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      Donald Trump Shouldn’t Be Underestimated

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      Like most Democrats, I initially underestimated Donald Trump. In 2015, I founded a super PAC dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton. Through all the ups and downs of the campaign, I didn’t once imagine that Americans would vote Mr. Trump in.He was an obvious pig (see the “Access Hollywood” tapes), a fraud (multiple failed businesses and bankruptcies) and a cheat (stiffing mom-and-pop vendors). Not to mention the blatant racism and misogyny. About the outcome, I was spectacularly wrong.Once he was in office, I misread Mr. Trump again. Having worked inside the conservative movement for many years, I found his policies familiar: same judges, same tax policy, same deregulation of big business, same pandering to the religious right, same denial of science. Of course, there were the loopy tweets, but still I regarded Mr. Trump as only a difference of degree from what I had seen from prior Republican presidents and candidates, not a difference of kind.When a raft of books and articles appeared warning that the United States was headed toward autocracy, I dismissed them as hyperbolic. I just didn’t see it. Under Mr. Trump, the sky didn’t fall.My view of Mr. Trump began to shift soon after the November election, when he falsely claimed the election was rigged and refused to concede. In doing so, Mr. Trump showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process, and in time he managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner.Then came the Capitol Hill insurrection, and, later, proof that Mr. Trump incited it, even hiring a lawyer, John Eastman, who wrote a detailed memo that can only be described as a road map for a coup. A recent Senate investigation documented frantic efforts by Mr. Trump to bully government officials to overturn the election. And yet I worry that many Americans are still blind, as I once was, to the authoritarian impulses that now grip Mr. Trump’s party. Democrats need to step up to thwart them.Are Democrats up for such a tough (and expensive) fight? Many liberal voters have taken a step back from politics, convinced that Mr. Trump is no longer a threat. According to research conducted for our super PAC, almost half of women in battleground states are now paying less attention to the political news.But in reality, the last election settled very little. Mr. Trump not only appears to be preparing for a presidential campaign in 2024; he is whipping up his supporters before the 2022 midterms. And if Democrats ignore the threat he and his allies pose to democracy, their candidates will suffer next fall, imperiling any chance of meaningful reform in Congress.Going forward, we can expect bogus claims of voter fraud, and equally bogus challenges to legitimate vote counts, to become a permanent feature of Republican political strategy. Every election Republicans lose will be contested with lies, every Democratic win delegitimized. This is poison in a democracy.As of late September, 19 states had enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for their citizens to vote. The Republican National Committee’s “election integrity director” says the party will file lawsuits earlier and more aggressively than they did in 2020. Trump wannabe candidates like Glenn Youngkin, running for Virginia governor, are currying favor with the Republican base by promoting conspiracy theories suggesting that Virginia’s election may be rigged.More alarmingly, Republicans in swing states are purging election officials, allowing pro-Trump partisans to sabotage vote counts. In January, an Arizona lawmaker introduced a bill that would permit Republican legislators to overrule the certification of elections that don’t go their way. In Georgia, the legislature has given partisan election boards the power to “slow down or block” election certifications. Why bother with elections?Democrats now face an opposition that is not a normal political party, but rather a party that is willing to sacrifice democratic institutions and norms to take power.The legislation Democrats introduced in Congress to protect our democracy against such assaults would have taken an important step toward meeting these challenges. But on Wednesday, Republicans blocked the latest version of the legislation, and given the lack of unanimity among Democrats on the filibuster, they may well have succeeded in killing the last hope for any federal voting rights legislation during this session of Congress.Having underestimated Mr. Trump in the first place, Democrats shouldn’t underestimate what it will take to counter his malign influence now. They need a bigger, bolder campaign blueprint to save democracy that doesn’t hinge on the whims of Congress.We should hear more directly from the White House bully pulpit about these dire threats. The Jan. 6 investigators should mount a full-court press to get the truth out. Funding voting rights litigation should be a top priority.Where possible, Democrats should sponsor plebiscites to overturn anti-democratic laws passed by Republicans in states. They should underwrite super PACs to protect incumbent election officials being challenged by Trump loyalists, even if it means supporting reasonable Republicans. Donations should flow into key governor and secretary of state races, positions critical to election certification.In localities, Democrats should organize poll watching. Lawyers who make phony voting claims in court should face disciplinary action in state bar associations. The financiers of the voting rights assault must be exposed and publicly shamed.The good news is that liberals do not have to copy what the right is doing with its media apparatus — the font of falsehoods about voter fraud and a stolen election — to win over voters. Democrats can leapfrog the right with significant investments in streaming video, podcasting, newsletters and innovative content producers on growing platforms like TikTok, whose audiences dwarf those of cable news networks like Fox News.Issues like racial justice, the environment and immigration are already resonating online with audiences Democrats need to win over, such as young people, women and people of color. Democratic donors have long overlooked efforts to fund the media, but with so much of our politics playing out on that battlefield, they can no longer afford to.David Brock (@davidbrockdc) is the founder of Media Matters for America and American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      YouTube’s stronger election misinformation policies had a spillover effect on Twitter and Facebook, researchers say.

