2016 Election
Research
-
Journal Article
The Times They Are Rarely A-Changin': Circadian Regularities in Social Media Use
Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 2021
-
Journal Article
Trumping Hate on Twitter? Online Hate Speech in the 2016 U.S. Election Campaign and its Aftermath.
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2021
To what extent did online hate speech and white nationalist rhetoric on Twitter increase over the course of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential election campaign and its immediate aftermath? The prevailing narrative suggests that Trump's political rise — and his unexpected victory — lent legitimacy to and popularized bigoted rhetoric that was once relegated to the dark corners of the Internet. However, our analysis of over 750 million tweets related to the election, in addition to almost 400 million tweets from a random sample of American Twitter users, provides systematic evidence that hate speech did not increase on Twitter over this period. Using both machine-learning-augmented dictionary-based methods and a novel classification approach leveraging data from Reddit communities associated with the alt-right movement, we observe no persistent increase in hate speech or white nationalist language either over the course of the campaign or in the six months following Trump's election. While key campaign events and policy announcements produced brief spikes in hateful language, these bursts quickly dissipated. Overall we find no empirical support for the proposition that Trump's divisive campaign or election increased hate speech on Twitter.
News & Views
-
News
Did Hate Speech on Twitter Rise During and After Trump’s 2016 Election Campaign?
Our research shows that the amount of hate speech on Twitter did not systematically increase during and immediately after the 2016 presidential campaign.
June 9, 2021
-
Commentary
The Limited Room for Russian Troll Influence in 2016
Coordinated campaigns by sock puppets on social media are likely neither necessary nor sufficient to signify serious foreign threats to electoral integrity.
October 27, 2020