When does misinformation "harm democratic institutions"?

Question

One of the things that our new Misleading Information Policy bans is "misleading information" that "Is likely to significantly harm democratic institutions or voting processes or to cause voter or census suppression".

The consensus here seems to be that this is a dog whistle reference to a specific US politician (whose name may rhyme with "Chump") and a violent incident that may have occurred on a January day in 2021. For example, see a recent comment by Richard.

My question is how (or if) this clause will apply to other political issues or movements, especially in the future after the hinted-at politician is done and gone into history books.

Generally speaking, when does misinformation "harm democratic institutions"? Is this a low barrier that covers a wide variety of political misstatements that fail to cast politicians in the best light possible given the best available evidence, or is it a high barrier that is only really reached when physically violent or armed rebellion is occurring or imminent?

For example, suppose I post misstatements about Vladimir Putin in an answer on Politics SE. I am aware that the content that I am posting is false or at least unsupported by what most people consider to be the best evidence, but I reasonably predict that the effect of my misinformation will be limited to damaging Putin's reputation and that the chance of the misinformation triggering a January 6-style insurrection at the Kremlin is minimal. Is my misinformation of such a gravity as to violate this clause of the Misleading Information Policy, or is reading this clause in the context of anyone other than that orange guy and his violent, racist, and/or Fascist followers misguided and excessively literalistic?

Regarding my example, I am aware that an argument can be made that 21st century Russia is insufficiently "democratic" to trigger a clause involving harm against "democratic" institutions, but I have serious concerns about such an argument and whether that will lead to a defense against violations that the harmed institution "isn't really democratic" or "isn't democratic enough" to matter.

In response to Richard, you've hit the nail on the head as to what my question really is. In other words, my question could be interpreted as whether "Is likely to significantly harm democratic institutions or voting processes or to cause voter or census suppression" is a test that is applied individually to various and diverse information and allegations that may not have even been thought up at the time the policy was inked, or whether the policy is simply intended to mean "No MAGA content" and was never intended to apply to anything else. For example, would a hypothetical future misinformation or disinformation campaign spearheaded by the Left and targeted at discrediting right-wing politicians such as "Chump" through allegations that are either verifiably false or not in accordance with the best available evidence fall under this policy?

In other words, if I am a diamond moderator handling a post that a user has flagged as in violation of the Misleading Information Policy, is my duty limited to determining whether the post contains MAGA, QAnon, and/or Alt-Right content (delete post if yes, decline flag if no) or would I be expected to engage in independent fact-checking and, if I determine the information to be false or unsupported, make an informed estimate of the kind and amount of harm to democratic institutions that would be done if the information is not adequately censored, and then apply some sort of rubric to determine if the misinformation is serious enough to find in violation of the policy? For example, Time Cube content posted on Physics.SE might be considered blatant misinformation, but of the type that is extremely unlikely to cause anything other than trivial harm to democratic institutions and thus not in violation of the policy.

So, I'm seeing one of the following as the most likely:

• The policy applies only to MAGA and/or similarly aligned or allied content such as QAnon, Alt-Right, or Patriot Militia content. Attempts to apply it to other content (even other political content such as Communist propaganda) are misguided and ultimately meaningless.
• The policy applies broadly. Moderators are expected to fact-check posts brought to their attention as possibly false or unsupported and perform risk assessments on the likelihood and impact to democratic institutions of content they find to be false or unsupported. The moderator applies a rubric to determine whether to delete the content or notify users that the content is not in violation and should be downvoted rather than flagged.
• The clause about harm is superfluous, as any demonstrably false or unsupported information is automatically deemed to be "likely to significantly harm democratic institutions or voting processes or to cause voter or census suppression" by the very fact that it is false and/or unsupported by the best available evidence. Content as apparently innocuous as Time Cube therefore violates the policy due to the overwhelming evidence of its lack of scientific support. Code snippets posted on Stack Overflow that violate the applicable language standards (e.g. by being malformed or containing undefined behavior) would also likely be considered in violation as such code could theoretically end up being copypasted into voting machines or otherwise used in defense of democratic institutions.

To be clear, I am not questioning whether there are a small number of Very Violent People who will stop at nothing to spread their scurrilous lies and plunge the world into a thousand-year night and whose online activities therefore must be ruthlessly censored to hold off said coming darkness. My fear is that we could be entering into a Brave New World of administratively-defined Truth and that a person such as myself, who has never voted for the orange guy and doesn't even like him, will someday find himself in a factual disagreement with Company Truth and Safety Team Orthodoxy and be punished with post deletions and suspensions.

Answer 1

I can think of several examples in the recent past where disinformation campaigns based on false claims were deployed to sway public opinion.

Many of these were perpetrated by various factions within the alt-right peanut gallery; but then, I would argue that this only demonstrates that dogmatic extremists are more easily manipulated by playing on their preconceived notions, and does not as such suggest that any policy against disinformation is designed to specifically target them.

Unfortunately, the policy leaves a lot of leeway to enforcers. Assertions that we do not live on a roughly spherical planet are relatively harmless; should they be suppressed with the same vigor as allegations that vaccination requirements are a conspiracy by child-abusing cannibals to inject mind-controlling nanochips into your blood? And, without context, would such preposterous claims as the latter example not be so obviously patently false as to be harmless ... until you examine the broader context, and realize that they have been repeated enough to actually form a threat to public health, and potentially to the foundations of civilized political discourse?

(The Q-Anon example is of course specific to the United States, and is simply absurd anywhere else in the world; but given the international situation, domestic US politics have global repercussions, and thus are familiar and important to all of us.)

Returning to your example, if you are slandering Putin in isolation, that is probably not an example of something the policy would address; but if yours were a small part of a more widely orchestrated campaign of posts to disturb the stability of the Russian Federation, that would constitute an offense (modulo your doubts as to whether Putin's Russia qualifies as "democratic").

Again, this is (perhaps necessarily) uncomfortably vague. On one hand, reasonable proof that you are violating the policy will be prohibitively hard to produce within a reasonable timeframe; on the other, if no proof is required, the policy could be haphazardly applied to many unpopular claims.