Abstract
This study was a mixed-method quantitative and qualitative analysis that analyzed content posted to TheDonald.win, a web forum popular with extreme supporters of Donald Trump. The purpose of this study was to expand knowledge of the dynamics of radicalized online spaces, especially the role that shifting In-Group and Out-Group membership plays in fomenting increased levels of observably radicalized language. The study examined the top-20 posts on the website every day between when the 2020 US presidential election was called and the presidential inauguration in January 2021. The study found that In-Group membership was maintained only by expressing open, public support of Trump’s claims of election fraud, that misinformation was rampant on the site but was often vague in its linguistic form, and that posters to TheDonald.win saw their own In-Group as the victims of violence more often than they used violent rhetoric against members of the Out-Group.
On Saturday, 7 November 2020, most large American media outlets called the 2020 presidential election for Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris. The election was on 3 November, and Americans waited on 4 days of vote tabulation in swing states before it was clear Biden’s Electoral College lead was insurmountable. Incumbent President Donald Trump reacted with anger and doubt, tweeting false accusations multiple times over the course of the vote count that the election was being stolen from him via conspiracy. Regardless of either party’s immediate reaction, news media calling the race for Biden began Trump’s “lame duck” period, as it is known in US politics.
If Donald Trump took the loss hard, the web forum created by some of his most intense followers, called TheDonald.win, took the loss even harder. From claims of secret watermarks on ballots, to claims that voting machines were changing votes, to the lost hope the Supreme Court of the United States would hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, to the rejection in state courts of questionable lawsuits led by Rudy Giuliani and others, there was a consistently morphing solution that would kick off the chain of events that would mean Trump would be sworn in for a second term. As each conspiracy fell short of that goal, anger increased and the “Out-Group,” or people whom members of TheDonald.win view as “others,” expanded to include conservative media and Republicans who would not support Trump’s claim that the election was fraudulent. At the same time, the noted “In-Group” shrank to only those who would continue to openly state that they believed the 2020 presidential election was predetermined against Trump. That anger, expanding Out-Group, and shrinking In-Group came to fruition on 6 January 2021, when a crowd of rioting Trump supporters overwhelmed security at the US Capitol building. They beat police officers, verbally threatened to kill elected officials, stole property from congressional offices, and caused a total lockdown of the national capital.
This study was a mixed-method quantitative and qualitative content analysis of content posted to TheDonald.win over the 75-day lame-duck period beginning on 7 November 2020. The 20 posts with the most upvotes were coded each day for a total sample of 1,500 posts. Posts were examined under three lenses. First, the parameters of observable shifts in membership in the In-Group and Out-Group were marked, especially examining the verbiage used to justify their group membership. Second, the misinformation themes and their changes over time were examined. Third, the expansion of violent, extremist rhetoric on TheDonald.win was examined, noting who the target of violence was meant to be.
Analysis of TheDonald.win helps us better understand how radicalized digital spaces can be used for the fomenting of anger and grievance that can lead to democratic decline. The very ideology of democracy itself was identified as a concept within the Out-Group in this study, with posts claiming the United States would be better off in a Trump-led dictatorship than a democracy. It is imperative that we better understand the dynamics of radicalization occurring in digital spaces, especially when that radicalization is no longer contained in the digital realm. As the 6 January Capitol Riot shows, anger and resentment can reach a point of crossing over from the digital to the physical. On the afternoon of the Capitol Riot, polling indicated that nearly 62% of Americans saw the action as a threat against the foundations of democracy in the United States (Smith et al., 2021). As stated by Cynthia Miller-Idriss (2021), the lead investigator at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at the American University: The date, 6 January, will go down in history as one of the clearest illustrations we have in the modern era of how mass disinformation can manipulate ordinary citizens and voters into violent engagement, even in a country that thinks of itself as a beacon of democracy. (para. 3)
Literature Review
Timeline of Reddit and TheDonald.win
TheDonald.win began as a subreddit, called /r/The_Donald, on the social link aggregation website Reddit. It was created in 2015, shortly after Donald Trump declared his candidacy. The subreddit was known for its intense support for Trump’s campaign and eventual presidency, and it was also infamous for promoting racism, homophobia, xenophobia, calls for violence, White supremacy, and spreading conspiracy theories (Marantz, 2020). Reddit’s administrators banned /r/The_Donald in July 2020 after repeated warnings about site-wide rules violations (Shepherd, 2020; Tiffany, 2020).