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      Share of Election-Related Posts on Social Platforms Linking to Videos Making Claims of Fraud
      Source: Center for Social Media and Politics at New York UniversityBy The New York TimesYouTube’s stricter policies against election misinformation was followed by sharp drops in the prevalence of false and misleading videos on Facebook and Twitter, according to new research released on Thursday, underscoring the video service’s power across social media.Researchers at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University found a significant rise in election fraud YouTube videos shared on Twitter immediately after the Nov. 3 election. In November, those videos consistently accounted for about one-third of all election-related video shares on Twitter. The top YouTube channels about election fraud that were shared on Twitter that month came from sources that had promoted election misinformation in the past, such as Project Veritas, Right Side Broadcasting Network and One America News Network.But the proportion of election fraud claims shared on Twitter dropped sharply after Dec. 8. That was the day YouTube said it would remove videos that promoted the unfounded theory that widespread errors and fraud changed the outcome of the presidential election. By Dec. 21, the proportion of election fraud content from YouTube that was shared on Twitter had dropped below 20 percent for the first time since the election.The proportion fell further after Jan. 7, when YouTube announced that any channels that violated its election misinformation policy would receive a “strike,” and that channels that received three strikes in a 90-day period would be permanently removed. By Inauguration Day, the proportion was around 5 percent.The trend was replicated on Facebook. A postelection surge in sharing videos containing fraud theories peaked at about 18 percent of all videos on Facebook just before Dec. 8. After YouTube introduced its stricter policies, the proportion fell sharply for much of the month, before rising slightly before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The proportion dropped again, to 4 percent by Inauguration Day, after the new policies were put in place on Jan. 7.To reach their findings, researchers collected a random sampling of 10 percent of all tweets each day. They then isolated tweets that linked to YouTube videos. They did the same for YouTube links on Facebook, using a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool, CrowdTangle.From this large data set, the researchers filtered for YouTube videos about the election broadly, as well as about election fraud using a set of keywords like “Stop the Steal” and “Sharpiegate.” This allowed the researchers to get a sense of the volume of YouTube videos about election fraud over time, and how that volume shifted in late 2020 and early 2021.Misinformation on major social networks has proliferated in recent years. YouTube in particular has lagged behind other platforms in cracking down on different types of misinformation, often announcing stricter policies several weeks or months after Facebook and Twitter. In recent weeks, however, YouTube has toughened its policies, such as banning all antivaccine misinformation and suspending the accounts of prominent antivaccine activists, including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokeswoman, said that YouTube was the only major online platform with a presidential election integrity policy. “We also raised up authoritative content for election-related search queries and reduced the spread of harmful election-related misinformation,” she said.Megan Brown, a research scientist at the N.Y.U. Center for Social Media and Politics, said it was possible that after YouTube banned the content, people could no longer share the videos that promoted election fraud. It is also possible that interest in the election fraud theories dropped considerably after states certified their election results.But the bottom line, Ms. Brown said, is that “we know these platforms are deeply interconnected.” YouTube, she pointed out, has been identified as one of the most-shared domains across other platforms, including in both of Facebook’s recently released content reports and N.Y.U.’s own research.“It’s a huge part of the information ecosystem,” Ms. Brown said, “so when YouTube’s platform becomes healthier, others do as well.” More

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      Why Democrats See 3 Governor’s Races as a Sea Wall for Fair Elections

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      Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all have Democratic governors and G.O.P.-led legislatures. And in all three battlegrounds, Republicans are pushing hard to rewrite election laws.MADISON, Wis. — In three critical battleground states, Democratic governors have blocked efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to restrict voting rights and undermine the 2020 election.Now, the 2022 races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — states that have long been vital to Democratic presidential victories, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s — are taking on major new significance.At stake are how easy it is to vote, who controls the electoral system and, some Democrats worry, whether the results of federal, state and local elections will be accepted no matter which party wins.That has left Govs. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania standing alone, in what is already expected to be a difficult year for their party, as what Democrats view as a sea wall against a rising Republican tide of voting restrictions and far-reaching election laws.The question of who wins their seats in 2022 — Mr. Evers and Ms. Whitmer are running for re-election, while Mr. Wolf is term-limited — has become newly urgent in recent weeks as Republicans in all three states, spurred on by former President Donald J. Trump, make clearer than ever their intent to reshape elections should they take unified control.Republicans have aggressively pursued partisan reviews of the 2020 election in each state. In Pennsylvania, G.O.P. lawmakers sought the personal information of every voter in the state last month. In Wisconsin, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice, who is investigating the 2020 election results on behalf of the State Assembly, issued subpoenas on Friday for voting-related documents from election officials. And in Michigan on Sunday night, Ms. Whitmer vetoed four election bills that she said “would have perpetuated the ‘big lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote.”Republican candidates for governor in the three states have proposed additional cutbacks to voting access and measures that would give G.O.P. officials more power over how elections are run. And the party is pushing such efforts wherever it has the power to do so. This year, 19 Republican-controlled states have passed 33 laws restricting voting, one of the greatest contractions of access to the ballot since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Democrats in Congress have tried without success to pass federal voting laws to counteract the Republican push.The prospect that Mr. Trump may run again in 2024 only compounds what Democrats fear: that Republicans could gain full control over the three key Northern states in 2022 and, two years later, interfere with or overturn the outcome of a narrow Democratic presidential victory in 2024.