Original subtitles

[Borat] Nice to meet you.

- Oh, okay. - Yes.

[Sacha] In Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,

I lived with two conspiracy theorists,

in character, for several days.

- Vaccines. - Bill Gates.

- Mail-in ballots. - Chinese virus.

- Drink their blood. - Not nice.

The myths and misinformation they shared with Borat

fuel a dangerous rhetoric that is tearing apart societies

in front of our eyes.

In this series of episodes,

we'll introduce Jim and Jerry to world-leading experts,

doctors and academics, who will address

some of the most dangerous conspiracies head-on

and debunk them face-to-face.

Hello, Jim and Jerry.

This is Hillary Rodham Clinton.

You know, I refuse to take part in mail-in ballots.

It's just bullshit.

Right?

Mail-in ballots...

They can cheat. They can win that way.

[narrator] In 2016, during the presidential primaries,

before the election ever happened,

Roger Stone launched the Stop the Steal website,

and since then, Trump has touted voter fraud

as the only reason he would ever lose an election.

Unsolicited millions of ballots that they're sending.

It's a scam. It's a hoax.

[narrator] Even after he defeated Hilary Clinton,

he claimed to be a victim of it,

keeping the threat alive in the minds of his supporters,

until the next election.

During the 2020 election, in the midst of a global pandemic,

many states determined that the best way to keep voters safe

and distanced was through mail-in ballots.

As Election Day drew closer, Trump ramped up

his baseless attacks against mail-in ballots,

continuing to cast doubt on their accuracy.

[narrator] This was a way to undermine the validity

of the traditional Democratic voter living in cities

who were thought to be more likely

to utilize the mail-in system.

While dramatic, these claims are patently false.

Mail-in ballots have reliably been used since the Civil War,

showing no party bias.

One analysis of mail-in ballots in the 2016 and 2018 elections

found only 372 possible cases of fraud,

out of 14.6 million votes cast.

These facts were drowned out by the story of a president

creating doubt about his own nation's electoral system,

which became daily fodder for all the news networks,

which, in turn, continued to spread this false narrative

of election fraud.

Hey, Jim and Jerry.

How are you? I feel like I know you two.

[woman news reporter] Mutale Nkonde is a fellow

at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard.

We have been looking at how platform companies

allow their recommendation algorithms

to spread disinformation.

It's good to meet you.

It's nice to be able to sit here and talk to you.

[Mutale] Like, I would love to hear

what element of the election,

if any, do you think...

I think that they used a lot of ballots that were false.

Mail-in voting, is, is open for fraud,

and even Jimmy Carter said that.

[Jerry] It is. It's open completely to fraud,

and you're able to do so many things

with so many extra ballots.

I, I did mail-in, uh, voting for years because I travel a lot.

So, that's how I did it.

But I had to request it. All right?

What happened was, they just mass-mailed them out.

The independent studies that the Secretary of States

did afterwards with this election,

they said it was the safest election in U.S. history.

Last year's presidential election in United States,

was, all the electoral officials agree,

and all observers and commentators agree,

the fairest and most scrupulously carried out

in American history.

[woman] The Justice Department has not seen fraud

on a scale that could have changed the outcome

of the presidential race.

Bush said, in part, the American people "can have confidence

that the election was fundamentally fair."

The voters and the clerks are to be commended for the work

that they did to ensure that, under such significant scrutiny,

the process worked.

[Evans] But Donald Trump cannot stand the idea of defeat.

And so, he began to say,

even before the election, that if he was defeated,

it would be the result of fraud.

The biggest critical thing that we're looking at right now

- with this country is the corruption. - Yep.

And that's what it boils down to.

That's what's going on right now.

It's... To me, it's disgusting.

[narrator] On election night 2020,

there was an explosive renewal of the #StoptheSteal hashtag

causing the eponymous Facebook group to amass 360,000 members

in the 48 hours following Election Day.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter allowed #StopTheSteal

to circulate on their platforms.

Despite the group's violent rhetoric,

it took Facebook over a month to remove them from their site.

But as we saw on January 6,

- violent rhetoric became real life. - [angry mob shouting]

[news reporter 2] A mob of domestic terrorists

broke into the Capitol to try and stop the confirmation

of the electoral vote.

See, if you believe that the elected representatives

have been fraudulently elected,

then you consider yourself justified

in overthrowing them and attacking them.

Which is what happened on January 6.

I think that they put Biden in there.

He wasn't elected.

You can't tell me that.

You just... I just can't believe that.

[crowd chanting] Stop the steal! Stop the steal!

Stop the steal! Stop the steal!

- Stop the steal! - [gunshot]

The current wave of conspiracy theories

bypass the traditional gatekeepers

of opinion formation.

Newspaper editors, radio and TV producers,

who would say, "You can't do this.

I'm not going to print this,

because there's no factual evidence for it at all.

It's just a-a, a vicious fantasy."

And with the Internet and social media,

you can bypass all of that

and say whatever you like on the Internet.

That's beginning to change, and I think

it's important that that's changing.

Um, that social media companies

now are beginning to take responsibility

for the kind of information that they carry.

But there's still a long way to go.

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