Misinformation spreads about ICE and Black Panthers at polling locations
It wouldn’t be Election Day without an allegation that members of the New Black Panther Party were intimidating voters at the polls.
This year’s allegations come by way of the Georgia governor's race, in a closely watched contest between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp.
Posts on Twitter and Facebook — some with thousands of engagements — have alleged Abrams-supporting, armed Black Panthers have been walking through polling places in Georgia and threatening voters. There is no evidence for such a claim, but the misinformation stems from a report published in Breitbart over the weekend that went viral, attracting 95,000 engagements, according to social analytics tool BuzzSumo.
Kemp linked to Breitbart's article in a tweet from his official account on Sunday. That report took photos from the Georgia New Black Panther Party’s Facebook page that showed a few of the armed men posing with Stacey Abrams’ signs on the streets of Atlanta.
The fear-baiting is reminiscent of Election Day 2008 in which two members of the New Black Panther Party, one carrying a nightstick, were recorded standing outside a Philadelphia polling place. That video became the subject of over nearly 100 Fox News segments and two Department of Justice investigations.
Facebook has also squashed rumors on its platform that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents would be patrolling polling places, checking IDs and making arrests of undocumented immigrants attempting to vote.
ICE dispelled such rumors last month, tweeting that the agency “does not patrol or conduct enforcement operations at polling locations. Any flyers or advertisements claiming otherwise are false,” ICE wrote on Twitter.
ProPublica described the ICE rumors as another recurring piece of disinformation that “cropped up intermittently over the past two years."
A Facebook spokesman told NBC News that its War Room had been monitoring posts, with assistance from the Department of Homeland Security and state elections directors. As part of that effort, Facebook had taken down multiple posts that falsely claimed ICE was patrolling polling places. They also took down “several” posts aimed at voter suppression including ones that urged voters to head to polls on nonelection days.