Daily Distortions Tracking Viral Misinformation Every day, Times reporters will chronicle and debunk false and misleading information that is going viral online.

Dec. 15, 2020, 6:28 p.m. ET Dec. 15, 2020, 6:28 p.m. ET Dominion’s C.E.O. defends his firm’s voting machines to Michigan lawmakers, denouncing a ‘reckless disinformation campaign.’ A demonstration in Atlanta of a Dominion Voting Systems machine in 2019. Credit... John Bazemore/Associated Press A day after Michigan’s 16 electoral votes formally went to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., a voting machine manufacturer told state senators that he stood by his company’s work, and shot down unfounded allegations that the results may have been manipulated. Dominion Voting Systems is the victim of “a dangerous and reckless disinformation campaign aimed at sowing doubt and confusion over the 2020 presidential election,” John Poulos, the company’s chief executive, told the State Senate Oversight Committee. The company has come under fire from supporters and lawyers for President Trump, who have claimed without evidence that the company’s voting machines switched votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. Mr. Poulos assured the committee that his company had no connections to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, or George Soros, the billionaire financier who is a subject of conspiracy theories on the right. “The comments about our company being started in Venezuela with Cuban money with the intent to steal elections are beyond bizarre and are complete lies,” Mr. Poulos added. “My company started in my basement, which happened to be in Toronto.” State Senators, who are conducting an investigation into alleged reports of irregularities in the 2020 election, continually returned to tiny Antrim County in northern Michigan, where human error in the local clerk’s office related to updating the software in some vote tabulators caused votes for Mr. Trump to be inadvertently counted for Mr. Biden. The mistake was caught and corrected before the results of the vote were certified. Supporters of Mr. Trump have pointed to the error as proof of widespread fraud in the election. “If all of the tabulators had been updated per our procedure, there wouldn’t have been any error in the unofficial report,” Mr. Poulos said. “Human mistakes happen, especially in busy election years when election officials work tirelessly through weekends and holidays for months on end.” He dismissed as seriously flawed a report from a self-proclaimed election fraud expert on the Antrim County situation that has been cited by Trump allies. Lawmakers also repeatedly asked about various other unfounded allegations, including that Dominion tabulators were connected to the internet, and consequently susceptible to hacking; and that the machines employed ranked-choice voting in Michigan. “Would it be impossible for anything to be manipulated,” asked State Senator Michael MacDonald, a Republican. “I don’t think so, but if it was possible, it would certainly be detectable,” Mr. Poulos responded, pointing to Michigan’s use of paper ballots. “If there was any manipulation of the system, those paper ballots would not match the machine totals.” Although there is nothing the committee can do to alter the results, it plans to continue to investigate the election, with plans to subpoena the city clerks of Detroit and Livonia, two cities in Wayne County that drew national attention last month after Republicans on the county’s board of canvassers initially opposed certifying the election results because of minor irregularities. Read more

Dec. 15, 2020, 4:55 p.m. ET Dec. 15, 2020, 4:55 p.m. ET Could Congress overturn Biden’s Electoral College win? Possibly. Will it? No. Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, at the Capitol last year. He has vowed to challenge the presidential election results when Congress meets to ratify them next month. Credit... Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock Even after the Electoral College certified President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner of the election on Monday, some of President Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress refused to accept his loss, vowing that they could still reverse the results on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Mr. Trump amplified their claims, recirculating an article on Tuesday about the efforts led by Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, to challenge Mr. Biden’s victory when the House and Senate meet to formally ratify it on Jan. 6. But while the Constitution gives Congress the final say in the election, there is no chance that it will agree to overturn the results and keep Mr. Trump in office. Every four years, the House and Senate come together to formally tabulate the electoral votes and raise any final concerns about the results. Normally, it is a perfunctory confirmation of the Electoral College vote. But this year, Mr. Brooks has threatened to transform it into a messy last stand by objecting. He is all but certain to fail, but not before a potentially divisive spectacle on the House floor that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the politically perilous position of confirming that Mr. Trump lost. The process is designed to be arduous. Mr. Brooks would first have to find a willing Republican senator to partner with him in the challenge, which federal law says must be co-signed by at least one member of each chamber. No Republican senator has yet come forward to back the effort, and on Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, appealed privately to Republicans in his chamber not to join it. Even if one did, there would not be enough support to sustain the objection. In the event of a challenge by a member of the House and Senate, the joint session would pause and lawmakers would go back to their respective chambers to debate for up to two hours. They would then vote on whether to toss out the electoral results of the state in question. Both chambers would have to agree to reject the votes, something that has not happened since the Reconstruction era. Democrats control the House, so there is no chance that that chamber would vote to overturn the results. While Republicans lead the Senate, several members of the party there have recognized Mr. Biden as the winner of the election, and Mr. McConnell made it clear in a call with his colleagues on Tuesday that the effort would not have his support either. Read more