“I would’ve never guessed that my job as governor when I ran a couple years ago was going to be mainly about making sure that our democracy is still intact in this state,” said Mr. Evers, a former Wisconsin schools superintendent. He was elected governor in the Democratic wave of 2018 on a platform of increasing education spending and expanding Medicaid.He and Ms. Whitmer are seeking re-election while vying to preserve the voting system, which was not built to withstand a sustained partisan assault, in the face of intensifying Republican challenges to the routine administration of elections. Mr. Wolf cannot seek a third term, but his Democratic heir apparent, Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, has been on the forefront of legal efforts to defend the 2020 election results for nearly a year.The shift from focusing on traditional Democratic issues like health care and education to assuring fair elections is starkest for Mr. Evers, a man so aggressively staid that he’s partial to vanilla ice cream.Campaigning at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wis., Mr. Evers said that Wisconsin’s race for governor next year would be “about our democracy.”Lianne Milton for The New York TimesLast week, as he walked through a row of black-and-white Holstein cows at the World Dairy Expo, he predicted that if he were defeated next year, Republican legislators would have a direct path to reverse the results of the 2024 election.“The stakes are damn high,” Mr. Evers said above the din of mooing and milking at Madison’s annual dairy trade show. “This is about our democracy. It’s frightening.”The message that democracy itself is on the line is a potentially powerful campaign pitch for Mr. Evers and his fellow Democrats, one he has used in fund-raising appeals.Republicans dismiss the idea that they are undermining democracy and say that their various election reviews will increase, not decrease, voters’ trust in the system.“It’s full of hyperbole and exaggeration, which is what the Democrats do best on this election stuff,” Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, said in an interview last week at the State Capitol. “All we’re trying to do is make sure that people who were elected were elected legitimately.”Mr. Vos said he was still not sure if President Biden had legitimately won the state. (Mr. Biden carried it by more than 20,000 votes.) It would not take much to swing statewide elections in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Four of the last six presidential contests in Wisconsin have been decided by fewer than 23,000 votes. Other than Barack Obama, no presidential nominee has won more than 51 percent of the vote in any of the three states since 1996.And as Mr. Trump and his allies chisel away at confidence in American elections by making baseless allegations of voter fraud, it is no longer a stretch to imagine governors loyal to the former president taking previously unthinkable steps to alter future results.Governors are required to submit to Congress a certificate of ascertainment of presidential electors. But what if a governor refused?Another scenario could also give a governor outsize power over the presidential election: A state could send competing slates of electors to Congress, and the House might accept one slate and the Senate the other. Then, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — the guidelines for tallying Electoral College votes, which remained obscure until the violence of Jan. 6 — appears to give the state’s governor the tiebreaking vote.The National Task Force on Election Crises, a nonpartisan group of experts in various fields, warned about such a possibility in a September 2020 memo.“It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that any one of those states falling to a Trump-aligned candidate would pose an existential threat to the survival of American democracy come the 2024 election,” said Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group dedicated to resisting authoritarianism, who convened the election crises task force before the 2020 election.Republicans have not been shy about their ambitions to change election laws in the three states.In Pennsylvania, Lou Barletta, a former congressman who recently announced a bid for governor, said that as he crossed the state last week, the top issue for voters was “election integrity.”“People talk to me about mandates, about vaccines, but they always bring up election integrity as well,” Mr. Barletta said in an interview. He said that he was waiting for the Republicans’ election review before committing to a full slate of election changes, but that he already had a few in mind, including stricter voter identification laws.Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general of Pennsylvania who defended the results of the 2020 election in the state, is expected to announce his campaign for governor as soon as this month.Susan Walsh/Associated PressJames Craig, the leading Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, has backed bills that would forbid the mass mailing of absentee ballot applications to voters who do not request them and that would enact a strict voter ID requirement. He declined to comment.Those proposed laws are being pushed by Ed McBroom, a Republican state senator, even though he released a report in June debunking Trump-inspired claims of election fraud.“Somebody could pretty easily try to impersonate somebody they don’t know,” said Mr. McBroom, who leads the Michigan Senate’s elections committee.And in Wisconsin, Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor under Gov. Scott Walker until 2019, is challenging Mr. Evers with a campaign platform that calls for shifting responsibility for the state’s elections from the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which her and Mr. Walker’s administration created in 2016, to the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature. Ms. Kleefisch declined to comment. Perhaps no 2022 Democratic candidate for governor is as familiar with Republican attempts to dispute the 2020 outcome as Mr. Shapiro. As Pennsylvania’s attorney general, he defended the state in 43 lawsuits brought by Mr. Trump and his allies that challenged voting methods and the results.“There are new threats every single day on the right to vote, new efforts to disenfranchise voters, and I expect that this will be another huge test in 2022,” said Mr. Shapiro, who is planning to announce a campaign for governor as soon as this month.Last month, Mr. Shapiro filed a lawsuit to block Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate after they sought the personal information of all seven million voters in the state as part of their election review, including driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is running for re-election in Michigan, where Republican election officials tried to stall the certification of the results of the state’s 2020 presidential race.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesIn Michigan, Ms. Whitmer, who has faced threats of an insurrection in her statehouse and a kidnapping plot, is now fighting a Republican attempt to work around her expected veto of a host of proposed voting restrictions.“The only thing that is preventing the rollback of voting rights in Michigan right now is the threat of my veto,” she said in an interview.Michigan was also home to one of the most forceful and arcane attempts at reversing the outcome in 2020, when Republican election officials, at Mr. Trump’s behest, tried to refuse to certify the results in Wayne County and stall the certification of the state’s overall results. That memory, combined with new voting bills and Republican attempts to review the state’s election results, makes Michigan’s election next year all the more important, Ms. Whitmer said.“If they make it harder or impossible for droves of people not to be able to participate in the election,” she said, “that doesn’t just impact Michigan elections, but elections for federal offices as well, like the U.S. Senate and certainly the White House.”Mr. Vos said he had not thought about the degree to which Wisconsin Republicans could change voting laws if the state had a Republican governor. But this year, the State Legislature passed a package of six bills that would have enacted a range of new voting restrictions.Mr. Evers vetoed them all.“I’ve learned to play goalie in this job,” he said. “And I’ll continue to do that.” More

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      Whistle-Blower to Accuse Facebook of Contributing to Jan. 6 Riot, Memo Says

