Political misinformation is now a tool driven by politicians to amass popularity and propel personal agendas. Politicians play a dirty game by sending emails that promote lies to the public.
Emails are one of the most trusted forms of communication which is deemed to be reliable and trustworthy. Even government officials and departments utilize these platforms to carry out sensitive projects. Military operations are also emailed to concerned parties, and it is rare for such emails to leak.
Usually, whenever a lawmaker makes a statement on social media or television broadcast, there are analysts who fact-check those statements and scrutinize them. But politicians use emails to send false information directly to the public, bypassing any scrutiny. The New York Times noted that “But email – one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people – teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice” [Source].
To survey falsehoods sent out by email. New York Times officials “signed up to the campaign lists of the 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022 and read through 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers”.
Both Republicans and Democrats had “heaps of hyperbole in their emails.” In the hyperbole mails, one Republican “declared that Democrats wanted to establish a ‘one-party socialist state,’ while a Democrat suggested that the party’s Jan. 6 inquiry was at imminent risk because the G.O.P. “could force the whole investigation to end early.”
But Republicans sent more misinformed messages as compared to the Democrats. New York Times posited that “in about 15 percent of their messages, compared with about 2 percent for Democrats. In addition, multiple Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims, whereas Democrats rarely repeated one another’s”.
During Trump’s era, about eight Republican lawmakers “sent fund-raising emails containing a brazen distortion of a potentials settlement with migrants separated from their families.” For instance, John Kennedy, a Republican in Louisiana, sent out claims that the US president Joe Biden was “giving every illegal immigrant that comes into our country $450,000”.
Commenting on the distortion in emails, Republican pollster Frank Luntz said, “It may be a fund-raising pitch, but very often, people look at it as a campaign pitch. And so misleading them in an attempt to divide them from their money is pure evil, because you’re taking advantage of people who don’t know the difference” [Source].
A significant number of Democrats purported false statements related to abortion. New York Representative Carolyn Maloney said the Mississippi law before the Supreme Court was “nearly identical to Texas’s, banning abortions after 6 weeks”. A contradictory statement on Maloney’s claims notes that “Mississippi’s law bans abortion after 15 weeks and does not include the vigilante enforcement mechanism that is a defining characteristic of Texas’ law”.
It is dangerous to use a text that comes directly to one’s phone because people trust me with those emails or texts. Darren Linvill, a specialist in social media at Clemson University, “I think people are more ready to accept information that comes through their phone than social media, where we’re trained in many ways to be more on guard” [Source].
Before the 2020 elections in the US, political misinformation was sent via text message and email. The Washington Post noted, “They’re arriving in waves of text messages and emails, making use of a more intimate and less heavily scrutinized vector of disinformation than the social networking services manipulated four years ago as part of the Kremlin’s sweeping interference in the 2016 election.”
Mailing political misinformation is now a trend among politicians who campaign and tends to be impossible to uproot.