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Dec. 15, 2020, 4:35 p.m. ET Dec. 15, 2020, 4:35 p.m. ET Nick Corasaniti and No, there aren’t ‘alternate electors’ who can vote for President Trump. Georgia’s actual members of the Electoral College cast their ballots for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Atlanta on Monday. Credit... Nicole Craine for The New York Times Once the Electoral College has met and every state’s election has been certified, there is no constitutional provision for an “alternate slate” of electors. A group of people who gather in a room and claim they are electors, as state-party-backed Republicans did in a few states on Monday, have no more authority than if the people reading this article decided that they, too, wanted to be members of the Electoral College. So while Republicans in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan followed the White House’s lead, making or discussing moves to form their own competing slates of pro-Trump electors, it was a theatrical effort with no legal pathway. Electoral College slates are tied to the winner of the popular vote in each state, and all five of those states have certified their results in favor of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. The most the Republicans could do was claim a symbolic moment, saying that the people who showed up would have been the slates of electors had President Trump won those states. But since he lost them, and numerous state and federal courts have rejected his and his allies’ baseless claims of voting fraud, these groups have no actual significance. Mr. Trump’s supporters have also seized upon some superficial murkiness in the Constitution and federal law as to whether a state legislature could appoint its own slate of electors. Since the Electoral Count Act was enacted in 1887, a situation akin to “dueling electors” has happened only once, when Hawaii was in the throes of a close recount in 1960. The governor of Hawaii signed off on a Republican slate of electors for Richard M. Nixon before the recount was completed; when it was finished and showed John F. Kennedy ahead, the governor had to send a new Democratic slate to Congress. The Democratic slate was accepted. The Constitution stipulates that states select their electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” In modern times the states have done that by holding popular elections that determine to whom their electors will be pledged. Various constitutionally enshrined rights and laws would preclude state legislatures from changing the rules and nullifying the popular will after the fact in pursuit of a different outcome. Regardless, no state legislatures have seriously explored overturning the results, despite Mr. Trump’s entreaties to state Republican leaders. It is up to Congress to accept the Electoral College results, which will happen on Jan. 6. Even if a state legislature were to send to Congress ballots from its own appointed slate of electors, many legal scholars have said that Congress would have to give preference to the slate sent by the governor. In any event, both chambers would have to agree to block the pro-Biden electors. It is inconceivable that the Democrats who control the House of Representatives would consider any such move by Republicans. While some Trump loyalists in the House, like Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, have claimed that they will try to challenge the results, many Republican senators conceded on Monday that Mr. Biden had been affirmed as the president-elect. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, appeared to close off any possibility that he would give much berth to a challenge when he congratulated Mr. Biden from the floor of the Senate on Tuesday. Read more

Dec. 15, 2020, 3:29 p.m. ET Dec. 15, 2020, 3:29 p.m. ET Facebook lifts ban on political ads for Georgia runoff elections. Political signs in a yard in Columbus, Ga. The results of two runoff elections will decide which party controls the Senate. Credit... Spencer Platt/Getty Images Facebook said on Tuesday that it would allow some advertisers to run political issue and candidacy ads in Georgia, a change from its recent ban on political ads in the United States and just weeks before a major runoff election in the state could decide the future of the Senate. Beginning Wednesday morning, Facebook said it would allow authorized advertisers to buy and run political ads targeted to people within Georgia. Only those previously authorized to run such ads on the platform will be permitted, a process that involves identity verification and other safety measures. Facebook’s ban on political ads will otherwise remain in effect for the remaining 49 states. Georgia is the home to two consequential Senate runoff elections. Two Democratic candidates, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, are fighting two Republican incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. The results will determine which party will control the Senate when President-elect Joseph R. Biden takes office next year. “In recent weeks we’ve heard feedback from experts and advertisers across the political spectrum about the importance of expressing voice and using our tools to reach voters ahead of Georgia’s runoff elections,” Sarah Schiff, a Facebook product manager in charge of political advertising, said in a company blog post about the change. “We agree that our ad tools are an important way for people to get information about these elections.” The move follows months of contentiousness around political advertising on Facebook, which critics have said helps misinformation spread. For the past few years, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has said he wishes to maintain a largely hands-off stance toward speech on the site unless it poses an immediate harm to the public or individuals, saying that he “does not want to be the arbiter of truth.” But before the Nov. 3 presidential election, Facebook took some steps to rein in misinformation. That included halting new ad purchases in the week before Election Day, and pausing all political advertising in the United States after the polls closed. The company has said the political ads ban is temporary, but it has not said when such ads will be allowed to resume. Facebook said it planned to ramp up the ads program slowly in Georgia, beginning with those running political campaigns in the state, as well as state and local elections officials and state and national political parties. The company added that it would reject political advertising that is targeted outside Georgia or that does not concern the coming runoff election. Google, which paused more than five million ads that referred to the presidential election after the polls closed, said last week that it was changing that policy and would permit advertisers to begin running election-related ads again “as long as they comply with our global advertising policies.”