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      In an internal memo, Facebook defended itself and said that social media was not a primary cause of polarization.SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook, which has been under fire from a former employee who has revealed that the social network knew of many of the harms it was causing, was bracing for new accusations over the weekend from the whistle-blower and said in a memo that it was preparing to mount a vigorous defense.The whistle-blower, whose identity has not been publicly disclosed, planned to accuse the company of relaxing its security safeguards for the 2020 election too soon after Election Day, which then led it to be used in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to the internal memo obtained by The New York Times. The whistle-blower planned to discuss the allegations on “60 Minutes” on Sunday, the memo said, and was also set to say that Facebook had contributed to political polarization in the United States.The 1,500-word memo, written by Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of policy and global affairs, was sent on Friday to employees to pre-empt the whistle-blower’s interview. Mr. Clegg pushed back strongly on what he said were the coming accusations, calling them “misleading.” “60 Minutes” published a teaser of the interview in advance of its segment on Sunday.“Social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out,” he wrote. “But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization.”Facebook has been in an uproar for weeks because of the whistle-blower, who has shared thousands of pages of company documents with lawmakers and The Wall Street Journal. The Journal has published a series of articles based on the documents, which show that Facebook knew how its apps and services could cause harm, including worsening body image issues among teenage girls using Instagram.Facebook has since scrambled to contain the fallout, as lawmakers, regulators and the public have said the company needs to account for the revelations. On Monday, Facebook paused the development of an Instagram service for children ages 13 and under. Its global head of safety, Antigone Davis, also testified on Thursday as irate lawmakers questioned her about the effects of Facebook and Instagram on young users.A Facebook spokesman declined to comment. A spokesman for “60 Minutes” did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Inside Facebook, executives including Mr. Clegg and the “Strategic Response” teams have called a series of emergency meetings to try to extinguish some of the outrage. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, have been briefed on the responses and have approved them, but have remained behind the scenes to distance themselves from the negative press, people with knowledge of the company have said.The firestorm is far from over. Facebook anticipated more allegations during the whistle-blower’s “60 Minutes” interview, according to the memo. The whistle-blower, who plans to reveal her identity during the interview, was set to say that Facebook had turned off some of its safety measures around the election — such as limits on live video — too soon after Election Day, the memo said. That allowed for misinformation to flood the platform and for groups to congregate online and plan the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol building.Mr. Clegg said that was an inaccurate view and cited many of the safeguards and security mechanisms that Facebook had built over the past five years. He said the company had removed millions of groups such as the Proud Boys and others related to causes like the conspiracy theory QAnon and #StopTheSteal election fraud claims.The whistle-blower was also set to claim that many of Facebook’s problems stemmed from changes in the News Feed in 2018, the memo said. That was when the social network tweaked its algorithm to emphasize what it called Meaningful Social Interactions, or MSI, which prioritized posts from users’ friends and family and de-emphasized posts from publishers and brands.The goal was to make sure that Facebook’s products were “not just fun, but are good for people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in an interview about the change at the time.But according to Friday’s memo, the whistle-blower would say that the change contributed to even more polarization among Facebook’s users. The whistle-blower was also set to say that Facebook then reaped record profits as its users flocked to the divisive content, the memo said.Mr. Clegg warned that the period ahead could be difficult for employees who might face questions from friends and family about Facebook’s role in the world. But he said that societal problems and political polarization have long predated the company and the advent of social networks in general.“The simple fact remains that changes to algorithmic ranking systems on one social media platform cannot explain wider societal polarization,” he wrote. “Indeed, polarizing content and misinformation are also present on platforms that have no algorithmic ranking whatsoever, including private messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp.”Mr. Clegg, who is scheduled to appear on the CNN program “Reliable Sources” on Sunday morning, also tried to relay an upbeat note to employees.“We will continue to face scrutiny — some of it fair and some of it unfair,” he said in the memo. “But we should also continue to hold our heads up high.”Here is Mr. Clegg’s memo in full:OUR POSITION ON POLARIZATION AND ELECTIONSYou will have seen the series of articles about us published in the Wall Street Journal in recent days, and the public interest it has provoked. This Sunday night, the ex-employee who leaked internal company material to the Journal will appear in a segment on 60 Minutes on CBS. We understand the piece is likely to assert that we contribute to polarization in the United States, and suggest that the extraordinary steps we took for the 2020 elections were relaxed too soon and contributed to the horrific events of January 6th in the Capitol.I know some of you – especially those of you in the US – are going to get questions from friends and family about these things so I wanted to take a moment as we head into the weekend to provide what I hope is some useful context on our work in these crucial areas.Facebook and PolarizationPeople are understandably anxious about the divisions in society and looking for answers and ways to fix the problems. Social media has had a big impact on society in recent years, and Facebook is often a place where much of this debate plays out. So it’s natural for people to ask whether it is part of the problem. But the idea that Facebook is the chief cause of polarization isn’t supported by the facts – as Chris and Pratiti set out in their note on the issue earlier this year.The rise of polarization has been the subject of swathes of serious academic research in recent years. In truth, there isn’t a great deal of consensus. But what evidence there is simply does not support the idea that Facebook, or social media more generally, is the primary cause of polarization.The increase in political polarization in the US pre-dates social media by several decades. If it were true that Facebook is the chief cause of polarization, we would expect to see it going up wherever Facebook is popular. It isn’t. In fact, polarization has gone down in a number of countries with high social media use at the same time that it has risen in the US.Specifically, we expect the reporting to suggest that a change to Facebook’s News Feed ranking algorithm was responsible for elevating polarizing content on the platform. In January 2018, we made ranking changes to promote Meaningful Social Interactions (MSI) – so that you would see more content from friends, family and groups you are part of in your News Feed. This change was heavily driven by internal and external research that showed that meaningful engagement with friends and family on our platform was better for people’s wellbeing, and we further refined and improved it over time as we do with all ranking metrics.Of course, everyone has a rogue uncle or an old school classmate who holds strong or extreme views we disagree with – that’s life – and the change meant you