to account for 14% of eligible voters in November and have a higher turnout rate than Latino voters, despite making up a lower share of the U.S. population.

Recent outreach to Black voters by Biden and former President Donald Trump is evidence of an emphasis on capturing the demographic.

The latest NBC News poll found that 2 in 3 Black voters ages 18 to 49 support Biden, as well as 88% of older Black voters.

Trump, meanwhile, has garnered support from 1 in 4 young Black voters ahead of this year’s election and 6% of older Black voters, according to the NBC News poll, in an election in which even minor changes in voting patterns in battleground states could decide the race.

By comparison, in 2020, no less than 78% of Black voters chose Biden, according to exit polling data.

But not all experts believe disinformation efforts have substantial influence now or will have it in the future.

Deen Freelon, a presidential professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in digital politics, remains hesitant about overstating how deep misinformation runs within the Black community.

“It is incredibly difficult to draw a straight line between any kind of communication … and the kinds of attitudinal and behavioral changes that people would like communication to have,” he said. “It’s just very hard to change people’s minds and their behavior in substantial ways from what they’re already doing.”

However, Freelon acknowledged that even a slight change in behavior could tip the race to Biden or Trump.

“The vast majority of people who consume [disinformation] is a small group of people, but in a close election, a small group of people can be sufficient to, at least potentially, sway the election one way or the other,” he said.

CORRECTION (June 26, 2024, 12:17 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misclassified The Breakfast Club, according to the report's criteria. The report classifies it as a “gateway influencer,” and not as an outright distributor of false information. 

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