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Dec. 11, 2020, 3:22 p.m. ET Dec. 11, 2020, 3:22 p.m. ET Here’s what went viral online this week. Video Here at Daily Distortions, we try to debunk false and misleading information that has gone viral. We also want to give you a sense of how popular that misinformation is, in the context of what is being discussed on social media. With the help of NewsWhip, a firm that compiles social media performance data, we made a list of the 10 most-engaged stories of the week in the United States. (NewsWhip tracks the number of reactions, shares and comments each URL receives on Facebook, as well as shares on Pinterest and by a group of influential users on Twitter.) This was the worst week of the Covid-19 pandemic yet. All over the country, news about rising case counts, overcrowded I.C.U.s and new lockdown rules were making headlines. But on social media, the most-engaged stories of the week were much more scattershot. At the top of that list, by a wide margin, was a TMZ story about the death of Tommy “Tiny” Lister, a character actor best known for playing Deebo in the hit “Friday” movie franchise. Mr. Lister, who was 62, experienced Covid symptoms in the days leading up to his death, according to TMZ. Second was a viral video, posted on the “free speech” video platform Rumble, of a restaurant owner in Los Angeles attacking the city’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, for restrictions that prevented her from offering outdoor dining while a nearby film production was allowed to operate. The clip was shared by right-wing personalities including Dan Bongino, and it received more than a million interactions. Rounding out the top three was a story about BTS, the Korean pop supergroup, being named Time magazine’s “entertainer of the year.” Here’s the full top-10 list: 1 TMZ: ‘Friday’ Star Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister Dead at 62 (2,052,405 interactions) 2. Rumble.com: Restaurant Owner Exposes LA Mayor in Video All of America Needs to See NOW (1,080,965 interactions) 3. Time: BTS Is TIME’s 2020 Entertainer of the Year (906,731 interactions) 4. Breitbart: Texas Sues Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin at Supreme Court over Election Rules (859,606 interactions) 5. CBS News: Judge orders restoration of DACA, opening immigration program to new applicants for first time since 2017 (799,667 interactions) 6. Washington Post: Federal judge restores DACA, orders DHS to accept first-time applications from immigrants (574,917 interactions) 7. CNBC: 17 states tell Supreme Court they support Texas bid to reverse Biden win (573,568 interactions) 8. ComicBook.com: Star Wars: Hayden Christensen Returning to Play Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Series (556,980 interactions) 9. Vice: The House Just Voted to Decriminalize Weed (544,189 interactions) 10. Rumble.com: Dan Crenshaw Ends Nancy Pelosi’s Whole Career In SAVAGE Speech (534,894 interactions) Read more

Dec. 10, 2020, 8:10 p.m. ET Dec. 10, 2020, 8:10 p.m. ET Jeremy W. Peters, David Montgomery, Linda Qiu and Two reasons the Texas election case is faulty: flawed legal theory and statistical fallacy. Texas filed its election challenge directly to the Supreme Court, an unusual move. Credit... Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has asked the Supreme Court to do something it has never done before: disenfranchise millions of voters in four states and reverse the results of the presidential election. The case is highly problematic from a legal perspective and is riddled with procedural and substantive shortcomings, election law experts said. And for its argument to succeed — an outcome that is highly unlikely, according to legal scholars — a majority of the nine justices would have to overlook a debunked claim that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s chances of victory were “less than one in a quadrillion.” Mr. Paxton is a compromised figure, under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations, by several former employees, of abusing his office to aid a political donor. Here are some reasons this case is probably not “the big one” like President Trump has called it. The suit’s legal argument is deeply flawed, legal experts said. Texas appears to have no claim to pursue the case, which would extend Monday’s deadline for certification of presidential electors in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It relies on a novel theory that Texas can dictate how other states run their elections because voting irregularities elsewhere harm the rights of Texans. The Paxton case fails to establish why Texas has a right to interfere with the process through which other states award their votes in the Electoral College, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and director of its election law program. The authority to manage elections falls to the states individually, not in any sort of collective sense that the Paxton suit implies. “They all do what they do,” Mr. Foley said. “For Texas to try to complain about what Georgia, Pennsylvania and these other states have done would be a lot like Massachusetts complaining about how Texas elects its senators.” Typically state attorneys general are protective of their rights and wary of Supreme Court intervention, which Mr. Foley said makes this case unusual. “This is just the opposite,” he said. “It would be an unprecedented intrusion into state sovereignty.” The four states named in the suit denounced it on Thursday and urged the court to reject it. The attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, accused Mr. Paxton and other Trump allies of running “a disinformation campaign baselessly attacking the integrity of our election system.” The remedy the lawsuit seeks — the disenfranchisement of millions of voters — would be without precedent in the nation’s history. Even if the suit were proper, it was almost surely filed too late, as the procedures Texas objects to were in place before the election. A Supreme Court brief opposing Texas’ requests by prominent Republicans, including former Senator John Danforth of Missouri and former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, said Texas’ filings “make a mockery of federalism and separation of powers.” “It would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles for this court,” the brief said, “to serve as the trial court for presidential election disputes.” Mr. Trump and his supporters have often pointed to Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 election, as a hopeful historical precedent for their side. But unlike Bush v. Gore, there is not an obvious constitutional question at issue. “It looks like an inherently political suit,” Mr. Foley said. The suit uses statistical arguments that experts called ‘comical.’ Mr. Paxton’s filing repeatedly cites an analysis by an economist in California that statisticians have said is nonsensical. Mr. Biden’s chances of winning the four battleground states in question, the analysis says, were “less than one in a quadrillion.” The economist, Charles J. Cicchetti, who donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, arrived at the minuscule probability by purporting to use the results of the 2016 election as a backstop. His flawed reasoning was this: If Mr. Biden had received the same number of votes as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, he wrote, a victory would have been all but impossible. But Mr. Biden, of course, did not receive the same number of votes as Mrs. Clinton; he received over 15 million more. Nor would any candidate be expected to receive the same number of votes as a previous candidate. That one-in-a-quadrillion figure has echoed across social media and was promoted by the White House press secretary. But an array of experts have said that the figure and Mr. Cicchetti’s analysis are easily refutable. Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University who runs its election data archive, called this analysis “comical.” The analysis omitted a number of obvious, relevant facts, he said: “the context of the elections are different, that a Covid pandemic is going on, that people reach different conclusions about the administration, that Biden and Clinton are different candidates.” By the same logic and formula, if Mr. Trump had received an equal number of votes in 2020 as he did in 2016, there is also a one in a quadrillion chance that Mr. Trump in 2020 would outperform his totals in 2016, said Stephen C. Preston, a professor of mathematics at Brooklyn College. “But that doesn’t prove Trump cheated, it just shows that the numbers are different,” he said. “It’s like finding a low probability that 2 equals 3.” Mr. Cicchetti also wrote that votes counted earlier in the process and votes counted later favored different candidates, and that there was “a one in many more quadrillions chance” that votes counted in the two time periods were coming from the same groups of voters. But that is exactly what was expected to happen: Democrats tended to prefer voting by mail, and those ballots were counted later in the four battleground states, while Republicans tended to prefer voting in person on Election Day, and those ballots were counted earlier. “The order and tempo of vote counting was unlike previous elections,” said Amel Ahmed, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. What Mr. Cicchetti wrote was not especially revelatory, experts agreed. “The model is silly,” said Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is not science or statistics. It’s not even a good cartoon of elections.” Texas’ attorney general is caught up in scandal. Though the legal reasoning of Mr. Paxton’s case may be novel, the impulse behind it is not. It was just the latest example of a Trump loyalist using the power of public office to come to the aid of a president whose base of support remains deeply attached to him and overwhelmingly says the election was unfair, according to polls. Mr. Paxton, 57, has been under a cloud of scandal since October, when seven of his senior staff attorneys accused their boss of bribery, misuse of his office and other wrongdoing. Their allegations, which Mr. Paxton has denied, involve a wealthy developer and political donor, Nate Paul, whose home and offices were raided by federal agents in August. The aides accused Mr. Paxton of “potential criminal offenses,” including assisting in Mr. Paul’s defense and intervening in the developer’s efforts to get a favorable judgment in a legal battle between his properties and a nonprofit. First elected in 2014, Mr. Paxton has served much of his term under a still-unresolved securities fraud indictment stemming from events that took place before he took office. The indictment accuses Mr. Paxton of selling technology shares to investors in 2011 without disclosing that he received 100,000 shares of stock as compensation, and of failing to register with securities regulators. Mr. Paxton has nevertheless maintained a high national profile — and the affection of conservatives — with his relentless efforts to dismantle policies of the Obama era and shoulder the Trump administration’s causes. Read more

Dec. 10, 2020, 1:25 p.m. ET Dec. 10, 2020, 1:25 p.m. ET No, there isn’t evidence that Pfizer’s vaccine causes infertility. On Wednesday, Erin Lilly, who works at a retirement home, became one of the first people in Cornwall, England, to receive the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination. Credit... Hugh Hastings/Getty Images Social media platforms were flooded this week with concerns about an alarming headline purporting that the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, which is expected to be cleared for emergency use this week, could cause infertility in women. But experts say these claims are baseless. “It’s a myth, it’s inaccurate — there’s no evidence to support their perception,” said Saad Omer, a vaccine expert at Yale University. Expert agencies that oversee the clearance of vaccines for use in people, he added, “have a rigorous process” to weed out products that might cause such disastrous effects. “And when things happens, action is taken,” Dr. Omer said. This week, the Food and Drug Administration reiterated its confidence in data showing that the vaccine can protect people against developing Covid-19 without causing serious side effects. Pfizer’s vaccine has been given green lights in Britain and Canada. The rumors about infertility were fueled by an article published by a blog called Health and Money News, which falsely claimed that Pfizer’s vaccine contained ingredients capable of “training the female body to attack” a protein that plays a crucial role in the development of the placenta. The unfounded claims were drawn from a petition co-written by Dr. Michael Yeadon, a retired British doctor and former Pfizer employee who has previously been criticized for his misleading views on the coronavirus. Dr. Yeadon has downplayed the severity of the pandemic in Britain and publicly aired his grievances about the futility of investing in vaccines. But experts say there is no evidence to back up the infertility claim. The key ingredient in Pfizer’s vaccine (as well as a similar vaccine made by Moderna that is also rapidly on its way to emergency clearance) is genetic material that instructs human cells to make a coronavirus protein called spike. The production of this protein teaches the body to fight off the coronavirus. There are no placental proteins, or genetic material that instructs the manufacture of placental proteins, in Pfizer’s vaccine, said a company spokeswoman, Jerica Pitts. The misleading blog piece drew a comparison between coronavirus spike and a type of placental protein. The similarities were strong enough, it contended, that a vaccine could dupe the immune system into confusing the two proteins and attacking the placenta. But Stephanie