. That means several more weeks of campaign activity are to come. And Georgia is of particular interest to Democrats, as a key swing state and one that shines a light on some of the party’s ongoing obstacles. Democrats can’t win there without bringing a maximum number of Black voters into the process, but the state is also home to about 120,000 Black male registered voters who—despite Abrams’ famous voter-mobilization effort—sat out the last few election cycles, Banks says.
“What we interpreted from that is, hey, somebody is pushing this information to them,” House says. “And the way they did it was in messages [that said things like], ‘OK, the Asian Americans got their bill and the LGBTQ [Americans] got their bill, but when are we going to get the anti-lynching bill?’ Now, mind you, theThat’s where Win Black and other emergency response projects like it come in.
That’s not to say that every person who tweets about being concerned about potential violence at the polls is a plant, Bouzy cautions. But “the average person overestimates how much money or sophistication is necessary to circulate information the poster knows to be false,” he says—and the average person also fails to understand how social-media creators can make money by jumping on trending topics, even when those trends are based on hateful or false ideas.