Elderly voters' fitness to vote are potential targets of social media disinformation

?Eric Hovde, a Republican candidate for Senator in Wisconsin, is at the center of a controversy for comments he made about the authenticity of the votes of elderly people made while residing in nursing homes.? In an interview on The Guy Benson Show, Heartland Signal reported him as saying, “Almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote, and you had children, adult children, showing up, saying, ‘Who voted for my 85- or 90-year-old father or mother?’”?

?There was a genuine dispute in Racine County about potential voting fraud. No evidence emerged that demonstrated criminal intent to steal the 2020 Presidential election. Meanwhile, Hovde is being roundly attacked on social media as wanting to disenfranchise elderly voters. Former President Trump, who has endorsed Hovde, continues to assert that he won Wisconsin in 2020, a position Hovde disagrees with, but gives his adversaries lots of political maneuverability.

No charges have been filed in the Racine County case, according to Associated Press, which also reported Hovde’s attempts to clarify his standing that “elderly should absolutely vote.”

?"Sharp as a tack"

Enter a largely unrelated trend on social media yesterday, April 22: Michael Douglas, the elderly, now 79 year old actor was quoted as saying President Biden is “sharp as a tack.” The political right has pounced on this by making fun of both men, posting images of bent tacks and similar tacky others, blatant antisemitism and other lies about Democratic politicians.

?Age has been a divisive discourse in social media for some time. “Hey boomer” is past its expiration date but has modeled a template how ageism plays out in social media. It may be that a new divisive discourse is arising in advance of the 2024 U.S. elections, the idea that elderly voters are unfit to vote or that their ballots are harvested by political operatives, meaning they are tricked into singing their absentee ballots to cast votes they would not have.

?In the Hovde discussion, whether he likes or not, hints are arising this may be the case. Will this GIF (screenshot below) and other memes be used to promote election misinformation based on the notion that elderly Americans, the most active voters by demographic, are mentally unfit to vote? This is the exact opposite of the context of the GIF's source clip belonging to the LBJ Presidential Library that suggests that all voters and their votes are important.

There is more. This post posits “shameless” liberals pressuring old people for votes while another is more blunt; the votes of elderly will be systematically stolen in the 2024 election. In this comment on YouTube, this person claimed that nursing home staff “made her [mother] vote democrat."

?Be prepared to see, and suspicious of, more posts from those expressing certainty about their beliefs of the elderly who should or should not vote, and from those that claim that their elderly parents voting rights were taken advantage of as we head into election season. And, by all means, help your elderly parents vote their choice.

#socialmedia #disinformation #misinformation

Acknowledgments

I am a YouScan Ambassador and wish to thank YouScan Social Listening ? for access to their AI enabled social listening platform, YouScan.io.

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