Researchers Release Comprehensive Twitter Dataset of False Claims About The 2020 Election

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://techpolicy.press/researchers-release-comprehensive-twitter-dataset-of-false-claims-about-the-2020-election/

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.”

Just before Thompson opened the hearing, at which 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.

*snip*