Sarah Palin is a “super-sharer of unreliable sources,” according to a new study of Facebook posts by candidates for Congress from the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University.

Palin accepts Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and regularly passes along other bogus information.

“She shared 849 links to unreliable sources from January to July 2022,” wrote Megan Brown and Maggie Macdonald, two researchers at the academic research institute.

Rob Cornicelli of New York, who also echoes Trump’s election lies, runs a distant second by having spread 88 links from unreliable sources in the first six-and-a-half months of 2022.

On social media, Palin often shares links from her own website, which NewsGuard, an entity that studies this topic, regards as unreliable. Her reliance on social media as a celebrity is part of what makes her an outlier in spreading things that no one should believe.

NewsGuard is an independent organization that says it ranks news and information sites based on nine criteria of journalistic practice.

The researchers said they also ran the numbers on spreading Facebook posts with Palin excluded from the total. With her out of the picture, the increase in spreading unreliable information is smaller but significant.

Palin has eagerly embraced Trump’s lies despite the lack of evidence of fraud. She was echoing Trump’s nonsense about voter fraud in 2016 and started claiming the 2020 election was rigged after Biden won. She strings together rumors about “shenanigans” and never fails to mention the aide to Obama who voted absentee in Alaska in 2008.

“Well, primaries can be fixed, and debate questions can be fixed, and dead people can vote,” she said in 2016. Palin has never provided any proof to justify her constant claim that no one can be sure that Biden won.

In Alaska there has been no effort to call out Palin’s lies and false claims. Alaska news organizations simply don’t have a strategy to improve the situation and her social media accounts remain an echo chamber for her fans.

Researchers Zeve Sanderson and Joshua Tucker said the phenomenon of Republican candidates spreading information from unreliable sources is spreading, while Facebook has cut the number of employees working on election integrity from 300 to 60.

“Right now, a faction of the Republican party has decided that election outcomes — at least when they lose — aren’t legitimate. As a result, platforms must not only consider how to moderate election misinformation but also how to handle candidates who question the legitimacy of the process itself,” they wrote.

“Platforms have numerous ways to moderate misinformation. Research shows they all work, and don’t, to varying degrees. For example, several studies indicate fact checks can reduce belief in misperceptions. However, these effects can decay over time. Another study found attaching a warning label or blocking engagement with Trump’s 2020 election misinformation tweets was not related to a reduction of its spread, both on Twitter and other platforms. And while recent work shows accuracy nudges decrease belief in and sharing of misinformation, it’s yet to be tested at scale on platforms.”

“Beyond content, platforms also must contend with users spreading election falsehoods, many of whom are political candidates. With the exception of Trump, companies have been largely reluctant to ban candidates who post misinformation. Indeed, high-profile users, such as celebrities and politicians, are essentially immune from Facebook’s content moderation rules.”

Writing in the Washington Post Monday, Brown and Macdonald said the spreading of unreliable information has increased since the 2020 election, “and the increase appears to be driven by nonincumbent Republican candidates.”

Your contributions help support independent analysis and political commentary by Alaska reporter and author Dermot Cole. Thank you for reading and for your support. Either click here to use PayPal or send checks to: Dermot Cole, Box 10673, Fairbanks, AK 99710-0673