Trumpland pt 3: The Fallout
In the week following election day, the fifteen ‘alternative news’ websites Signify monitored racked up more than 27 million social media reactions across high-performing content.
These sites are ‘alternative news’ destinations favoured by hardcore Trump supporters, which provide a bellwether of current and consistent interests. Recently (see Trumpland pt 2 for more detail) they have been very focused on electoral fraud.
We define high-performing content as news articles or videos accruing more than 50,000 social reactions. 245 pieces published in the period 4-10 November 2020 met that standard.
The immediate conclusion is that angles around election fraud and other malfeasance are finding a sizeable audience.
All of the top ten new articles are about election irregularities, legal challenges or outright fraud.
Most Shared Stories in Trumpland (4-10 November)
Among the Trumpland sites, Breitbart in particular has gained traffic by focusing on fraud. After taking a strong stance in support of the fraud narrative, they have risen to gain 22% of social reactions on new articles in our group, up from 8% in the 4 months prior. In doing so, they have managed to score 4 of the top 10 most popular articles published in the period – as shown in the graph above.
Entity extraction from the key articles confirms our initial impression – with the top entities (excluding candidates’ names) for the period focusing on States, cities or locations in which voting “glitches”, implications of tampering and “tabulation errors” occurred.
Entities for which the top contributing article mentioned irregularities, glitches, or other issues with ballots and voting are marked in red below.
Top 10 entities by ShareScore (4-10 November 2020)
Military Ballots Still Counting
Further supporting the growing obsession with fraud, we continued to see a growth in shares of historical pieces – for example, one highly popular piece about military ballots.
We discussed the piece in a previous entry – the most engaged article across all fifteen websites in the study period, claimed “Military Ballots Found in the Trash in PA, All Were Trump Votes”.
This piece was published in September and was fact-checked in early October. Since the election, engagement has only escalated, with the piece attracting a further 2.3 million engagements in the past week, taking it from 4.1 million to 6.4 million reactions.
Only five other articles in the course of our study gained more than this weekly difference in total, and none received more than 3.5 million engagements overall. The military ballot story has now grown to be the 9th most-engaged article published in the past five years mentioning Biden, Trump, Clinton, Election, Ballot, Vote, Democrats or Republicans.
In the week following the election, such beliefs in electoral fraud has gathered support and is being shared by Americans numbering in the millions. This is hardly surprising with the current President acting as the Amplifier-in-Chief of electoral fraud conspiracies.
Whilst mainstream media are reporting that this may be the safest and most secure election in history, for a very significant amount of Americans it really does appear as though the election is being stolen.
Signs of Schism?
One interesting fall-out of the election and Donald Trump’s decision to erroneously declare his own victory, is the position taken by the outlets that have traditionally supported him.
Whilst it is somewhat predictable that established Murdoch-owned outlets like Fox News and NY Post have taken an editorial line opposing Trump’s attempts to hold on to power, (indeed, this is why they were originally excluded from our tracking list), we also see some of our monitored sources reluctant to follow the sitting President.
Daily Wire, the top Trumpland site which received 31% of total engagements in our overall study, has been one of those refusing to toe the line about a stolen election, with founder Ben Shapiro referring to Trump’s actions as “irresponsible”.
For this, he was rounded on by many other right-wing figures, such as Paul Joseph Watson.
Other Daily Wire pundits have been more sympathetic to Trump and the site has generally pursued a more moderate line than some of the others in the list, tending to steer clear of allegations of direct widespread fraud and going more for straight reporting – even if that reporting invariably has an angle.
Top Daily Wire Stories (4-10 November)
The website remains the top publication in this sector but is struggling to replicate the big social media hits it scored throughout the summer with racially charged articles around the death of Cannon Hinnant and culture war pieces about protests.
It will be interesting to see whether Daily Wire maintains its audience while being accused of “counter-messaging” Trump.
Signify will now go on hiatus while the world waits for a concession or some kind of conclusion to the legal wrangles over the election. We will check back a month after the election to take a longer view at how the Trump hardcore experienced his election defeat, and what they did next…
This blog is part of a short series, tracking the impact of disinformation on Trump’s base and the wider electorate in the USA. To learn more about the work that Signify does to help fight racism and protect human rights around the world, please get in touch.