are more likely to come across their posts too. Even so, we’ve developed industry-leading tools to remove hateful content and reduce the distribution of problematic content. As a result, the prevalence of hate speech on our platform is now down to about 0.05%.But the simple fact remains that changes to algorithmic ranking systems on one social media platform cannot explain wider societal polarization. Indeed, polarizing content and misinformation are also present on platforms that have no algorithmic ranking whatsoever, including private messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp.Elections and DemocracyThere’s perhaps no other topic that we’ve been more vocal about as a company than on our work to dramatically change the way we approach elections. Starting in 2017, we began building new defenses, bringing in new expertise, and strengthening our policies to prevent interference. Today, we have more than 40,000 people across the company working on safety and security.Since 2017, we have disrupted and removed more than 150 covert influence operations, including ahead of major democratic elections. In 2020 alone, we removed more than 5 billion fake accounts — identifying almost all of them before anyone flagged them to us. And, from March to Election Day, we removed more than 265,000 pieces of Facebook and Instagram content in the US for violating our voter interference policies.Given the extraordinary circumstances of holding a contentious election in a pandemic, we implemented so called “break glass” measures – and spoke publicly about them – before and after Election Day to respond to specific and unusual signals we were seeing on our platform and to keep potentially violating content from spreading before our content reviewers could assess it against our policies.These measures were not without trade-offs – they’re blunt instruments designed to deal with specific crisis scenarios. It’s like shutting down an entire town’s roads and highways in response to a temporary threat that may be lurking somewhere in a particular neighborhood. In implementing them, we know we impacted significant amounts of content that did not violate our rules to prioritize people’s safety during a period of extreme uncertainty. For example, we limited the distribution of live videos that our systems predicted may relate to the election. That was an extreme step that helped prevent potentially violating content from going viral, but it also impacted a lot of entirely normal and reasonable content, including some that had nothing to do with the election. We wouldn’t take this kind of crude, catch-all measure in normal circumstances, but these weren’t normal circumstances.We only rolled back these emergency measures – based on careful data-driven analysis – when we saw a return to more normal conditions. We left some of them on for a longer period of time through February this year and others, like not recommending civic, political or new Groups, we have decided to retain permanently.Fighting Hate Groups and other Dangerous OrganizationsI want to be absolutely clear: we work to limit, not expand hate speech, and we have clear policies prohibiting content that incites violence. We do not profit from polarization, in fact, just the opposite. We do not allow dangerous organizations, including militarized social movements or violence-inducing conspiracy networks, to organize on our platforms. And we remove content that praises or supports hate groups, terrorist organizations and criminal groups.We’ve been more aggressive than any other internet company in combating harmful content, including content that sought to delegitimize the election. But our work to crack down on these hate groups was years in the making. We took down tens of thousands of QAnon pages, groups and accounts from our apps, removed the original #StopTheSteal Group, and removed references to Stop the Steal in the run up to the inauguration. In 2020 alone, we removed more than 30 million pieces of content violating our policies regarding terrorism and more than 19 million pieces of content violating our policies around organized hate in 2020. We designated the Proud Boys as a hate organization in 2018 and we continue to remove praise, support, and representation of them. Between August last year and January 12 this year, we identified nearly 900 militia organizations under our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy and removed thousands of Pages, groups, events, Facebook profiles and Instagram accounts associated with these groups.This work will never be complete. There will always be new threats and new problems to address, in the US and around the world. That’s why we remain vigilant and alert – and will always have to.That is also why the suggestion that is sometimes made that the violent insurrection on January 6 would not have occurred if it was not for social media is so misleading. To be clear, the responsibility for those events rests squarely with the perpetrators of the violence, and those in politics and elsewhere who actively encouraged them. Mature democracies in which social media use is widespread hold elections all the time – for instance Germany’s election last week – without the disfiguring presence of violence. We actively share with Law Enforcement material that we can find on our services related to these traumatic events. But reducing the complex reasons for polarization in America – or the insurrection specifically – to a technological explanation is woefully simplistic.We will continue to face scrutiny – some of it fair and some of it unfair. We’ll continue to be asked difficult questions. And many people will continue to be skeptical of our motives. That’s what comes with being part of a company that has a significant impact in the world. We need to be humble enough to accept criticism when it is fair, and to make changes where they are justified. We aren’t perfect and we don’t have all the answers. That’s why we do the sort of research that has been the subject of these stories in the first place. And we’ll keep looking for ways to respond to the feedback we hear from our users, including testing ways to make sure political content doesn’t take over their News Feeds.But we should also continue to hold our heads up high. You and your teams do incredible work. Our tools and products have a hugely positive impact on the world and in people’s lives. And you have every reason to be proud of that work. More

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      Ignoring Arizona Humiliation, ‘Stop the Steal’ Races Forward

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      As a Republican review of 2020 votes in Arizona sputtered to a close, Donald Trump and his allies signaled that their attack on the election, and their drive to reshape future elections, were far from over.After all the scurrying, searching, sifting, speculating, hand-counting and bamboo-hunting had ended, Republicans’ post-mortem review of election results in Arizona’s largest county wound up only adding to President Biden’s margin of victory there.But for those who have tried to undermine confidence in American elections and restrict voting, the actual findings of the Maricopa County review that were released on Friday did not appear to matter in the slightest. Former President Donald J. Trump and his loyalists redoubled their efforts to mount a full-scale relitigation of the 2020 election.Any fleeting thought that the failure of the Arizona exercise to unearth some new trove of Trump votes or a smoking gun of election fraud might derail the so-called Stop the Steal movement dissipated abruptly. As draft copies of the report began to circulate late Thursday, Trump allies ignored the new tally, instead zeroing in on the report’s specious claims of malfeasance, inconsistencies and errors by election officials.Significant parts of the right treated the completion of the Arizona review as a vindication — offering a fresh canard to justify an accelerated push for new voting limits and measures to give Republican state lawmakers greater control over elections. It also provided additional fuel for the older lie that is now central to Mr. Trump’s political identity: that the 2020 election was stolen from him.