Reddit banning /r/The_Donald made headlines, but many of the news articles failed to mention that the subreddit had been effectively dead for 4 months anyway. In June 2019, Reddit administrators placed the subreddit in “quarantine” status (Robertson, 2019). That status meant that the /r/The_Donald was on probation. In February 2020, Reddit administrators acted again and removed all the subreddit’s existing moderators, warning that continued flagrant disregard for site-wide rules would result in a total subreddit ban (Parker, 2020). Users of /r/The_Donald were told by administrators to vote on new moderators from an administrator-approved list of names. Users refused, and the subreddit went into hibernation, eventually getting banned entirely in July 2020.
However, expecting they would be eventually banned, top moderators and users of the subreddit built TheDonald.win as a backup website in November 2019 (Parker, 2020). The new site used a replica of Reddit’s user interface. There were only two structural differences between /r/The_Donald and TheDonald.win. First, Reddit had forced /r/The_Donald to attempt to abide by site-wide rules to avoid being banned, but on the new site, they were free to set their own rules (Chandrasekharan et al., 2020). Second, /r/The_Donald was attached to a website with many other subreddits that were ideologically opposed to Trump, while the new site is an ideological island. Although traffic to the site stayed low from November 2019 until June 2020, Reddit banning /r/The_Donald caused a deluge of activity. After the November 3 election, traffic to the site nearly doubled, according to Alexa data (Alexa Global internet Data [Alexa—Top Sites in United States—Alexa, 2021]). Although TheDonald.win never released their official subscriber numbers, refreshing the main feed of new content in November 2020 showed the website received upward of 140 new posts per-hour.
Prior to being banned, /r/The_Donald was the subject of academic research, primarily concerning the nature of the content posted to the subreddit and how it interacted with other subreddits. Existing research has found that /r/The_Donald was home for extremist political ideologies (Gaudette et al., 2020), calls for violence (Massanari, 2020), and misinformation (Riley & Cowart, 2018). However, that research was done when /r/The_Donald was operational, when moderators and users had to, even if performatively, obey Reddit’s site-wide rules. Although TheDonald.win had their own stated rules about not posting bigoted content, there was little evidence those rules were enforced, and the site’s owners state the site was a bastion of “free speech.” Online right-wing extremists often utilize online spaces that openly make “free speech” a priority, using the notion of freedom as a cover for hate speech (Marantz, 2020).
Radicalization of Online Spaces
TheDonald.win is a part of the long-standing problem of radicalization and extremism fomenting in digital spaces. This study relied on Winter et al.’s (2020) definition of online extremism, which is: “Internet activism that is related to, engaged in, or perpetrated by groups or individuals that hold views considered to be doctrinally extremist.” Radicalization, then, is the process by which extremism spreads to new users and the extremist view propagates. Radicalization tends to take place within the individual, but the dynamics of radicalization are heightened in digital spaces with interconnected informational messaging (Bastug et al., 2020).
Concerns over online radicalization have been raised since the advent of the Internet, with some of the earlier concerns being the use of the Internet by Al Qaeda for planning and recruiting purposes in the mid-to-late 1990s (Thomas, 2003) and the “White Aryan Resistance,” a White nationalist group that launched a recruiting website in 1985 (Burris et al., 2000). Online radicalization often takes place in established digital spaces where communication is present and widespread, such as web forums and social networking sites (Hawdon et al., 2015). The inherent goal of many radicalized digital spaces, or rather, the goal of many who utilize radicalization to their advantage, is to expand a sense of “membership” in the extreme ideology, thus propagating the ideology itself.
Online radicalization occurs first through a feedback enforcement mechanism (Huey, 2015; Jiries, 2016). Someone already harboring anger or resentment from other aspects of their life may stumble upon a radicalized digital space, perhaps the comments of a YouTube channel, posts on a subreddit, or discourse on an independent web forum, and will discover there are others who harbor their same anger (Scrivens, 2021). That initial dynamic—the discovery of same-minded ideology—allows the user to feel more confident in their expression of a nonhegemonic ideology because they know they are not alone in expressing it. That confidence tends to lead to information-seeking behavior that bends toward the radical ideology, but the information-seeking behavior is gated within the parameters of the newly found radicalized digital space (Alfida et al., 2019). Searching within the ideological parameters of the radicalized digital space tends to cause a limiting of new information and a sense of growth and camaraderie with those feeding into the feedback loop.
