The state of American political disinformation as of January 13, 2021 is what would be called "scrambled".

Simply listing all the narratives observed, or telling what the most popular ones are, tends to make those trivial; as it is easy to guess that the following will be mentioned:

1) Mike Pence
2) impeachment
3) the inauguration

This is actually what people are talking about on the Reddit-clone “.win” sites that Trumpists have left and it is probably fairly close to what is circulating right now on Twitter and Facebook,

Counter-disinformation studies and anti-fascist operations in general cannot proceed as simply whack-a-mole-ing disinformation for the rest of all time, constantly vigilant to quash every tiny false thing that someone says before it spreads. That's not scalable, and it's not even a unique service. Fact-checking does that already, and even with multiple fact-checking services (LeadStories, TruthOrFiction, Politifact, Reuters, Snopes, AP, etc., etc.) it is barely keeping up.

We need to see through things, not just look at them en masse. We need to transcend the game, understand its winning conditions and defeat it finally and definitively, not chase the next battle while fretting about the last one.

There are some parts of that final "kill it and it stays dead" solution that people can all agree on. It has to involve a community effort; it has to be a citizen-led initiative, because government speech restrictions are bad (notwithstanding the misuse of the argument by conservatives right now); it has to build a long-term reservoir of resilience against manipulation and division by propaganda. These propositions are overall fairly uncontroversial.

More than a daily detailed list of all the latest bad things that people are saying, things need to be seen as opposed to a normal day, in order to grasp the differences.

In context, what has been observed today is not a coordinated push.

A coordinated push or a disinformation surge can be defined as:

the diversity of people or groups and entities saying the same thing or message
The synchrony of those messages, as they should say it at the same time, (within a few hours, days or week)

Here's a timely example:

From a disinformation sample (n = 20) taken on September 28, 2018 -

The accounts behind those posts are geographically distinct, putatively unconnected accounts that share in common only high-frequency propaganda posting. On September 28, 2018, three sets of nearly identical or identical images across a 24-hour span were identified. The narrative on all 20 samples from that day were all uniformly nearly identical. Spammers with no connection to each other - different entrepreneurs, even operating in different countries - all started saying the same thing, suddenly. That is a disinformation surge.

It has been theorized that there were central, synchronizing signals that the disinformation ecosystem followed. It has been speculated that it was Dan Scavino daily email blasts from the White House press office to Fox News, specifically to Hannity and Carlson, most probably have been bellwethers in an ecosystem, not specifically leading so much as setting an example for other operators.

The activity seen today is not a disinformation surge.

As of January 13, 2021, those lies are disconnected and fragmented, and slower to production than they have been historically.

During the first impeachment of President Trump in the House, and the trial in the Senate, we saw ecosystem-wide disinformation narrative changes, day-over-day, dependent upon which witness was testifying or which Senator was speaking. Not just Fox saying something different: right-wing memes, YouTube and Facebook comments, even radio talk-show hosts and pundits, would all change their targets and their themes.

What we see in 2021 is that although the same fluidity and speed of response is there in terms of distribution of narratives, their traction - the speed at which they grow - is much slower than it used to be. The speed at which the right-wing disinformation ecosystem converges on a narrative is noticeably slower than it once was. And, interestingly, they are often conflicting.

Approximately 36 hours ago the flyer above, calling for a "Refuse To Be Silenced" March on state Capitols, emerged on a Twitter account. Lauren Witzke, a QAnon-adherent Republican Congressional candidate, is being quoted by an official Proud Boys chapter on Telegram ordering members to “Stand down and do not attend”. The message being transmitted, differs between two critical nodes in a way that significantly differs from the old "everyone all mashed together" narrative world of Facebook and Twitter in an era where members of these communities have taken refuge on Telegram. One message is essentially a counter-revolutionary one - and one is in direct conflict with other elements of that same ecosystem.

A satisfying and moralistic read would simply be to say "hah they don't even trust themselves" and scroll downwards.

Think about what I just showed you:

an ecosystem-wide "pulse" phenomenon demonstrating a high degree of phenomenological synchrony and diversity, and
an example of two critical nodes in the ecosystem at odds with another ecosystem node

This asynchrony that you observe in this example is novel, especially considering how frequently it is now occurring. Trumpists turned on McConnell, for instance. In late December; they turned on Cheney (the younger); today they are even turning on Pence.

This change of dynamic in disinformation narrative propagation has profound political impacts.

The basic political bargain of Trumpism has always been based upon his control of the cult of personality comprising his "base". At any given moment in the last four years, that base - meaning not merely the people who sort-of liked Trump, but rather the people who voted and based their political behavior on Trumpism - stood between 25-30% of America by most estimates.

That base, however, was sufficiently reliable as voters that it provided Trump with political blackmail he could use on Republicans. Simply tweeting at the wrong Republican, for the past four years, would destroy that Republican's career. This has resulted in the quiet wreckage of a multitude of Republican careers, such as Paul Ryan, or Reince Priebus.

In short, Trump controlled the base with disinformation. The base gave him blackmail on Republicans. Disinformation gave Trump control over Republicans.

Looking at what is perceptible at a global level, there is a marked and profound change in how the disinformation ecosystem as a whole seems to react to exigent political events. It is slower, and stupider, and markedly less coordinated than it once was.

This is due to any number of systemic factors; including the distribution of disinformation narratives to more private platforms like Telegram, which announced today it is banning insurrectionists; the succession of "bot" purges that Twitter and Facebook have undertaken since 2016, i; and the increasing social disapproval of insurrectionist sentiment, and Trumpism in general, that is forcing more and more of that narrative distribution "underground".

Misinformation Report - 13th of January 2020