After Trump's victory, claims of vote rigging have disappeared
What a difference a day makes.
Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists said for months and months that the presidential election was rigged, but now after the surprise victory of Donald Trump, they've suddenly gone silent.
Hundreds of thousands of Twitter users made allegations of voter fraud after Trump referred to the election as "absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media" back in August.
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Earlier this week we reported about the scale of those allegations on Twitter. There were over 600,000 allegations of vote rigging, made by 112,000 Twitter users over a two-week period (Oct. 19 to Nov. 2). Those crying foul who could be divided into three distinct groups.
A follow up analysis shows a dramatic drop in the number of claims of vote rigging being made as soon as the result came in.
The analysis by the think-tank Demos for Mashable found there were 55,000 tweets alleging vote rigging on the day of the vote on Nov. 8 compared to just 5,000 tweets the day after.
That's a decrease of almost 90 percent.
The number of users who repeatedly claimed the election was rigged also fell sharply from 34,000 users to 4,000.
The research from the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media based in Demos think tank and the University of Sussex, collected tweets with hashtags identified as, at least in part, devoted to discussing the legitimacy of the U.S. presidential elections.
Using the data, Demos identified three groups who repeatedly claimed the election was rigged. There is Trump's core group (dubbed Trump and the Gang), Conspiracy Hunters (such as Alex Jones and James O'Keefe) and Conservative Cheerleaders (which includes evangelical Christians).
The location of Twitter users on election day also gives interesting insights.
Predictably, there was a higher concentration of tweets in urban areas (more people = more social media traffic).
But in some Rust Belt states -- Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania -- there was more activity than population would suggest.
Trump's performance in those states was key to his victory.
The graph below shows where people were tweeting about vote rigging on the day after the election -- a noticeable decrease in activity compared to the graph above. But, importantly, there is a particularly noticeable drop in activity in the Rust Belt states.
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.
Topics X/Twitter Donald Trump
