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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 Committeeâs investigation has established that Trump âbetrayed 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 outâand the courts upheld the will of the people.â
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 Washingtonâs Center for an Informed Public and the Krebs Stamos Group* published a massive dataset of âmisinformation, disinformation, and rumors spreading on Twitter about the 2020 U.S. election.â 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, âis 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,â and it âfocuses on false, misleading, exaggerated, or unsubstantiated claims or narratives related to voting, vote counting, and other election procedures.â
âPresident 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,â 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. âBut everyday people produced many of those claims.â The new report sheds light on how these claims proliferated from the margins to the nationâs Capitol.
The Nature of False Claims about the 2020 Election
The researchers collected 307 distinct âstoriesâ or narratives, encompassing 44.8 million tweets, that they labeled as âsowing doubtâ in the 2020 election.** After a painstaking project to annotate and group the stories, the researchers were able to see patterns in âcontent groups,â or âcollections of stories that have similar narrative or thematic componentsâ representing the broadest categories of stories.
Notably, while âfour out of the top five content groups were primarily spread by Trump-supporting accounts,â 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 âhighly skewed toward pro-Trump accountsâ throughout the period.
The largest story in the dataset revolved around Dominion voting systems and claims its software âhad systematically changed votes from candidate Trump to candidate Biden.â Spawned from reports of a single âmistake in the process of updating the software on vote tabulation computersâ in Antrim County, Michigan, which was quickly corrected, the story was adopted by Donald Trump Jr., and then by President Trump, who tweeted about âdominionâ 24 times between Nov. 6 and Dec. 15, 2020. âDominion,â concludes the researchers, âwas a prime example of an isolated incident which was reframed to suit the narrative that election fraud was systematic and widespread.â
Another prominent story is what came to be known as âSharpiegate,â an example of the set of allegations in the âpartisan vote counting/recordingâ content group. Sharpiegate started âwhen voters in several polling locations,â mostly in Arizona, ânoted that the Sharpie pens they had been given to vote were bleeding through the ballotsâand some began to share concern (and later suspicion) that their votes had not been counted.â 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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