Perception And Mobilization Of “Truth” January 6, 2021, Stop The Steal, And Social Media
Date
2022-05
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The Stop the Steal movement was intensely popular among conservative and
far-right groups in the United States, and was predicated on the belief that the 2020
Presidential Election had been “stolen” from President Trump. While there is no
concrete evidence to support that notion, following the election, an intense
mobilization effort occurred on multiple avenues which eventually lead to a deadly
riot at the United States Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. The Stop the Steal
movement often utilized social media to promote unfounded claims of electoral fraud
and irregularities. This thesis conducts a content analysis, utilizing measures of
nominal association to analyze tweets that appeared on leaders’ feed within the Stop
the Steal movement from the election through January 6. A specific focus was placed
on examining the association of election-related content, January 6-related content,
electoral misinformation, electoral calls to action, and violent rhetoric surrounding the
election within tweets. Further, the prevalence of these variables regarding the total
number of engagements a tweet received was explored. There is a high level of
association between tweets that mention the election and those same tweets containing
electoral misinformation. However, the association was not as strong between those
that mention January 6 and contain electoral misinformation, and those that mention
January 6 and contain violent electoral rhetoric. There is a moderate correlation
between tweets containing calls to action and violent rhetoric regarding the election.
Further, tweets that contained electoral misinformation and those that mentioned the
election received significant engagement.
Description
Keywords
Far-right groups, Stop the Steal Movement, January 6, Social media, Misinformation