“The leaked report conclusively shows there were enough fraudulent votes, mystery votes, and fake votes to change the outcome of the election 4 or 5 times over,” Mr. Trump said in a statement early Friday evening, one of seven he had issued about Arizona since late Thursday. “There is fraud and cheating in Arizona and it must be criminally investigated!”For Mr. Trump, Republican candidates vying to appeal to voters in primary races, and conservative activists agitating for election reviews in their own states, the 91-page document served as something of a choose-your-own-adventure guide. These leaders encouraged their supporters to avert their eyes from the conclusion that Mr. Biden had indeed won legitimately, and to instead focus on fodder for a new set of conspiracy theories.“Now that the audit of Maricopa is wrapping up, we need to Audit Pima County — the 2nd largest county in AZ,” Mark Finchem, a Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona who supported the effort in Maricopa, wrote on Twitter. “There are 35k votes in question from multiple sources & I want answers.”Even Republicans who do not subscribe to false claims of election fraud are using investigations to justify more restrictive voting laws. In Michigan, State Senator Ed McBroom, a Republican who leads his chamber’s elections committee and wrote an unsparing report in July debunking an array of Trump-inspired fraud claims, said Friday that the discovery of potential avenues for election fraud — not evidence of fraud itself — was reason enough to pass new voting restrictions.“Just like we found in Michigan, it’s good that we found that these vulnerabilities weren’t exploited to any important extent in this election,” Mr. McBroom said in an interview. “It doesn’t mean that somebody might not use them in the future.”Cherry-picking from the report on Friday, the former president and his allies cited a series of eye-popping statistics that, on first glance, appeared to bolster their case, trusting that their supporters either would not digest the document in full or would not trust the mainstream news outlets that laid out its complete contents.Peter Navarro, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, falsely claimed on Twitter that the report had shown that 50,000 potentially illegal votes were cast in Maricopa County. That number was in fact the tally of ballots that the report — through questionable methodology — described as problematic in some way.Liz Harrington, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, pointed on Twitter to “23,000+ Phantom Voters.” This was apparently a reference to 23,344 mail-in ballots that Cyber Ninjas, the company assigned by Arizona Republicans to carry out the review, had claimed came from voters listed under prior addresses. (Such claims were quickly refuted by the Maricopa County elections board, which said that “this is legal under federal election law.”)People in Phoenix, including supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, watched a live stream on Friday as the results of the election review were presented to the Arizona State Senate.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesProponents of the Arizona review seized on vague suggestions by the report’s authors that “canvassing,” or the common political campaign practice of knocking on doors, was needed. Without defining what sort of canvass they had in mind, many Republicans in Arizona and beyond made the word a new rallying cry in the hunt for election fraud.“Canvass Maricopa,” Wendy Rogers, a Republican state senator in Arizona, wrote on Twitter.The Arizona review, and similar partisan election investigations around the country, are one spear in a multipronged effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to dispute the outcome of the 2020 race and to overhaul future American elections.That push has alarmed Democrats, good-government groups and historians, who point to the ways that Mr. Trump undermined democratic norms while in office, including his fight to subvert last year’s election, an effort that culminated in the Capitol riot.New evidence for their arguments emerged this week in the form of a memo unearthed in a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post. According to the memo, drafted by John Eastman, a Republican lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign, by refusing to accept the results, Mr. Trump could help prompt a state legislature to send an alternative slate of electors to Congress.The memo concluded that, with multiple slates to consider, former Vice President Mike Pence and allies in Congress could refuse to certify the states in question, which would nullify the election results and lead instead to a vote in the House of Representatives on the president, with each state delegation receiving one vote.In 2020, Republicans held the advantage in state delegations, with 26, meaning that Mr. Trump would have successfully overturned the election in this scenario.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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      Republican Review of Arizona Vote Fails to Show Stolen Election

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      The much criticized review showed much the same results as in November, with 99 more Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump ones.PHOENIX — After months of delays and blistering criticism, a review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, ordered up and financed by Republicans, has failed to show that former President Donald J. Trump was cheated of victory, according to draft versions of the report.In fact, the draft report from the company Cyber Ninjas found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.The full review is set to be released on Friday, but draft versions circulating through Arizona political circles were obtained by The New York Times from a Republican and a Democrat.Late on Thursday night, Maricopa County, whose Republican leaders have derided the review, got a jump on the official release by tweeting out its conclusions.“The county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” the county said on Twitter. It then criticized the review as “littered with errors and faulty conclusions.”Mr. Biden won Arizona by roughly 10,500 votes, making his victory of about 45,000 votes in Maricopa County crucial to his win. Under intense pressure from Trump loyalists, the Republican majority in the State Senate had ordered an autopsy of the county’s votes for president. The review was financed largely by $5.7 million in donations from far-right groups and Mr. Trump’s defenders.The draft reports implicitly acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory, noting that there were “no substantial differences” between the new tally of votes and the official count by Maricopa County election officials. But they also claimed that other factors — most if not all contested by reputable election experts — left the results “very close to the margin of error for the election.”Among other alleged discrepancies, the reports claimed that some ballots were cast by people who had moved before the election, that election-related computer files were missing and that some computer images of ballots were missing.One expert and critic of the review who had seen a draft report of the findings called those red herrings.