Trends in online chatter mirror patterns observed in the lead-up to 2020 elections and January 6 Capitol attack

Trends in online chatter mirror patterns observed in the lead-up to 2020 elections and January 6 Capitol attack

There could be a potential surge in political violence following the upcoming US election, and pro-Trump rightwing vigilante “poll watchers” might surveil ballot drop boxes as Americans cast their votes, experts warned this week.

A new report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) highlighted alarming trends in online chatter, mirroring patterns observed in the lead-up to the 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

Meanwhile, Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI), issued a fact sheet with recommendations for dealing with conspiracy-minded monitoring groups like True the Vote, which spread false narratives in 2020 alleging that Democrats had sent paid “mules” to drop boxes with thousands of illegal votes in order to steal the election from Donald Trump.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    24 hours ago

    For example, in October, violent rhetoric related to election denialism increased by 317% on Telegram, 105% on Gab, 25% on communities.win, and 75% across a selection of Fediverse communities.

    While it’s nice to be included, weird that they used “a selection”

    • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      22 hours ago

      What else could they do? There’s no way to make a comprehensive list of every Fediverse-supporting server in existence, let alone aggregate their data.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        22 hours ago

        They could name the instance (what they probably meant) or the communities (what they said).

        A 75% increase in parts of the Fediverse means absolutely nothing…

        Like, you understand that was my complaint, right?

        That X% of a non defined subgroup is literally meaningless?

        • ragepaw@lemmy.ca
          6·
          22 hours ago

          Also, scale matters. If 4 posts increased to 7, that’s a 75% increase I’m not concerned about. Now, 40,000 to 70,000 concerns me.

        • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          18 hours ago

          Yeah, I agree. Even if they were trying to be comprehensive, there’s no real way to make sure they got the entire long tail of tiny instances, especially since, for all we know, there might be clusters of them federated with each other but disconnected from the “main” cluster containing the biggest servers.

          Moreover, I agree that failing to name the instances/communities is absolutely worthless. A 75% increase on lemmy.world might mean a very different thing than a 75% increase on exploding-heads.com, which might in turn mean a very different thing than a 75% increase on lemmygrad.ml.