How Twitter fueled the wild rise of vote rigging allegations
Casually lobbed by Donald Trump in early August after falling behind in the polls, allegations of vote-rigging in the U.S. elections have gone from political fringes to a mainstream battering ram of the right.
The concerns—largely dismissed as unreasonable by reputable voting groups—are being amplified in the favored arena of this campaign: Twitter.
Hundreds of thousands of allegations of vote rigging in the U.S. elections are being made on Twitter, and they're being fueled by three distinct groups, according to an analysis by the think-tank Demos for Mashable.
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"It's far easier to make a claim on social media than it is to rebut it," says Carl Miller, Research Director at Demos.
"Platforms like Twitter allow fears and concerns, of dead people voting, of ballot boxes being stuffed -- whatever the facts -- to spread faster and further than ever before," Miller continued.
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Over a two-week period from Oct. 19 to Nov. 2, 3.8 million tweets were analysed. In those tweets, there were over 600,000 allegations of vote rigging, made by 112,000 Twitter users.
Researchers from the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media based at the University of Sussex collected tweets with hashtags identified as, at least in part, devoted to discussing the legitimacy of the US presidential elections.
The hashtags selected for the analysis were:
#draintheswamp
#riggedelection
#stophillary2016
#crookedhillary
#neverhillary
#voterfraud
#riggedelections
#hillaryforprison2016
#rigged2016
#mediarigged
#pollsrigged
Then, using a natural language processing algorithm, researchers identified relevant tweets that made a genuine allegation of vote rigging.
The data only contain meaningful and relevant allegations of vote rigging, while tweets simply calling a candidate corrupt or flawed, for example, were discarded. Negative comments about the general state of the political system weren't included unless they went on to claim the election itself was rigged. Only specific tweets of people claiming they'd been deprived of the democratic process were considered.
Who's behind it?
Using the data, it's possible to paint a picture of what groups, specifically, are repeatedly claiming the election is rigged.
The image below shows everyone who's made ten separate tweets claiming the election is rigged. Clustered together are people who constantly tweet and retweet each other.
Demos has named the groups: Trump and the Gang, Conspiracy Hunters, and Conservative Cheerleaders.
'Trump and the Gang'
This is Trump's core group. In the centre is the Donald himself, surrounded by people who constantly praise him all the time and broader campaign supporters saying the election's rigged, based on what Trump has said. Profiles include the Once Upon a Time in America star James Woods.
'Conspiracy Hunters'
These are people who spread conspiracy theories about everything—they're not necessarily out-and-out Trump supporters. Accounts include Infowars pundit Alex Jones and James O'Keefe of Project Veritas.
'Conservative Cheerleaders'
Conservative Cheerleaders are Evangelicals and Republican accounts who are public figures, not necessarily conspiracy theorists or outright Trump supporters. Demos found that 38 percent of the total users showed explicit support for Trump in their profile -- many are self-described 'deplorables'.
A classifier trained to recognise explicit support for Trump (it operated at around 80% accuracy) showed 220,381 of the 576,833 tweets analysed were sent from people with explicit support in their profile.
'Vote rigging' concerns are growing
The data also show concerns about vote rigging as steadily building, and that breaking news events informed that conversation, leading to spikes in the number of allegations of rigging being made on Twitter.
Only a third of Republicans say they have a great deal or quite a bit of confidence that votes will be counted fairly, according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
And yet, a total of only 31 known cases of impersonation fraud have been found in one billion votes cast in all US elections between 2000 and 2014, according to Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School.
Media coverage is affecting voter sentiment
The graph below shows a surge in vote rigging claims on Twitter on Oct. 18 when the second video was released by James O'Keefe from Project Veritas claiming that the DNC and Hillary Clinton committed voter fraud on a massive scale.
The second example below -- highlighted in a red box -- happened when Donald Trump responded to comments made by the filmmaker Michael Moore following the release of his documentary Trumpland. At its highest, there were 5,500 tweets sent in an hour.
How often are people making rigging allegations?
From the research, it emerged that there's a hardcore group of Trump supporters -- 7.5 percent -- who tweeted about electoral fraud every single day. Half of the total amount of users only joined the conversation once.
One user tweeted nearly 4,000 times over two weeks -- but turned out to be an electoral bot. That's not surprising if one considers research from Oxford University that revealed more than a third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets came from automated accounts between the first and the second presidential debate.
Twitter influencers or eggs?
Over a half of the people who tweeted about rigged elections have 500 followers or less, indicating perhaps grassroots support for Trump.
That figure begins to shift as the number of followers go between 1,000 to 5,000 followers -- which gathers 27% of the unique users.
The users' location can also give some interesting insights. Predictably, there's a higher concentration of tweets in urban areas (where there are higher concentrations of people, and thus, social media users).
California -- the tech and social media heart of the country and home to Silicon Valley -- and its enormous population had the highest number of tweets about rigged elections. This more likely reflects the high adoption of Twitter in those places, and not necessarily pockets of high skepticism of the electoral process.
In some states -- Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Iowa -- there's more activity than state populations would suggest, according to Miller of Demos.
Any path Trump might take to win the presidency leads through those places, which he once described as "rusting and rotting" zones of manufacturing decline.
The research was conducted over a fortnight by the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM), a think-tank unit dedicated to researching digital society. CASM is a collaboration between Demos and the Text Analytics Group (Tag Laboratory) at the University of Sussex.
Mashable will release a second analysis of rigging complaints on Twitter after the election.
Topics Donald Trump
Anne-Marie Tomchak is the UK Editor of Mashable, where she heads up the company's operations from London. She has spent over a decade reporting and presenting for national and international broadcasters including the BBC, RTE, Deutsche Welle, American Public Media and NPR. In 2013, Anne-Marie launched the social media investigative unit BBC Trending. During her time at the corporation, she also developed the mobile video offering on the BBC News app and fronted live social broadcasts. Anne-Marie is a leading digital media voice contextualizing the role of technology in the modern world. She has made a number of feature length TV documentaries for Ireland's national broadcaster RTE in her capacity as UK Editor for Mashable, including ‘Cloud Control: Who Owns Your Data?’ (Nov 2016) about big data and digital fingerprints and “Will A Robot Steal My Job” (Nov 2017) about the impact of AI and automation on the workforce. The Irish Times listed her as '30 Irish Women You Need to Know' for International Women's Day and she is one of Silicon Republic's '30 Incredible Irish people leading a European invasion'.