In a wide-reaching analysis of the state of online extremism, Winter et al. (2020) found that there are two ways that academic researchers have tended to refer to the action of radicalization based on the platforms the radicalization is thriving on. First is the act of seeding radicalization on traditionally more general, nonideological social media networking platforms. These are social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, on which users represent a wide spectrum of ideological beliefs. This kind of radicalization is done for raw recruiting practices by those seeking to expand the extreme ideology, and as an attraction point for those on the fringe who might have wandered into it. Second, there are the more closed-off web forums that are geared toward intra-site information sharing, like TheDonald.win or the explicitly white nationalist Stormfront. Analysis has consistently found the overarching dynamic of radicalization that occurs on traditional social media sites tends to act as a pipeline that funnels newly radicalized users over to the “home base.” Once radicalized users are attracted from traditional social media to the radicalized web forum, expressions of violence and rhetorical showcases of extremism tend to increase. The US Department of Justice (2015) has noted that the primary concern of radicalized digital spaces is that heightened violent rhetoric in radicalized digital spaces can spill over into real-world violence. Winters et al. (2020) note that a limitation of their work is that a majority of the studies examining the mechanics of online radicalization and extremism have tended to focus on jihadism and Middle East-based terrorist groups, which has possibly skewed the analytical perspective on the topic. This study is examining the threat of online radicalization from the perspective of right-wing extremist ideologies, such as White nationalism, American ethnocentrism, and Christian nationalism.
Although TheDonald.win has been labeled as a home for online right-wing extremism, it is far from the only home for online right-wing extremism. Other modern digital spaces have been noted for their place in this ecosystem as well, such as 4chan, 8chan, Parler, and Gab (Kennedy et al., 2018; Mahl et al., 2021; Ng et al., 2021; Zelenkauskaite et al., 2021). TheDonald.win has been often noted for its contribution to the rise in online right-wing extremism, especially as it relates to the questions over the deliberate use of disinformation and vague threats to cloud political discourse (Zimdars & Mcleod, 2020). As Gaudette et al. (2020) notes, when it was still a subreddit, users would often intentionally stop short of direct, specific threats, instead of projecting the general desire for outcomes that require violence, as talk of physical violence would have broken Reddit’s site-wide rules.
In-Groups and Out-Groups
This study examined TheDonald.win through a lens of In-Group and Out-Group Dynamics, a classic understanding of intergroup and intragroup social construction. At its most simple, an In-Group is a collection of people who feel a sense of commonality among each other and who feel they can rely upon each other for some kind of social support (Tajfel, 1974). In-Groups can be drawn along many different lines, from political ideology to race to religion to countless other demographic and belief-based constructs (Fu et al., 2012). And, as Sherif’s (1961) classic study of a group of children at Robber’s Cave demonstrated that allegiances can be random and fleeting yet still produce noted differences in behavior. This study examined In-Group and Out-Group Dynamics along the lines of online radicalization, where political ideology becomes one of the overarching hinge points of association within the group. Political identity has been noted as a highly impactful line by which In-Groups form in online settings (Castano et al., 2002; Robertson et al., 2013). In-Group membership is typically associated with benefits known as In-Group Favoritism, which includes a sense of belonging, emotional support, validation of ideology, confirmation of correctness, and directional information seeking (Fu et al., 2012).
At its most simple, the Out-Group can be defined as those not within the In-Group (Tajfel, 1974). However, the dynamics of membership within an Out-Group can be more complicated. Out-Groups can be conceptualized by the In-Group because of notions of competition over resources, competition over potential members, differences in core ideologies, and feelings of being threatened (Havard et al., 2021). While In-Group status is affiliated with favoritism, Out-Group status is affiliated with a derogation, which can take the form of ostracization, mocking rhetoric, and assumed homogeneity, among many other negative outcomes (Abbink & Harris, 2019). Researchers have found that strong-to-extreme political ideologies tend to correlate with a heightened sense of Out-Group derogation, especially when ideological pressure mounts against a particular demographic in the Out-Group (Abbink & Harris, 2019; Castano et al., 2002; van Prooijen et al., 2015).
