Reporter Discusses False Accusations Against Dominion Worker

What was the biggest surprise you came across in your reporting?

I was genuinely surprised to find that Mr. Coomer had expressed strong anti-Trump sentiments, using strong language, on his Facebook page. His settings were such that only his Facebook friends could see it, but someone took a screenshot of those and other divisive posts, and right-wing media circulated them widely. The posts were used in the spread of what cybersecurity experts call malinformation — something true that is used to support the dissemination of a story that is false. In this case, it was the big lie that the election was rigged. I think to understand the spread of spurious information — to resist its lure, to fight it off — these distinctions are helpful to parse. Understanding the human cost of these campaigns also matters. We heard a lot about the attacks on Dominion, but there are real people with real lives who are being battered in a battle they had no intention of joining, whatever their private opinions.

There were so many elaborate theories of election fraud involving Dominion. How important were the accusations against Eric Coomer in that bigger story?

It’s hard to say. But Advance Democracy Inc., a nonpartisan nonprofit, looked at the tweets in its database from QAnon-related accounts and found that, from Nov. 1 to Jan. 7, Eric Coomer’s name appeared in 25 percent of the ones that mentioned Dominion. Coomer believes the attacks on Dominion were somewhat inevitable but considered his own role as “an accelerant.”

Why did so much attention focus on Dominion Voting Systems, as opposed to its competitors?

I’m not sure anyone fully understands that right now. But they happened to be heavily represented in swing states that went for Mr. Biden, such as Arizona, Michigan and Georgia. Election experts say that the elections went extraordinarily well, for the most part, especially given that there were record numbers of mail-in ballots due to Covid. But there were two instances, in places that used Dominion voting machines, where election officials made small mistakes (and skipped the necessary steps that would have caught those errors). Those, too, became fuel for subsequent malinformation campaigns. And then the Coomer story was amplified, too.

So is this story a cautionary tale about social media?

I think many people have taken it that way. But to me, it’s a case study in how one data point, which proved nothing, was taken, manipulated and transmitted with great speed, along various channels of right-wing media, until it reached the lawyers of the president of the United States, who were desperate for anything to delegitimize Joe Biden’s winning the election.

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