Trumpland pt 2: Election Day
Win or lose, we need to pay more attention to the role of disinformation in American public discourse. The voice of alternative news is almost as loud as the mainstream.
Trump’s base were fired up by Hunter Biden’s laptop in October. But overall, their engagement levels dropped slightly compared to July and August when they were exercised by Black Lives Matter protests across the country. These sites have pivoted in recent weeks to questioning the validity of postal votes and warning that the election will be ‘stolen’ from Trump.
As the results come in, the Signify team took a look back over four months of coverage by the 15 sites that we included in our Trumpland study.
The Trumpland sites are 15 high-profile right-wing websites with a taste for ‘alternative’ news and facts, many of them with larger followings on social media than conventional news outlets. These sites provide a bellwether to the obsessions of Trump’s base, and the stories being pushed by his proxies - see part 1.
The graph below highlights the top ‘entities’ picked up by our machine learning system over the past four months, from thousands of stories that were shared more than 800 million times. An ‘entity’ is a person, place or topic that is determined by our AI to be the focus of a given story. ShareScore is our proprietary scoring system that assigns share-ability to different concepts based on their relevance and how often they are shared. It is a measure of virality - anything with a ShareScore above half a million has truly ‘gone viral’ and achieved widespread exposure beyond the core audience.
Entities by ShareScore
It is notable that Hunter Biden is not the biggest story despite continuous coverage by all pro-Trump outlets including mainstream media. The biggest story of the last four months - the Cannon Hinnant murder - concerns the tragic shooting of a white child by a black man. this event has purportedly been ignored by the media because ‘it doesn’t fit their narrative‘. This is an entirely false premise as the news was widely covered - but the allegation of bias resonates with the racially charged grievances that are a key part of Trumpland editorial. Half of the top entities relate to racial or civil issues in some way.
“From the data, it’s clear that concern over civil unrest and racial grievances were far more effective tools for anti-Biden outlets than the Hunter laptop story.”
The personalities of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amy Coney Barrett both figure in this list, with a combined ShareScore of just under 8 million proving that the makeup of the Supreme Court does matter to Trump’s base. The other notable data point, is the profile of allegations about child trafficking in California. With a ShareScore of almost four million, stories about Democrats and paedophilia have reached a massive audience, confirming the influence of QAnon on Trumpland media and supporters.
Since the election is likely to be disputed throughout the week, we will be checking in with Trumpland again to see how the most ardent MAGA channels and their audiences are reacting to results, and statements from the candidates.
Stay tuned…