73% drop in election misinformation since Trump ban: Report
The research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm Zignal Labs found that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump
San Francisco: The social media ban on outgoing US President Donald Trump has resulted in a massive 73 per cent drop in online misinformation about election fraud, a new report has revealed.
The research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm Zignal Labs found that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned on Twitter on January 8.
Trump and his supporters have also lost accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Spotify, Shopify and other social media platforms.
According to The Washington Post, the findings highlight how falsehoods flow across social media sites.
Zignal found that the use of hashtags affiliated with the January 6 Capitol riot also dipped considerably.
“Mentions of the hashtag #FightforTrump, which was widely deployed across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media services in the week before the rally, dropped 95 pe rcent. #HoldTheLine and the term ‘March for Trump’ also fell more than 95 per cent,” the report said on Sunday.
Trump’s ban was followed by Twitter removing more than 70,000 accounts affiliated with the QAnon ideology, which played a key role in Capitol chaos.
“Together, those actions will likely significantly reduce the amount of online misinformation in the near term,” Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington, was quoted as saying.
Banned on various social media platforms, Trump has been releasing tweet-like statements through the White House press office.
Trump considered opening an account on far-right conservative platform Parler but it has been off the grid after Amazon stopped its web hosting.
Amazon said it is “troubled” by repeated policy violations by Parler.
The company noted that it “cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others”.
Google and Apple have removed Parler from their respective app stores after they found that Parler did not take stronger action to remove posts that sought “to incite ongoing violence” in the US.
