View from the Capitol Steps: Radicalism and Missingness on theDonald.win

• In Event: Poster Session: Health Policy and Politics & Information Technology and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Information Technology and Politics

Abstract

How concerned should we be about the self-censorship of extremist social media communities? Social media analyses of alt-right, QAnon, and other far-right conspiratorial movements are often plagued by a potential relationship between ideological extremity and missingness. This project employs text-as-data to perform a time series analysis of TheDonald.win forum posts made during the January 6 uprising. Researchers seeking a complete account of extremist social media activity months after the fact have no guarantee that the most radical users or community moderators have not already deleted incriminating messages. On the other hand, radical users may be more willing than the average user to leave extreme content visible to public scrutiny. Starting in the early hours of the January 6 uprising, the author live-scraped every active forum thread on TheDonald.win at regular intervals. The resulting original dataset captures the way members used the forum to coordinate their movements and trade eyewitness accounts while the riots were still in progress. The researcher leverages an original dataset composed of many snapshots of the same forum threads over time, rather than relying on a more typical one-time scrape. This unusually complete picture of January 6 rioters’ attitudes and self-censorship behavior allows the researcher to determine whether extreme or violent statements forum posts are also the most likely to be missing.

Author

• Vivian Ferrillo, Texas Tech University