Election rumors follow patterns with actors actions and objects
New Election, Same Old Story: How Tropes Form a Grammar of Election Rumors
Social and Information NetworksHuman-Computer Interaction
Summary
Election rumors might seem random at first, but the authors found common patterns or 'tropes' that repeat across many rumors from recent U.S. elections. They created a system with three levels to organize these tropes and noticed most rumors have key parts like who is involved, what happened, and what was done. This structure helps make sense of election rumors and could help others quickly spot and analyze new rumors in the future.
What this means in practice
- •For election officials: Identify and analyze common rumor patterns to better respond to misinformation during elections.
- •For social media moderators: Use the identified rumor grammar to detect and flag election-related misinformation more efficiently.
Tested on one dataset.
Authors
Stephen Prochaska, Mert Bayar, Ashlyn B. Aske, Joseph Schafer, Kate Starbird
Abstract
Recent elections in the United States have seen online rumors become a regular feature of election discourse as voters and election officials work to navigate a sea of digitally spread claims and propaganda. For the uninitiated, these rumors can feel overwhelming and random, sowing doubt about the integrity and legitimacy of recent elections. In this paper, we reviewed and qualitatively coded a large dataset of 590 election rumors collected during the the 2020 and 2022 national elections. We found that there are tropes that recur time and time again in election rumors, highlighting how these rumors are not as random as they may first appear. We make two primary contributions in this work: first, we introduce a hierarchical framework that structures observed tropes in three tiers (Meta-category, Meso-trope, and Micro-trope). Second, combining the framework with our coded data, we identify a visible grammar of election rumors, highlighting how in the majority of cases a rumor contains an Actor, and Object, and an Action, with optional grammatical components of Suggested Remedies and Scene & Setting. The framework and grammar can be used by other researchers to act as the underlying information architecture of analyses examining similar rumors, enabling the rapid identification, analysis, and prediction of election rumors.