A handful of right-wing “super propagators” on social media were responsible for most of the electoral misinformation in the race to attack the Capitol, according to a new study that also sheds light on the impressive scope of Donald’s falsehoods Trump.
A report by the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that includes Stanford and the University of Washington, analyzed social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok for several months before and after the 2020 elections.
He found that the “super propagators” – responsible for the most frequent and impactful disinformation campaigns – included Trump and his two oldest children, as well as other members of the Trump administration and the right-wing media.
The study authors and other researchers say the findings underscore the need to disable these accounts to prevent the spread of incorrect information.
“If there is a limit to how much content moderators can handle, get them to focus on reducing harm by eliminating the most effective spreaders of misinformation,” said Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who studies the psychology of news. false, but EIP report was not involved. “Instead of trying to apply the rules equally to all users, focus on applying the most powerful accounts.”
The report analyzed social media posts with words like “election” and “vote” to track important narratives of disinformation related to the 2020 election, including allegations of freighters throwing ballots, legitimate ballots strategically not being told, and other false or unproven stories. .
The report studied how these narratives developed and the effect they had. During that time, he found that popular right-wing Twitter accounts “turned unique stories, sometimes based on concerns from honest voters or genuine misunderstandings, into cohesive narratives of systemic electoral fraud.”
Ultimately, the “false allegations and narratives merged into the metanarrative of a ‘stolen election’, which later fueled the January 6 uprising,” the report said.
“The 2020 election demonstrated that actors – both foreign and domestic – remain committed to transforming false and misleading viral narratives to undermine confidence in the US electoral system and undermine Americans’ faith in our democracy,” the authors concluded.
Almost without fact verification, with Trump as the superdegradator-in-chief
In monitoring Twitter, the researchers analyzed more than 22 million tweets sent between August 15 and December 12. The study determined which accounts were most influential by the size and speed with which they spread disinformation.
“Influential reports from the political right rarely engaged in fact-checking behavior and were responsible for the most widespread incidents of false or misleading information in our data set,” said the report.
Of the 21 main offenders, 15 were verified on Twitter accounts – which is particularly dangerous when it comes to electoral misinformation, the study said. The “repeated propagators” responsible for the most widespread misinformation included Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and influencers like James O’Keefe, Tim Pool, Elijah Riot and Sidney Powell. All 21 major accounts for disinformation have tilted to the right, the study showed.
“Top-down misinformation is dangerous because of the speed with which it can spread,” said the report. “If a social media influencer with millions of followers shares a narrative, he can garner hundreds of thousands of engagements and shares before a social media platform or fact checker has time to review its content.”
On almost all platforms analyzed in the study – including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – Donald Trump played an important role.
He identified 21 incidents in which a tweet from Trump’s official @realDonaldTrump account spurred the spread of a false Twitter narrative. For example, Trump’s tweets unfoundedly claiming that voting equipment manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems was responsible for electoral fraud played a big role in extending conspiracy theory to a wider audience. Fake or baseless Tweets sent by Trump’s account – which had 88.9 million followers at the time – have accumulated more than 460,000 retweets.
Meanwhile, Trump’s YouTube channel has been linked to six distinct waves of disinformation that, combined, have been the most viewed of all the videos of other promoters. His Facebook account had the highest engagement of all studied.
The Election Integrity Partnership study is not the first to show the enormous influence that Trump’s social media accounts have had on the spread of misinformation. In one year – between January 1, 2020 and January 6, 2021 – Donald Trump released misinformation in more than 1,400 Facebook posts, a report by Media Matters for America released in February revealed. Trump ended up being suspended from the platform in January, and Facebook is debating whether he will be allowed to return.
Specifically, 516 of his posts contained misinformation about Covid-19, 368 contained electoral misinformation and 683 contained damaging rhetoric attacking his political enemies. Claims of electoral fraud generated more than 149.4 million interactions, or an average of 412,000 interactions per post, and accounted for 16% of interactions in his posts in 2020. Trump had the unique ability to amplify news that would otherwise remain contained in smaller vehicles and subgroups, said Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America.
“What Trump did was take the misinformation from the right-wing ecosystem and turn it into a news event that affected everyone,” he said. “He was able to take these absurd lies and conspiracy theories and turn them into national news. And if you do that and inflame people often, you will end what we saw on January 6th. “
Effects of false electoral narratives on voters
In the end, the “super-disclosure” accounts have been very successful in undermining voter confidence in the democratic system, the report concluded. Citing a poll from the Pew Research Center, the study said that of the 54% of people who voted in person, approximately half cited concerns about voting by mail, and only 30% of respondents were “very confident” that they were absent or post-em ballots were counted as planned.
The report outlined a series of recommendations, including the complete removal of “super-spreader” accounts.
External experts agree that technology companies should take a closer look at key accounts and repeat offenders.
The researchers said that the refusal to act or establish clear rules for when action should be taken helped fuel the prevalence of misinformation. For example, only YouTube had a publicly declared “three scam” system for election-related crimes. Platforms like Facebook also had three-scam rules, but did not make the system publicly known.
Only four of the top 20 Twitter accounts cited as the top spreaders were actually removed, the study showed – including that of Donald Trump in January.
Twitter said the former president’s ban is permanent. The YouTube CEO said this week that Trump would be reinstated on the platform as soon as the “risk of violence” in his posts passed. Facebook’s independent supervisory board is now considering whether to allow Trump’s return.
“We saw that he uses his accounts as a way to use disinformation as a weapon. This has already led to disturbances in the United States Capitol; I don’t know why you would give him the opportunity to do that again, ”said Gertz. “It would be a big mistake to allow Trump to come back.”