Black Lives Matter protesters display wristbands reading "I VOTED". Activists warn Black and Latino voters are being flooded with disinformation intended to suppress turnout in the election’s final days. Murphy Bannerman first noticed the posts this summer, in a Facebook group called Being Black in Arizona. Someone started posting memes full of false claims that seemed designed to discourage people from voting. The memes were "trying to push this narrative of, ‘The system is a mess and there’s no point in you participating,’" Bannerman said. She recalled statements like, "’Democrats and Republicans are the same. There’s no point in voting.’ ‘Obama didn’t do anything for you during his term, why should you vote for a Democrat this time around?’" Bannerman was alarmed. She had already been on high alert for these kinds of messages, because of her job as deputy director of Election Protection Arizona, a nonpartisan group that helps people vote. Black and Latino voters are being flooded with similar messages in the final days of the election, according to voting rights activists and experts that track disinformation. These tactics echo Russian election interference on social media four years ago, when operatives working for the Kremlin-backed Internet Research […]

Click here to view original web page at www.npr.org