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To rely the variety of posts that particularly sought to delegitimize the election outcomes, we examined 18.7 million posts from Election Day via Jan. 6 inside the doubtless U.S. political Fb teams. We separated out posts from teams with “Cease the Steal” of their identify and calculated which key phrases and phrases have been disproportionately frequent in posts from these teams utilizing a text-analysis method known as TF-IDF. Then, we handpicked the phrases and key phrases that have been meaningfully linked to election delegitimization theories (e.g., “cease the steal,” “steal the election,” “each authorized vote”). We had about 60 phrases that indicated delegitimization on their very own, plus 86 extra in two buckets that, if phrases from each buckets have been current, indicated delegitimization (e.g., a reference to absentee ballots by itself didn’t point out delegitimization, however a reference to “absentee ballots” and “fraud” did.) We recognized about 1.03 million posts that doubtless referenced delegitimization. Lastly, we hand-checked a pattern of those posts to estimate the proportion that really sought to delegitimize the election, and received a precision fee of about 64 p.c. (False positives included mainstream information articles, debunks of fraud claims, and references to different nations’ elections.) We arrived at our ultimate estimate of delegitimizing posts by multiplying the 2 collectively, to get an estimate of a bit greater than 655,000.
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