“The whole report just reflects on the Ninjas’ lack of understanding of Arizona election law and election administration procedures,” said Benny White, a Republican in Tucson who is an adviser on election law and procedures.It was not possible to determine whether the conclusions in the final version of the report being released on Friday would differ from those in the drafts. Mr. White said he had been told that some Republican Senate officials were unhappy with the findings.But if those findings stand, they would amount to a devastating disappointment for pro-Trump Republicans nationwide who have hoped the Arizona review would vindicate their belief that the presidency was stolen from him. For many loyalists, the investigation has been seen as the first in a string of state inquiries that would, domino-like, topple claims that Mr. Biden was legitimately in the White House.State Senator Wendy Rogers, a Republican who is among Arizona’s most ardent advocates of the stolen-election canard, posted on Twitter late on Thursday that the 110-page document was “simply a draft and is only a partial report,” and looked ahead to a hearing on Friday discussing the results. “Tomorrow we make history,” she wrote.On Thursday night, without acknowledging the findings of the draft reports that had been rippling across Arizona for half a day, the former president said in a statement, “Everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!”Election experts said the inquiry run by Trump partisans with unrestricted access to ballots and election equipment failed to make even a basic case that the November vote was badly flawed, much less rigged.Critics said that would raise the bar for Republican politicians in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who, under pressure from Mr. Trump and his supporters, have mounted their own Arizona-style investigations. Under similar pressure, the Texas secretary of state’s office on Thursday announced a “comprehensive forensic audit” of the results from four of the state’s largest counties.“If Trump and his supporters can’t prove it here, with a process they designed, they can’t prove it anywhere,” David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said on Thursday.In fact, the Republican inquiry may not be completely over. Senate investigators still want to examine Maricopa County computer servers for evidence of tampering, even though county officials insist they have had no connection to election machinery.In general, however, the report was a cap-gun ending to an inquiry whose backers hinted would turn up a cannonade of fraud.Republicans in the State Senate pushed for the inquiry in December, spurred in part by a daylong meeting with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer.The Republican president of the State Senate, Karen Fann, insisted that the review was a nonpartisan effort to reassure voters that the election had been well run, but faith in that pledge ebbed after she chose Cyber Ninjas, a firm with no prior experience in elections, to oversee the inquiry.The firm’s chief executive, Doug Logan, soon was shown to have suggested on Twitter that Mr. Biden’s victory in Arizona was illegitimate. Other firms and consultants hired for the inquiry also proved to have pro-Trump ties or were election conspiracy theorists.While the report’s authors declared that their monthslong review of votes in Maricopa County represented the “most comprehensive and complex election audit ever conducted,” the hand count of 2.1 million ballots and a review of voting machines and systems was plagued from the start by missteps and accusations of incompetence and partisan influence.Some elections officials said the draft reports offered an unlikely vindication of what they have been insisting for months: that Arizona ran a transparent, credible election in November.“The numbers match up,” said Adrian Fontes, who as county recorder oversaw the election in Maricopa County and is now a Democratic candidate for secretary of state.Mr. Fontes said some critiques and concerns raised in the report, such as the potential for duplicate votes, reflected a lack of knowledge about how the county conducts elections. Mr. Fontes said his office had put systems into place that reconciled in real time voter lists with records of who has voted.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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      Germany Struggles to Stop Online Abuse Ahead of Election

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      Scrolling through her social media feed, Laura Dornheim is regularly stopped cold by a new blast of abuse aimed at her, including from people threatening to kill or sexually assault her. One person last year said he looked forward to meeting her in person so he could punch her teeth out.Ms. Dornheim, a candidate for Parliament in Germany’s election on Sunday, is often attacked for her support of abortion rights, gender equality and immigration. She flags some of the posts to Facebook and Twitter, hoping that the platforms will delete the posts or that the perpetrators will be barred. She’s usually disappointed.“There might have been one instance where something actually got taken down,” Ms. Dornheim said.Harassment and abuse are all too common on the modern internet. Yet it was supposed to be different in Germany. In 2017, the country enacted one of the world’s toughest laws against online hate speech. It requires Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to remove illegal comments, pictures or videos within 24 hours of being notified about them or risk fines of up to 50 million euros, or $59 million. Supporters hailed it as a watershed moment for internet regulation and a model for other countries.But an influx of hate speech and harassment in the run-up to the German election, in which the country will choose a new leader to replace Angela Merkel, its longtime chancellor, has exposed some of the law’s weaknesses. Much of the toxic speech, researchers say, has come from far-right groups and is aimed at intimidating female candidates like Ms. Dornheim.Some critics of the law say it is too weak, with limited enforcement and oversight. They also maintain that many forms of abuse are deemed legal by the platforms, such as certain kinds of harassment of women and public officials. And when companies do remove illegal material, critics say, they often do not alert the authorities or share information about the posts, making prosecutions of the people publishing the material far more difficult. Another loophole, they say, is that smaller platforms like the messaging app Telegram, popular among far-right groups, are not subject to the law.Free-expression groups criticize the law on other grounds. They argue that the law should be abolished not only because it fails to protect victims of online abuse and harassment, but also because it sets a dangerous precedent for government censorship of the internet.The country’s experience may shape policy across the continent. German officials are playing a key role in drafting one of the world’s most anticipated new internet regulations, a European Union law called the Digital Services Act, which will require Facebook and other online platforms to do more to address the vitriol, misinformation and illicit content on their sites. Ursula von der Leyen, a German who is president of the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive arm, has called for an E.U. law that would list gender-based violence as a special crime category, a proposal that would include online attacks.“Germany was the first to try to tackle this kind of online accountability,” said Julian Jaursch, a project director at the German think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, which focuses on digital issues. “It is important to ask whether the law is working.”Campaign billboards in Germany’s race for chancellor, showing, from left, Annalena Baerbock of the Green Party, Olaf Scholz of the Social Democrats and Christian Lindner of the Free Democrats.Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesMarc Liesching, a professor at HTWK Leipzig who published an academic report on the policy, said that of the posts that had been deleted by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, a vast majority were classified as violating company policies, not the hate speech law. That distinction makes it harder for the government to measure whether companies are complying with the law. In the second half of 2020, Facebook removed 49 million pieces of “hate speech” based on its own community standards, compared with the 154 deletions that it attributed to the German law, he found.The law, Mr. Liesching said, “is not relevant in practice.”With its history of Nazism, Germany has long tried to balance free speech rights against a commitment to combat hate speech. Among Western democracies, the country has some of the world’s toughest laws against incitement to violence and hate speech. Targeting religious, ethnic and racial groups is illegal, as are Holocaust denial and displaying Nazi symbols in public. To address concerns that companies were not alerting the authorities to illegal posts, German policymakers this year passed amendments to the law. They require Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to turn over data to the police about accounts that post material that German law would consider illegal speech. The Justice Ministry was also given more powers to enforce the law. “The aim of our legislative package is to protect all those who are exposed to threats and insults on the internet,” Christine Lambrecht, the justice minister, who oversees enforcement of the law, said after the amendments were adopted. “Whoever engages in hate speech and issues threats will have to expect to be charged and convicted.”Germans will vote for a leader to replace Angela Merkel, the country’s longtime chancellor.Markus Schreiber/Associated PressFacebook and Google have filed a legal challenge to block the new rules, arguing that providing the police with personal information about users violates their privacy.Facebook said that as part of an agreement with the government it now provided more figures about the complaints it received. From January through July, the company received more than 77,000 complaints, which led it to delete or block about 11,500 pieces of content under the German law, known as NetzDG.“We have zero tolerance for hate speech and support the aims of NetzDG,” Facebook said in a statement. Twitter, which received around 833,000 complaints and removed roughly 81,000 posts during the same period, said a majority of those posts did not fit the definition of illegal speech, but still violated the company’s terms of service.“Threats, abusive content and harassment all have the potential to silence individuals,” Twitter said in a statement. “However, regulation and legislation such as this also has the potential to chill free speech by emboldening regimes around the world to legislate as a way to stifle dissent and legitimate speech.”YouTube, which received around 312,000 complaints and removed around 48,000 pieces of content in the first six months of the year, declined to comment other than saying it complies with the law.The amount of hate speech has become increasingly pronounced during election season, according to researchers at Reset and HateAid, organizations that track online hate speech and are pushing for tougher laws.The groups reviewed nearly one million comments on far-right and conspiratorial groups across about 75,000 Facebook posts in June, finding that roughly 5 percent were “highly toxic” or violated the online hate speech law. Some of the worst material, including messages with Nazi symbolism, had been online for more than a year, the groups found. Of 100 posts reported by the groups to Facebook, roughly half were removed within a few days, while the others remain online.The election has also seen a wave of misinformation, including false claims about voter fraud.Annalena Baerbock, the 40-year-old leader of the Green Party and the only woman among the top candidates running to succeed Ms. Merkel, has been the subject of an outsize amount of abuse compared with her male rivals from other parties, including sexist slurs and misinformation campaigns, according to researchers.Ms. Baerbock, the Green Party candidate for chancellor, taking a selfie with one of her supporters.Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesOthers have stopped running altogether. In March, a former Syrian refugee running for the German Parliament, Tareq Alaows, dropped out of the race after experiencing racist attacks and violent threats online.While many policymakers want Facebook and other platforms to be aggressive in screening user-generated content, others have concerns about private companies making decisions about what people can and can’t say. The far-right party Alternative for Germany, which has criticized the law for unfairly targeting its supporters, has vowed to repeal the policy “to respect freedom of expression.”Jillian York, an author and free speech activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Berlin, said the German law encouraged companies to remove potentially offensive speech that is perfectly legal, undermining free expression rights.“Facebook doesn’t err on the side of caution, they just take it down,” Ms. York said. Another concern, she said, is that less democratic countries such as Turkey and Belarus have adopted laws similar to Germany’s so that they could classify certain material critical of the government as illegal.Renate Künast, a former government minister who once invited a journalist to accompany her as she confronted individuals in person who had targeted her with online abuse, wants to see the law go further. Victims of online abuse should be able to go after perpetrators directly for libel and financial settlements, she said. Without that ability, she added, online abuse will erode political participation, particularly among women and minority groups.In a survey of more than 7,000 German women released in 2019, 58 percent said they did not share political opinions online for fear of abuse.“They use the verbal power of hate speech to force people to step back, leave their office or not to be candidates,” Ms. Künast said.The Reichstag, where the German Parliament convenes, in Berlin.Emile Ducke for The New York TimesMs. Dornheim, the Berlin candidate, who has a master’s degree in computer science and used to work in the tech industry, said more restrictions were needed. She described getting her home address removed from public records after somebody mailed a package to her house during a particularly bad bout of online abuse.Yet, she said, the harassment has only steeled her resolve.“I would never give them the satisfaction of shutting up,” she said. More

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      Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers' Dominion Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows

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      Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.Read the Trump campaign’s internal memoLast November, communications staff members on the Trump campaign hastily assembled a memo examining outlandish election claims. The memo found that many of the allegations were baseless.Read DocumentEven at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Mr. Coomer, “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee, was accused of playing a role in a conspiracy to breach voting machines and reverse the 2020 election’s outcome. Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Associated PressMr. Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell, Mr. Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company’s systems to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.Soon after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were part of a self-described “elite strike force” of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.On Nov. 19, for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters and placed Mr. Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion’s voting machines. By Ms. Powell’s account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a “massive influence of communist money.”Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking comment.Mr. Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially true.”And as recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was “essentially a bloodless coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single shot being fired.”It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the court documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.“They wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money,” Mr. Giuliani was quoted as saying in the deposition.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More