A handful of right-wing “super-distributors” on social media were responsible for most of the misinformation in the run-up to the attack on the Capitol, according to a new study that also sheds light on the staggering range of falsehoods by Donald Trump was pushed.
A report by the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a group that includes Stanford and the University of Washington, has covered social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, for several months before and after the 2020 election analyzed.
It found that ‘super-distributors’ – responsible for the most common and influential misinformation campaigns – include Trump and his two older sons, as well as other members of the Trump administration and the right-wing media.
The authors of the study and other researchers say the findings highlight the need to eliminate such reports to stop the spread of misinformation.
“If there is a limit to how much content moderators can tackle, they should focus on reducing harm by eliminating the most effective distributors of misinformation,” said Lisa Fazio, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, who studied the psychology of hoax news, said but said no relevant EIP report. “Instead of trying to apply the rules equally to all users, you should focus the application on the most powerful accounts.”
The report analyzed social media messages with words such as ‘election’ and ‘vote’ to track down key narrative narratives related to the 2020 election, including allegations that postal providers cast votes, legitimate votes that are strategically not counted, and other false or unproven stories. .
The report studied how these narratives evolved and the effect they had. It found that popular Twitter accounts during this period “transformed one-off stories, sometimes based on worrying voters or real misunderstandings, into coherent narratives of systemic election fraud.”
Eventually, the “false allegations and narratives coincide in the meta-narrative of a ‘stolen election’, which later fueled the uprising on January 6”, the report said.
“The 2020 election has shown that actors – both foreign and domestic – are committed to using viral false and misleading narratives to undermine confidence in the American electoral system and undermine Americans’ faith in our democracy,” the authors concluded.
Almost no fact-checking, with Trump as the super-spreader-in-chief
While monitoring Twitter, the researchers analyzed more than 22 million tweets sent between August 15 and December 12. The study determined which reports were most influential by the size and speed at which they disseminated incorrect information.
“Influential accounts on the political right have seldom engaged in behavioral control, and have been responsible for most incidents of false or misleading information in our dataset,” the report said.
Out of the 21 top offenders, 15 are verified Twitter accounts – which is especially dangerous when it comes to misinformation in the election, the study reads. The “recurring distributors” who were 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. The study showed that all 21 tilted the most important reports of misinformation to the right.
“Misunderstanding and misinformation from above is dangerous because of the speed with which it can spread,” the report said. “If a social worker with millions of followers shares a story, it can gain hundreds of thousands of engagement and shares before a social media platform or fact controller has time to review its content.”
On almost all the platforms analyzed in the study – including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – Donald Trump played a major role.
It has identified 21 incidents in which a tweet from Trump’s official @realDonaldTrump account caused the spread of a fake story on Twitter. Trump’s tweets, for example, unjustifiably claim that the manufacturer of the voting equipment, Dominion Voting Systems, was responsible for election fraud, played a major role in strengthening the conspiracy theory for a wider audience. False or unfounded tweets sent through Trump’s account – which then had 88.9 million followers – received more than 460,000 retweets.
Meanwhile, Trump’s YouTube channel is linked to six different waves of misinformation that collectively were the most of any other repeat speaker’s videos. His Facebook account had the most involvement with everyone who studied.
The Election Integrity Partnership study is not the first to show the huge impact that Trump’s social media accounts have had on disseminating misinformation. In one year – between January 1, 2020 and January 6, 2021 – Donald Trump shoved disinformation into more than 1,400 Facebook messages, a report by Media Matters for America released in February found. Trump was finally suspended from the platform in January, and Facebook is discussing whether he will ever be allowed in again.
Specifically, 516 of his posts contain disinformation about Covid-19, 368 contain disinformation about elections and 683 contain malicious rhetoric that attacks his political enemies. Allegations of electoral fraud have earned more than 149.4 million interactions, or an average of 412,000 interactions per post, and in 2020 accounted for 16% of the interactions on his posts. Trump had a unique ability to expand news reports that would otherwise remain contained in smaller stores. and subgroups, said Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America.
“What Trump did was take wrong information from the ecosystem to the right and turn it into a major news event that affected everyone,” he said. “He could pick up on these absurd lies and conspiracy theories and turn them into national news. And if you do, and inspire people often enough, you will end up with what we saw on January 6th. ‘
Effects of fake stories on voters
The reports of ‘super-distributor’ were ultimately very successful in undermining the confidence of the electorate in the democratic system. According to the Pew Research Center poll, the study found that of the 54% of people who voted in person, about half expressed concern about voting by mail, and only 30% of respondents were “very full”. confidence “that the absentee or by mail -in the ballot papers were counted as intended.
The report set out a number of recommendations, including the removal of ‘super-spreader’ accounts.
External experts agree that technology companies should investigate the best bills and repeat offenders.
Researchers have said that refusing to take action or establishing clear rules for the action should help fuel the appearance of misinformation. Only YouTube, for example, has a ‘three-strike’ system for election-related offenses. Reportedly, platforms like Facebook also had three-strike rules, but did not disclose the system.
Only four of the top 20 Twitter accounts cited as top distributors have actually been removed, the study showed – including Donald Trump’s in January.
Twitter maintained that the ban on the former president is permanent. YouTube’s CEO announced this week that Trump will return to the platform as soon as the ‘risk of violence’ passes from his posts. Facebook’s independent supervisory board is now considering allowing Trump to return.
‘We’ve seen him use his accounts as a way to use misinformation. This has already led to riots at the American Capitol; “I do not know why you would give him the opportunity to do it again,” Gertz said. “It would be a big mistake to allow Trump to return.”