In-Group membership can be demonstrated by radicalized online users in a number of ways. On /r/The_Donald, previous research found that news media choice was a clearly defined hinge point by which membership of the In-Group could be established, and by which the Out-Group membership lines were drawn (Riley & Cowart, 2018). This study will utilize open-ended collection and analysis of the use of positive and negative descriptive rhetoric to determine lines of membership in the In-Group Out-Group Dynamic.
Misinformation
The final major foundational component of this study is the dynamic of misinformation and disinformation in digital spaces. This study defined misinformation using Guess and Lyons’ (2020, pp. 10–11) parameters of the dynamic, which defines misinformation as “a claim that contradicts or distorts common understandings of verifiable facts” and disinformation as “a subset of misinformation that is deliberately propagated.” The difference between misinformation and disinformation is that misinformation can be inadvertent and could have started from some nugget of truth that, through processes like Buckner’s (1965) Rumor Theory, have been distorted over time to the point of untruth. Disinformation, however, is weaponized misinformation used by those who benefit from incorrect information being harbored and disseminated.
There has been a renewed interest in studying online misinformation and disinformation in digital spaces since the 2016 US presidential election, during which the Russian government engaged in a disinformation campaign directed at the US electorate (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017). That renewed interest has carried over into research examining the flow of misinformation around COVID-19 (Brennen et al., 2020) and the subsequent vaccinations in digital spaces (Marco-Franco et al., 2021). Yet a considerable amount of the studies looking into modern online misinformation and disinformation have concluded that much of the interactive dynamic between a misinformation message and the message recipient falls back on the desire of belief, which is a component of our classic understanding of Rumor Theory (Buckner, 1965). As Buckner (1965) wrote, if someone wants a rumor to be true badly enough, it will rarely be proven false in their minds. In the case of this study, the misinformation being analyzed is coming from an ideologically homogeneous digital space with established media-based gatekeeping (Riley & Cowart, 2018).
Research Questions
RQ1. How did the apparent membership of the In-Group and Out-Group form based on content posted to TheDonald.win, between the election being called for Joe Biden and Inauguration Day?
RQ2. What forms did misinformation take in the content posted to TheDonald.win between the election being called for Joe Biden and Inauguration Day?
RQ3. What kind of violent rhetoric was used in the content posted to TheDonald.win between the election being called for Joe Biden and Inauguration Day?
Methodology
This was a mixed-method qualitative and quantitative analysis of content posted to TheDonald.win. The quantitative components of this study were relatively minor and were used primarily to establish the overall traffic level of the website as that helps understand the potential reach that radicalized content in digital spaces can have. The quantitative portion was also used for the determination of the overall topic of an individual post. Qualitative analysis was used for the majority of the determination of In-Groups and Out-Groups as well as the variables of violence and misinformation. The content represents the Donald Trump’s 75-day lame-duck period between when the election was called by the news media on 7 November 2020, and Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January 2021. The lame-duck period was selected because it represents a period of transition for members of TheDonald.win, during which observable shifts in In-Group Out-Group membership are likely. The sample was created by screen-capturing TheDonald.win’s front page every day. Each screen capture was recorded between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. That time range was selected as it represents a period of heavier traffic for the site. It also allowed the researchers to compensate for temporary server outages, which did occur on at least two occasions. The top-20 posts in the “Hot” listing were chosen because that included all of the “Pinned” posts as well as the content that has been most upvoted.
Next, a codebook was created. The codebook began by asking coders to identify the month and day being coded, the position of the article on the page out of an optional 20 positions from the top, the upvote total, and the number of comments. Upvotes and downvotes are a legacy feature from the site’s origins as a subreddit, where users are encouraged to vote either positively, “up,” or negatively, “down,” with a pair of arrows next to each piece of content. The number of downvotes subtracted from the number of upvotes is considered the upvote total, and the algorithm uses votes to determine the order of content on the front page. From there, coders were asked to identify the kind of post, with three options: Photo posts, where the user posts an image that loads natively on the website; link posts, where the user posts a hyperlink that leads to another website; or self-posts, which are text-based posts like blogs that post natively to the website. Coders were then asked to identify if the post was “stickied” or not. Moderators of TheDonald.win have the capacity to “sticky” a post to the top of the page if they determine it is important enough. From there, coders were asked to identify one of 14 possible topic options. The topic options were determined based on a combination of open-ended pretesting using a subsample and work done by McLamore and Uluğ (2020) in qualitatively grouping social representations and included: General election information, election fraud, COVID-19, China, Communism/Socialism, the Democratic Party, Reddit/tech censorship, guns, protests and demonstrations, Muslims/Islam, Christianity, the media, and the January 6 riots.
