AN INTRUDER BARGES INTO THE HOUSE OF THE person who is second in line to the presidency, and strikes her 82-year-old husband with a hammer. Yet millions of people—including politicians, public figures, and the richest man in the world—seemingly believe that the incident was not a political attack at all, but a drunken lover’s quarrel.
Although the outlandish narratives about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi have generated widespread attention, the tactics used to spread them have generally been overlooked. A NewsGuard analysis of false narratives related to the incident reveals how the Paul Pelosi conspiracy went from fringe to mainstream in a matter of days, enabled by the limited information and unintentional misreporting that often accompany developing news stories, and dramatically amplified by a cast of malign actors taking advantage of social media’s speed and reach. These included right-wing personalities who were seeking to shift the narrative away from the notion that the
