According to a report by the Washington Post, Zignal Labs found that online misinformation about the 2020 election plummeted a stunning 73 percent after Trump’s digital excommunication.
Twitter confirmed this week that the ban on Trump’s account will continue after he leaves office on January 20. So far, Facebook has said that Trump’s suspension is “indefinite,” not committing either way to a permanent ban or eventual restoration. Trump and the accounts of his campaign and some top advisers were also suspended from Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify, Shopify, Pinterest, and several other platforms.
Zignal’s analysis looked at the week after Trump was kicked off Twitter and found that conversations about election fraud fell from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several top social media platforms — not just Twitter.
“Bottom line is that de-platforming, especially at the scale that occurred last week, rapidly curbs momentum and ability to reach new audiences,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks misinformation. “That said, it also has the tendency to harden the views of those already engaged in the spread of that type of false information.”