The coding then turned qualitative. Coders were asked to assess if there was a clearly defined member of the Out-Group or In-Group in the content of the headline based on positive or negative rhetoric used. The clarification of positive or negative rhetoric was honed using classic boundaries of In-Group Favoritism, where members of the In-Group are complimented, praised, or discussed with a sense of conjoined ownership, such as being on the “same team” or the statement someone is “one of us.” On the inverse, with Out-Group Derogation, members of the Out-Group were determined via rhetoric that belittled, attacked, or “othered” them, such as referring to them as being “not one of us” or “not a real patriot.” Important to note at this stage is that an In-Group “member” does not exclusively have to be a human being. Geographical locations, corporations, government agencies, and even looser social aspects of religious beliefs and spectrums of political ideology can all be considered to be either In-Group or Ourt-Group. In-Group and Out-Group membership were recorded as-is and then subjected to further grouping via commonalities in the framework.
Then coders were asked to identify if there was a claim or fact in the language of the headline of the posted content that would qualify as contextual misinformation. Coders were asked to determine if the claim counted as misinformation based on the context of the information that would have been available at the time by using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to target specific days of verifiable news. Finally, coders were asked to identify if violent rhetoric was used, and if so, to record the violent rhetoric as-is for further qualitative analysis, along with the target of the violent rhetoric. The target of violence was a binary option based on In-Groups and Out-Groups, with the options being that the violent rhetoric is either pointed at the Out-Group or is perceived as being pointed toward the In-Group by the Out-Group. In other words, the target of violence was categorized as either, “They should be victimized” or, “We are being victimized.”
Intercoder reliability was tested using two independent coders and a 100-post sub-sample. All quantitative variables were tested at an appropriate percent agreement and Krippendorff’s α with thresholds of 90% and >.800, respectively. To ensure the reliability of the as-is qualitative portions, concept agreement was worked through via blind coding followed by discussion, during which it was determined that the concepts were being independently coded at >90% agreement.
Results
Quantitative
Of the 1,500 coded posts, the median hours since posted was 4 hr, with a mean of 7.6 hr. The difference between those two statistics is due almost entirely to one Tweet that Donald Trump made on December 19, 2020, stating: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” That post was pinned to the top of TheDonald.win’s front page until January 5, acting as an outlier. The median number of upvotes was 3,706, and the median number of comments was 150. Those three pieces of information together act as an indicator that the website was operating in a high-traffic situation during the sample period.
The most common form of post was the photo post at 828 (55.2%), followed by link posts at 536 (35.7%), and self-posts at 136 (9.1%). However, it is important to note TheDonald.win’s culture of not giving traffic to news outlets that they disagree with (Riley & Cowart, 2018). Because of that, users tend to post screen captures of content they are disparaging rather than using direct hyperlinks. Therefore, not all photo posts in the sample were acting as photographs. Some were conveying the same information as a hyperlink, just in a different way. With the link posts, only 37 (6.9% of link posts, 2.5% of total sample) were linked directly to verifiable news outlets.
There was a sharp divide between the frequency of primary topics in the data. Three very popular primary topics were identified from the original codebook options. Of the 1,500 coded posts, 570 (38%) were about the supposed election fraud, 267 (17.8%) were about the January 6 Capitol Riots, and 269 (17.9%) posts were coded as general praise for Trump disconnected from any specific political policy. From there, frequencies sharply decreased. The other coded primary topics include COVID-19 at 93 (6.2%), tech censorship at 69 (4.6%), general nonfraud-based discussion of the elections at 62 (4.1%), the Democratic Party at 56 (3.7%), the news media at 37 (2.5%), guns and gun ownership at 28 (1.9%), and protests and demonstrations at 21 (1.4%), and communism or socialism at 15 (1%). Two topics were coded at <1%: China at 6 (.4%) and Christian-based religious discussion at 7 (.5%). The topic of “Muslims/Islam” did not appear in the sample, despite appearing in the pretest sample. The rest, coded “other,” were a collection of political grievances that did not individually add up to at least 1% of the overall sample when reanalyzed.