Langel, an immunologist and expert in maternal and neonatal immunity at Duke University, pointed out that coronavirus spike and the placental protein in question have almost nothing in common, making the vaccine highly unlikely to trigger a reaction to these delicate tissues. The two proteins share only a minuscule stretch of material; mixing them up would be akin to mistaking a rhinoceros for a jaguar because they are wearing the same collar. Dr. Langel also pointed out that the human body has evolved to quash immune reactions that might harm its own tissues. “If we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t even make it past Day 1 of life,” she said. Pfizer pointed to a recent study that found the coronavirus did not seem to raise the risk for pregnancy-related problems. “There are no data to suggest that the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine candidate causes infertility,” the company said in an emailed statement. Dr. Langel and Dr. Omer both noted that researchers would continue to monitor the well-being of vaccinated people as Pfizer’s products and others are rolled out around the world. There remains a dearth of data in people who are pregnant, Dr. Langel said. But baseless discussions about how vaccines could cause infertility, she added, were “particularly damaging” to the scientifically backed efforts to protect people with vaccines. Read more

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Dec. 9, 2020, 12:25 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2020, 12:25 p.m. ET YouTube is forbidding videos claiming widespread election fraud. YouTube’s announcement is a reversal of a much-criticized company policy on election videos. Credit... Dado Ruvic/Reuters YouTube on Wednesday announced changes to how it handles videos about the 2020 presidential election, saying it would remove new videos that mislead people by claiming that widespread fraud or errors influenced the outcome of the election. The company said it was making the change because Tuesday was the so-called safe harbor deadline — the date by which all state-level election challenges, such as recounts and audits, are supposed to be completed. YouTube said that enough states have certified their election results to determine that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the president-elect. YouTube’s announcement is a reversal of a much-criticized company policy on election videos. Throughout the election cycle, YouTube, which is owned by Google, has allowed videos spreading false claims of widespread election fraud under a policy that permits videos that comment on the outcome of an election. Under the new policy, videos about the election uploaded before the safe harbor deadline would remain on the platform, with YouTube appending an information panel linking to the Office of the Federal Register’s election results certification notice. In a blog post on Wednesday, YouTube pushed back on the idea that it had allowed harmful and misleading elections-related videos to spread unfettered on its site. The company said that since September, it had shut down over 8,000 channels and “thousands” of election videos that violated its policies. Since Election Day, the company said, it had also shown fact-check panels over 200,000 times above relevant election-related search results on voter fraud narratives such as “Dominion voting machines” and “Michigan recount.”

Dec. 8, 2020, 5:58 p.m. ET Dec. 8, 2020, 5:58 p.m. ET A Senate hearing promoted unproven drugs and dubious claims about the coronavirus Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, at the Capitol last week, has embraced the role of the Senate’s leading contrarian on the coronavirus. Credit... Al Drago for The New York Times Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, spent much of this year promoting investigations into Hunter Biden, trying fruitlessly to show corruption on the part of Joseph R. Biden Jr. Now Mr. Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is more focused on another narrative sympathetic to President Trump if not to established science: that the reaction to the coronavirus pandemic has been overblown and that public health officials have been too quick to come to conclusions about the best ways to deal with it. So on Tuesday, for not the first time, Mr. Johnson lent his committee’s platform to the promotion of unproven drugs and dubious claims about stemming the spread of the coronavirus while giving prominence to a vaccine skeptic. In a move that led even most members of his own party on the committee to avoid the hearing, Mr. Johnson called witnesses who promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. The National Institutes of Health guidelines recommend against using either drug to treat coronavirus patients except in clinical trials. Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalarial drug that President Trump has heavily promoted but has shown disappointing results in many clinical trials. Ivermectin is used to treat parasites in humans as well as to prevent heartworms in dogs; research on its effectiveness in treating the coronavirus has been mixed. Despite the regulatory warnings and the lack of substantial scientific evidence for their efficacy, Mr. Johnson claimed that “discouraging and in some cases prohibiting the research and use of drugs that have been safely used for decades has cost tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people their lives.” Just three other senators on the 14-member committee attended Tuesday’s session — “such low participation,” Mr. Johnson acknowledged at one point. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee, criticized the hearing in opening remarks but left before asking questions. On the Republican side, only Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Josh Hawley of Missouri made appearances. For about two and a half hours, the participants continuously challenged public health consensus, sometimes advancing inaccurate and previously debunked claims. One witness, Dr. Ramin Oskoui, a cardiologist in Washington, argued that “masks do not work” and “social distancing doesn’t work” by citing a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study tracked virus transmission among Marine Corps recruits who underwent quarantine. But two of the study’s authors refuted Dr. Oskoui’s interpretation. Rather, they said, the study showed that nonpharmaceutical interventions like masks and social distancing cannot be relied on alone to eliminate transmission. “For me, drawing the conclusion from our study that masking is not effective is like claiming that car brakes are not effective in preventing crashes because accidents still occur when they are used,” said Dr. Stuart C. Sealfon, the senior author of the study and a professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This is either a mistaken or a deliberately misleading interpretation of the results of the study.” Dr. Sealfon