The 2020 election was riddled with misinformation floating around the web and spreading rapidly through social media platforms as companies like Twitter and Facebook scrambled to add warnings to misleading posts. Although their efforts were not unfounded, there is still evidence of disinformation campaigns targeting certain groups and states. Zignal Labs provided a dataset to the MIT Review, which used the information to analyze mentions across social media for 30 terms related to fraud, voter suppression, intimidation, and technical errors.
The MIT Review found that swing states had four times the number of such mentions when compared to states that historically swing strongly republican or democrat. MIT states that they found a median of 115,200 mentions of the keywords related to election fraud in swing states, whereas non-swing states saw a median of 28,000. The MIT Review also states that some states experienced localization of disinformation. In Florida, Latino voters were allegedly subject to intense social media campaigns based on neighborhood profiles, heritage, and age.
Read More: Guess which states saw the most election disinformation in 2020