https://twitter.com/froomkin/status/1537180414103932928?s=21
https://techpolicy.press/researchers-release-comprehensive-twitter-dataset-of-false-claims-about-the-2020-election
Researchers Release Comprehensive Twitter Dataset of False Claims About The 2020 Election
June 15, 2022
On Monday, June 13, the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol hosted the second of its planned series of public hearings, focused on the Big Lie that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. The Chairman of the Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), said in his opening statement on Monday that the Committee’s investigation has established that Trump “betrayed the trust of the American people. He ignored the will of the voters. He lied to his supporters and the country. And he tried to remain in office after the people had voted him out—and the courts upheld the will of the people.”
On the same day the Committee laid out evidence that Trump and his associates knew the election was lost even as they cynically pushed the Big Lie, a group of researchers from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Krebs Stamos Group* published a massive dataset of “misinformation, disinformation, and rumors spreading on Twitter about the 2020 U.S. election.” The dataset chronicles the role of key political elites, influencers and supporters of the President in advancing the Big Lie, exploring how key narratives spread on Twitter.
Published in the Journal of Quantitative Description, the paper accompanying the dataset is titled Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization: A Comprehensive Dataset of Misinformation Tweets from the 2020 U.S. Election. The dataset, which the researchers named ElectionMisinfo2020, “is made up of over 49 million tweets connected to 456 distinct misinformation stories spread about the 2020 U.S. election between September 1, 2020 and December 15, 2020,” and it “focuses on false, misleading, exaggerated, or unsubstantiated claims or narratives related to voting, vote counting, and other election procedures.”
“President Trump and other pro-Trump elites in media and politics set an expectation of voter fraud and then eagerly amplified any and every claim about election issues, often with voter fraud framing,” said one of the lead researchers, Dr. Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public. “But everyday people produced many of those claims.” The new report sheds light on how these claims proliferated from the margins to the nation’s Capitol.
The Nature of False Claims about the 2020 Election
The researchers collected 307 distinct “stories” or narratives, encompassing 44.8 million tweets, that they labeled as ‘sowing doubt’ in the 2020 election.** After a painstaking project to annotate and group the stories, the researchers were able to see patterns in “content groups,” or “collections of stories that have similar narrative or thematic components” representing the broadest categories of stories.
Notably, while “four out of the top five content groups were primarily spread by Trump-supporting accounts,” the researchers conclude, a set of allegations about possible U.S. Postal Service involvement in election fraud was primarily advanced by Biden supporters. But the overall proportion of misinformation was “highly skewed toward pro-Trump accounts” throughout the period.
The largest story in the dataset revolved around Dominion voting systems and claims its software “had systematically changed votes from candidate Trump to candidate Biden.” Spawned from reports of a single “mistake in the process of updating the software on vote tabulation computers” in Antrim County, Michigan, which was quickly corrected, the story was adopted by Donald Trump Jr., and then by President Trump, who tweeted about “dominion” 24 times between Nov. 6 and Dec. 15, 2020. “Dominion,” concludes the researchers, “was a prime example of an isolated incident which was reframed to suit the narrative that election fraud was systematic and widespread.”
Another prominent story is what came to be known as “Sharpiegate,” an example of the set of allegations in the ”partisan vote counting/recording” content group. Sharpiegate started “when voters in several polling locations,” mostly in Arizona, “noted that the Sharpie pens they had been given to vote were bleeding through the ballots—and some began to share concern (and later suspicion) that their votes had not been counted.” While the claims were wrong, Sharpiegate concerns, shared first by social media accounts with limited reach but soon spreading to larger accounts, exploded after Arizona was called for Biden. Later, claims on the account @CodeMonkeyZ, run by prominent QAnon figure Ron Watkins, pushed Sharpiegate further.
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