added: “In view of the preponderance of evidence in the scientific literature supporting the benefits of mask wearing in reducing the transmission of SARS-COV-2, no reasonable scientist would conclude that these measures are ineffective. They are very effective, but they are not foolproof.” Throughout the hearing, Dr. Oskoui also promoted prescribing zinc and vitamin D. He said that the United States should follow the example of Britain and distribute vitamin D supplements to older people. The N.I.H. also recommends against using zinc to treat the coronavirus except in clinical trials. The British government has offered 2.5 million people free vitamin D to keep bones and muscle healthy, especially as more people stayed indoors, but the National Health Service has noted that “there is currently not enough evidence to support taking vitamin D to prevent or treat coronavirus.” Dr. Jane M. Orient, a prominent skeptic of vaccines, also cast doubt on mask wearing, suggesting that “maybe instead of putting masks on everybody, we should be putting lids on the toilet or putting Clorox into it before you flush it.” While there is some evidence that toilet bowls can be infectious, the virus is most commonly distributed through close contact with others, and masks do offer some protection. Dr. Orient also cited “192 studies compiled on hydroxychloroquine with all showing some benefit when used early.” That appeared to be an exaggerated reference to a database of studies gathered by an anonymous group. Of those studies, about 40 were categorized as researching use of hydroxychloroquine as an early treatment, and about two dozen of those concluding that the drug demonstrated “positive” effects. Mr. Hawley criticized lockdowns as harmful to mental health, accurately citing a government survey showing that a quarter of young adults seriously thought about suicide in June. He then repeated an inaccurate claim from Mr. Trump that the World Health Organization no longer recommends lockdowns. Mr. Johnson himself echoed praise for hydroxychloroquine, claiming that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also “talked” about the drug. While it is true that Dr. Fauci has discussed hydroxychloroquine in the pandemic, he has warned against its use. As the hearing drew to a close, the senator offered his opinion of the severity of the pandemic. “It’s certainly worse than the flu, but is it that much worse to cause that much economic devastation with that severe of a human toll?” Mr. Johnson asked. That prompted almost immediate pushback from one of his own witnesses, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya of Stanford University School of Medicine, who told the senator: “It is worse than the flu.” Correction : Dec. 9, 2020 An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the drug ivermectin. It is used both to treat parasites in humans and to prevent heartworms in dogs. Read more

Dec. 8, 2020, 1:10 p.m. ET Dec. 8, 2020, 1:10 p.m. ET Why can’t the social networks stop fake accounts? Credit... Raphaelle Macaron Every few months, social media companies say they removed another billion fake accounts. So how did a 21-year-old delivery driver in Pennsylvania impersonate Trump family members on Twitter for nearly a year, eventually fooling the president? The answer has to do with the enormity of the social networks, the complexity of catching fakes, and the business incentives of the companies that run the sites. The bot problem Facebook said it blocked 4.5 billion accounts in the first nine months of the year, and that it caught more than 99 percent of those accounts before users could flag them. That number of accounts — equivalent to nearly 60 percent of the world’s population — is mind-boggling. It’s also inflated. The vast majority of those accounts were so-called bots, or automated accounts that are often created en masse by software programs. Bots have been used for years to artificially amplify certain posts or topics so they are seen by more people. In recent years, Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies have gotten much better at catching bots. They use software that spots and blocks them, often during the registration process, by looking for digital evidence that suggests the accounts are automated. As Facebook has caught more bots, it has also reported increasingly colossal statistics on how many fake accounts it takes down. Those numbers have brought the company plenty of positive headlines, but “they’re actually not used internally that much,” said Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief information security officer, who left the company in 2018. “One person can blow out the stats, because there’s no cost to do an attempt.” In other words, one person can create a software program that attempts to create millions of Facebook accounts, and when Facebook’s software blocks those bots, its tally of deleted fakes swells. Facebook has admitted that these statistics are not that helpful. “The number for fake accounts actioned is very skewed by simplistic attacks,” Alex Schultz, Facebook’s vice president of analytics, said last year. The prevalence of fake accounts is a more telling metric, he said. And it shows the company still has a big problem. Despite removing billions of accounts, Facebook estimates that 5 percent of its profiles are fake, or more than 90 million accounts, a figure that hasn’t budged for more than a year. Handmade fakes The social media companies have a much harder time with fake accounts that are created manually — that is, by a person sitting at a computer or tapping away on a phone. Such fakes don’t carry the same telltale digital signs of a bot. Instead, the companies’ software has to look for other clues, like an account sending multiple strangers the same message. But that approach is imperfect and works better for certain kinds of fakes. That in part explains why Josh Hall, the Pennsylvania delivery driver, was able to repeatedly impersonate President Trump’s relatives on Twitter and attract tens of thousands of followers before the company took notice. Manual fakes can be more pernicious than bots because they look more believable. Political operatives use such fakes to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories, while scammers use them to defraud people. Criminals have posed as celebrities, soldiers and even Mark Zuckerberg on social media to trick people into handing over money. Twitter’s effort to catch impostor accounts is complicated by its policy allowing parody accounts. The company requires parody accounts to be clearly labeled. Facebook also still struggles with accounts that pose as those belonging to public figures, but periodic reviews by The New York Times suggest the company has gotten better at removing them. Instagram, which Facebook owns, has not made as much progress. Asking users to help One way to combat the fakes is to require more documentation to create an account. The