Tools to Understand 2016 Voter Influence Tactics in Comparison with the 2020 Election: Applications of Network Topology, Information Cascades and Rumor Recurrence

Abstract

Social medias have a fundamental impact on how society receives and exchanges information around political events, specifically elections. Understanding the underlying forces that are present in these social medias, which affect information cascades and misinformation propagation, is critical to determining the extent to which these networks enable amplification. These social media networks amplified misinformation during both the 2016 election and the 2020 election despite new control mechanisms. This research determines the key frameworks for understanding the network climate that enabled such amplification and misinformation, relying on veracity, amplification and recurrence to draw distinctions between the 2016 and 2020 elections. Critically, this research demonstrates that both the role of individuals in information cascades and the features of the rumors that propagate pervasively have a large impact on the likelihood that a rumor will recur in a given network. This research shows that false rumors propagate faster and recur more often than true rumors in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, but draws a distinction between unilateral and interactive information dissemination models to demonstrate the differing effect that amplifiers have on propagation and recurrence. For rumors that disseminate via a unidirectional traditional news outlet shared via links on Twitter, the effect of a high number of verified users is limited. However, for rumors that propagate as retweets and quoted replies, which have a multi-directional and interactive model, the effect of a high number of verified users participating in the cascade was very pronounced. Thus the properties of the rumor, its veracity and the specific subset of the population through which the rumor passes each has an effect on that rumor's overall impact and exposure to a given network of users. This research's findings are critical to the future of social medias as they grapple with the persistence of misinformation amidst a highly volatile and nuanced digital politics arena.