[After warnings it could go off the rails, the election actually ran smoothly.]
Pennsylvania saw much more misinformation on Election Day, specially about allegations of fraud or election thieving, than other states just before the polls shut, according to misinformation researchers.
Zignal Labs, a media insights company, tracked keywords and phrases connected to “steal” or “stealing” the election during the very first 18½ hrs of Tuesday. The key phrases were stated alongside one another with Pennsylvania at a amount 6.4 occasions better than the subsequent-best condition, Kansas (which was adopted by Texas, Michigan and Florida), the organization found.
Throughout that interval, Zignal located that keywords and phrases related to “stealing” and the election hit 119,000 mentions throughout cable television, social media, and print and on-line information outlets. A person viral hashtag in individual, #StopTheSteal, produced the mentions spike from a couple dozen to about 2,000 in 15 minutes on Tuesday early morning, scientists discovered. It was stated around 12,800 moments on Twitter by noon.
Within this established of mentions, Pennsylvania saw 8,150 associated to Democrats stealing the election, buoyed by content articles revealed on proper-wing outlets these kinds of as The Gateway Pundit and Nationwide Write-up. Noteworthy figures like Mike Roman, the Trump campaign’s director of Election Day functions, also pushed mentions up.
“ILLEGAL campaigning Inside of of a polling location in Philly,” Mr. Roman explained in a submit that was shared 13,200 periods on Twitter. “Man in blue is handing out DEM literature to voters IN LINE TO VOTE.”
An evaluation by The New York Times’s Visible Investigations device observed that the two pictures Mr. Roman shared did not look to match. Twitter labeled the tweet “misleading” and afterwards “manipulated,” and a spokeswoman said the business had labeled the tweet and a number of some others by Mr. Roman less than its Civic Integrity Coverage.
A individual assessment by Zignal confirmed that Pennsylvania was the subject of much more most likely voting misinformation than other states on Tuesday, too. Of around 15,000 voting misinformation mentions from midnight to 7 p.m., 3,449 were being tied to Pennsylvania, which was adopted by Michigan, Florida, Washington and Wisconsin.
Pennsylvania, with 20 electoral votes, is one of the most significant battleground states.