companies have begun to often require a phone number, but they are loath to make it more difficult for people to join their sites. Their businesses are predicated on adding more users so they can sell more ads to show them. Plus, Twitter in particular prizes its users’ anonymity; the company said it enables dissidents to speak out against authoritarian governments. So to whittle down the number of questionable accounts they should review, the companies rely on users to flag them. The strategy is far more efficient and cost-effective for the companies. It also means that as a fake account gains more attention, the more likely that it will be flagged for a closer look. Yet it still sometimes takes a while for the companies to act. Mr. Hall gained 77,000 followers posing as President Trump’s brother and 34,000 followers as the president’s 14-year-old son before Twitter took down the accounts, which Mr. Hall had used to spread conspiracy theories. And from 2015 to 2017, people working for the Russian government posed as the Tennessee Republican Party on Twitter, attracting 150,000 followers, including senior members of the Trump administration, while posting racist and xenophobic messages, according to a federal investigation. A Twitter spokesman said in a statement, “We’re working hard to ensure that violations of our rules against impersonation, particularly when people are attempting to spread misinformation, are addressed quickly and consistently.” Still, most fakes fail to attract many followers. Mr. Stamos argued that impostor accounts that few people notice don’t have much of an impact. “It gets pretty Zen but: If nobody follows a fake account, does the fake account exist?” he said. Mr. Stamos said that tech companies face so many threats, they must make difficult decisions on what issues to work on, and sometimes, the tricky work of rooting out each fake account isn’t worth it. “The companies are usually putting effort behind the things that they can show are the worst, not just the things that look bad,” he said. “How do you apply the always finite resources that you have to the problems that are actually causing harm?” Read more

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Dec. 8, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ET Dec. 8, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ET No, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine development has not been ‘reckless.’ A volunteer receiving Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine in August. A doctor who has voiced concerns about coronavirus vaccines is scheduled to testify at a Senate hearing on Tuesday. Credit... Ford Health System, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Dr. Jane M. Orient, an Arizona internist who will testify before Congress on Tuesday, has raised concerns about the new scientific methods that the drug companies Moderna and Pfizer are using to develop coronavirus vaccines, and about continued calls for widespread vaccination. “It seems to me reckless to be pushing people to take risks when you don’t know what the risks are,” Dr. Orient said this week in an interview with The New York Times. “People’s rights should be respected. Where is ‘my body, my choice’ when it comes to this?” Pfizer and Moderna are indeed relying on new scientific methods for their vaccines, building them around a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA, a natural genetic material that instructs the manufacture of proteins in human cells. But the concerns raised by Dr. Orient, who leads the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and was previously criticized for promoting anti-vaccine sentiment, aren’t backed by the wealth of scientific evidence to date. Although neither experimental vaccine has yet been given a green light by the Food and Drug Administration for widespread use, both products have been heavily and carefully tested in clinical trials. Early data suggests they are about 95 percent effective at protecting people from developing Covid-19, and neither has shown serious side effects. Both Pfizer and Moderna have applied for emergency use authorization for their vaccines from the F.D.A. On Thursday, the agency will review Pfizer’s case, and many experts expect the product to win approval. On Tuesday, the F.D.A. released documents reaffirming the Pfizer vaccine’s safety and effectiveness in a wide range of volunteers, across age, weight and race. Emergency authorization for Moderna’s vaccine will probably follow next week. The approvals would kick-start a series of vaccination campaigns that are expected to stretch far into 2021. Mass vaccination, which will curb the pandemic’s death toll and most likely slow the spread of disease, is an important step in the fight against the coronavirus. “Getting vaccinated protects you, but it also protects the people around you,” said Padmini Pillai, a vaccine researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And based on data, the virus kills, but the vaccine doesn’t.” The mRNA in these vaccines contains the blueprint for a protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. Once produced by cells, this protein acts like a molecular mug shot that teaches the immune system about the coronavirus’s most memorable features. This prepares the body to fight the real virus off, should it ever come to call. The process more or less mimics what happens when a virus infects a cell: It, too, must unload its genetic cargo, and force the cell to churn out proteins. But unlike a virus, the mRNA is not infectious and cannot prompt cells to produce active, disease-causing viruses. The molecules are also fragile and do not linger long in cells after they are “read” to make proteins. Researchers have no reason to believe they leave a lasting mark on the human body, apart from bolstering its defenses against infection. Pfizer’s vaccine has already been granted emergency approval in Britain. It and Moderna’s product are on track to be the world’s first fully licensed mRNA vaccines, though similar vaccines have been in development for decades. Neither vaccine has caused serious side effects in clinical trial volunteers. While many recipients have experienced mild symptoms after being injected, including headaches, mild fevers, fatigue and aches, “that just means the immune system is working,” Dr. Pillai said. “Tens of thousands of people have received the vaccine safely.” The F.D.A. and equivalent agencies in other countries take safety seriously when considering whether to give vaccines their stamps of approval. Researchers will also continue to be on the lookout for any unexpected side effects as more people are vaccinated. So far, Dr. Orient’s skepticism appears unfounded. Dr. Orient has also attracted criticism for her stalwart defense of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 despite overwhelming evidence that the drug has little benefit and may harm the people who receive it. She will appear on Tuesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a hearing focused on at-home treatment for Covid-19. She told The Times this week that doctors were too often sending patients home to ride out their disease. Read more

