Twitter conversations about Georgia are full of unsubstantiated claims that the state’s upcoming runoff election will be fraudulent as well as other misinformation about the 2020 election, according to a new report from non-partisan research organization Advance Democracy.
From November 26 through December 2, four of the top five posts on Twitter about Georgia made baseless allegations about the election, according to the research.
Advance Democracy determined that Twitter posts included in the analysis were about Georgia if they contained at least one of a long list of terms and hashtags, including “Georgia,” “#gapol,” run-offs, #Dems4GA,” and the names of the candidates in the race.
"Citizens of the State of Georgia, who are about to decide what party controls the US Senate, are being bombarded by election-related disinformation on social media," said Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI analyst and Senate investigator, who is president of Advance Democracy. "Much of that disinformation revolves around the idea that the election is pre-ordained or 'rigged.' It’s hard to imagine that the prevalence of this rhetoric and the outright lies about voting will not have real-world consequences on January 5th."
Other key findings from the research:
- Five of the top 10 hashtags used in tweets about Georgia in the last week implied voter fraud, including “#stopthesteal,” “#fightback” and “#dominionwatch,” the latter two referring to fighting back against election fraud and watching Dominion voting machines for election fraud, respectively.
- Seven of the top 10 most shared links in tweets about Georgia in the last week were links to websites promoting election fraud, including right-wing sites.
- Twitter accounts related to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory continue to appear and helped amplify hashtags insinuating voter fraud.
- As of Thursday, there are more than 97,200 active QAnon-related accounts on Twitter, despite the platform’s crackdown on such content, per the new report.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.