The report shows that Gateway Pundit’s election claims continue despite lawsuits

USA TODAY looks at the week of extremism

Gateway Pundit, now being sued over false election claims, has doubled down on conspiracy theories about the presidential election, according to a new analysis. Meanwhile, white supremacists continue to flee Telegram, a messaging platform, following the arrest of its founder and CEO in France last month. The report shows that TikTok is spreading racist stereotypes about Haitian immigrants among millions of people.

This is extremism week.

Gateway Pundit Continues to Spread Election Fraud

A new report from Advance Democracy, Inc. analysts provided exclusively to USA TODAY shows that the conservative news site Gateway Pundit has stepped up to spread false claims about the presidential election. This is despite the site being hit with two lawsuits over false claims about the 2020 election.

ADI found that from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31, the Gateway Pundit published at least 128 articles containing keywords related to fraud or election workers. The articles focused on leads including that the Democratic Party is working with election officials to steal the 2024 presidential election and allowing noncitizens to vote. Examples include articles with headlines such as “WATCH OUT: Democrats Just Revealed How They’ll Steal the 2024 Election — In Three Easy Steps.”
The site is currently facing a defamation lawsuit filed by a former voting software executive who accuses former President Donald Trump’s campaign and many conservative media outlets of spreading “false and baseless claims.”
In 2021, the site was also sued by two election workers who claim the site and its owners “knowingly published false stories about them, sparking a relentless campaign of harassment and threats.”
ADI said the claims in recent articles often led to threats of violence. Analysts monitored reactions to the articles after they were published on the website and on social media and found calls for civil war and calls for violence against Democratic lawmakers and election workers.

“We live in an extremely polarizing and divisive political climate, and the threats of political violence we are seeing are significant and serious,” ADI President Daniel J. Jones told USA TODAY. “Our research details how calls for violence from the right can be linked to false information promoted by The Gateway Pundit.”

A request for comment to Gateway Pundit was not immediately returned.

White supremacists got scared on the Telegram app

A new report from ProPublica and FRONTLINE shows that white supremacists and neo-Nazis saw an increase in panic on the social media platform Telegram after a key policy change. Some called for abandoning Telegram after CEO Pavel Durov announced that the app would start sharing identifying information with law enforcement about users who violate its policies.

This is not the first time that extremists have made threats on Telegram. As USA TODAY reported last month, far-right users of the app were unsettled by Durov’s arrest in France on charges of committing a wide range of crimes – related to Telegram’s alleged complicity in enabling users to trade child pornography, drugs and money laundering.
News of the app’s cooperation with law enforcement has sparked new consternation, according to a ProPublica/FRONTLINE analysis. “Shut it down,” says one person who wrote to a white supremacist chat on Tuesday.
Following Durov’s arrest earlier this month, two leaders of a group of federal prosecutors known as the Terrorgram Collective were arrested. The Justice Department charged the men with soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists via the Telegram platform.

Report: TikTok Spreads Springfield Animal Claims

Racist tropes about Haiti’s immigrant community stemming from comments by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, are reaching millions of people, according to a new analysis by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America on TikTok. .

Both Trump and Vance pushed the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are killing and eating pets.
According to Media Matters, for TikTok users seeking detailed information about Springfield, Ohio, and Haitian immigrants, “the platform serves up gross misinformation. The high number of video views relative to the low follower ratio also suggests that TikTok’s “For You” page algorithm is driving this content.
The report listed several offensive and conspiracy-laced videos that popped up immediately when the researcher searched for terms such as “Haitians in Springfield.”

Statistics of the week: 63 percent

According to the FBI, this is how much anti-Jewish hate crimes in America have increased in 2022-2023.

While FBI statistics are notoriously inaccurate, the bureau recorded a record 1,832 one-sided anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in 2023, the highest number ever.