Dec. 7, 2020, 1:56 p.m. ET Dec. 7, 2020, 1:56 p.m. ET No, Kelly Loeffler didn’t wear a wire during a debate. Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Georgia Republican, speaking during a debate with Democratic challenger the Rev. Raphael Warnock in Atlanta on Sunday. Credit... Pool photo by Ben Gray On Sunday, Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican in one of the runoff elections in Georgia next month, fielded questions and sparred with her Democratic opponent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, in a televised debate. But on the internet, some Democrats saw evidence of foul play — a light-colored strand on Ms. Loeffler’s head that they claimed, without evidence, proved that she was being fed answers onstage. Ms. Loeffler was not wearing a wire, and the mysterious filament was likely just a strand of hair that caught the light. The Atlanta Press Club, which hosted the debate, tweeted on Monday that Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Warnock “had no audio assistance from their campaigns.” A spokesman for Ms. Loeffler’s campaign sent a link to the Atlanta Press Club’s tweet debunking the rumor when asked for comment. The candidates in last night's @atlpressclub debates had no audio assistance from their campaigns. — Atlanta Press Club (@atlpressclub) December 7, 2020 The claim has not been shared by many prominent Democrats. But it was shared by some liberals on Twitter, including Ben Meiselas, a lawyer with 100,000 followers who has previously shared other baseless theories, including suggesting that Ms. Loeffler might be “Q,” the central figure in QAnon. Here's a founder of the liberal SuperPAC Meidas Touch ("Because Truth Is Golden") spreading disinfo about Kelly Loeffler "wearing a wire" at last night's debate. pic.twitter.com/Sr2sDYlGtS — Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) December 7, 2020 Conspiracy theories about politicians wearing hidden wires and earpieces during debates are decades old. They date to the 2000 presidential election, when the right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh advanced the false theory that Al Gore had gotten hidden help from his campaign during a debate with George W. Bush. In the two decades since, Democrats and Republicans have advanced similar theories. This year, some Republicans speculated, falsely, that Joseph R. Biden Jr. was receiving assistance through an earpiece, a claim that was quickly debunked. Read more

Dec. 7, 2020, 1:36 p.m. ET Dec. 7, 2020, 1:36 p.m. ET Top Georgia election official debunks ‘ridiculous’ claims about election fraud. Gabriel Sterling, the voting implementation manager in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, speaking to reporters in Atlanta. Credit... Erik S. Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock Late on Nov. 3, election workers in Fulton County, Georgia, heard that they would be allowed to go home for the night. So they packed uncounted ballots into suitcases and prepared to lock up for the evening. When word came that they couldn’t leave yet, they dragged the suitcases back out and began counting the ballots again. That singular scene — of workers taking out suitcases of votes — was then selectively edited and shared by allies of President Trump as a conspiracy theory that election workers had dragged out fraudulent ballots under the cover of night. According to the theory, those suitcases helped swing Georgia’s Electoral College votes to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. But on Monday, Georgia’s secretary of state office dedicated part of a morning news conference to debunking that falsehood and many others, in what was called “Disinformation Monday.” Gabriel Sterling, the voting implementation manager in Georgia and a Republican, said in the news conference that watching the entire surveillance footage of Election Day showed that workers had first packed the suitcases with valid, uncounted ballots and then later unpacked those same ballots. They had not taken out suitcases full of fake ballots, he said. “The reason they were packed away is because they were under the misbegotten impression that they were getting to go home, which, if you notice when you go back to see the videos on this, they were packing these things up 10, 10:30 at night,” Mr. Sterling said. He ran through a list of other pieces of misinformation being spread about the Georgia elections and rebuked the baseless claims. Conspiracy theories have been running rampant in the state, which also will hold runoff elections for its two Senate seats on Jan. 5. About the rumor that a “water main break” had damaged ballots and the tally in Fulton County on Election Day, Mr. Sterling said, “There was no water main break.” He cited surveillance footage that showed that there was simply a water leak and that it did not affect any ballots. “You’ll see when they walk in, and they see the obvious water leak on the floor,” he said. “You will see when they move all the stuff out of the way. You will see the Zamboni, little carpet-dryer thingy driving around. I mean, you can see all the things happen, you can see the table get put in place.” Mr. Sterling criticized Mr. Trump and his allies for sharing a clip of the water leak incident and making it appear to show something else that was false and deceptive. “What’s really frustrating is the president’s attorneys had this same videotape,” he said. “They saw the exact same things the rest of us see, and they chose to mislead state senators and the public about what was on that video.” On false claims that workers had fed the same ballot multiple times into voting machines on Election Day, Mr. Sterling also said that that could not happen because “it would have shown up in the hand count.” Georgia election officials undertook a complete hand recount of the results after the election ended because of the closeness of the race. When the recount showed no change in results, the Trump campaign requested a machine-based recount. That, too, showed no meaningful change. On false claims of hand-count irregularities and how an algorithm was used in the voting machines to swing ballots against Mr. Trump, Mr. Sterling was unequivocal. “There is no algorithm proof,” he said, adding it was “irresponsible” for people to spread the baseless rumors. Finally, Mr. Sterling addressed a claim that Georgia Democratic state senators went to Pennsylvania to count ballots as part of some conspiracy to help Mr. Biden in that state, saying it was not true. He made his exasperation clear. “It’s ridiculous,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m standing here and saying these things.” Read more

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