Of the 1,500 coded posts, 68 (4.5%) contained a clear and direct statement of violence. The direction of that violence goes counter to expectations, however. Of those 68 posts, 43 (63.2% of “violence” posts, 2.8% of total sample) were coded as being about how members of TheDonald.win saw themselves as the victims of political violence. Only 25 posts (36% of the “violence” posts, 1.6% of the total sample) contained language professing the need or desire by TheDonald.win members to inflict violence upon those who they deem the Out-Group. Those numbers indicate members of TheDonald.win expressed that they believed they were the victims of violence from their perceived Out-Group at a far higher rate than they claimed the desire to commit violence against the Out-Group. The differences in the contextual rhetoric within the violence dialogue were further addressed through qualitative analysis.
Qualitative
In-Group and Out-Group Membership
The next step in analyzing the results was to qualitatively assess the membership of, and shifts between, the In-Group and Out-Group. This was done by reanalyzing “as-is” membership status as it appeared in posts to TheDonald.win. Reanalysis provided four common groupings based on reappearing sub-themes in the rhetorical framing: “People and Groups,” “Places,” “Jargon. Identities and Ideology,” and “Companies and Agencies.”
The “People and Groups” grouping contained individual people and groups identified by a loose descriptor instead of a specific organization, such as “poll workers,” who were identified in the Out-Group, and “poll watchers,” who were identified as in the In-Group. Of the “People and Groups,” there were 60 unique members of the Out-Group for a total of 286 total mentions, and there were 73 unique members of the In-Group for a total of 231 total mentions. An abridged representation of this can be seen in Table 1 and Table 2. There was a wider array of members in the “People and Groups” In-Group, but ultimately, the Out-Group was discussed at a higher rate. The In-Group was primarily conservative and was heavy on individuals who appear in conservative media. The most-mentioned member of the identified In-Group was Steve Bannon, former editor of right-wing blog Breitbart and former chief strategist in Trump’s White House, with 20 mentions. Bannon endured a soured relationship with Trump after being suspected of leaking information. However, Bannon appears to have returned to an assumed ally position among members of TheDonald.win. As an important note, one reason for Bannon’s higher count is that TheDonald.win often stickied links to Bannon’s web radio program at the top of the page. After Bannon, the top In-Group member by mention was Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who filed lawsuits claiming electoral fraud in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. All of the lawsuits were dismissed, however, Powell remained a vocal proponent of the false claim that the election was fraudulent. The only two other specific mentioned members of the In-Group with counts higher than 10 were Rudy Giuliani, who also filed lawsuits alleging fraud, and Josh Hawley, who announced plans to object to the certification of the election.
Frequencies of “People and Groups” Members of the Out-Group Identified At Least Two Times Based on Being Mentioned in Headlines of Content Posted to TheDonald.win, As Well As the Date Range They Represent and Details.
Frequencies of “People and Groups” Members of the In-Group Identified At Least Two Times Based on Being Mentioned in Headlines of Content Posted to TheDonald.win, As Well As the Date Range They Represent and Details.
The Out-Group “People and Groups” membership was much more diverse. Of the specific people named who were politicians with a clearly defined party or ideological affiliation, 23 were either Republicans or ideological conservatives, while 18 were either Democrats or ideological liberals, showing there was more emphasis on labeling the Republicans and conservatives as not belonging to the same set of ideologies that drive TheDonald.win. Some members of the In-Group transitioned to the Out-Group. Brian Kemp, the Republican Governor of Georgia, was mentioned positively as a member of the In-Group on 18 November, but would then cross-over to the Out-Group on 29 November, corresponding with Trump claiming he was “ashamed” of supporting Kemp and that Kemp did not do enough to overturn the election results. From that point forward, Kemp would be mentioned 17 more times in the Out-Group. Mike Pence was one of the only members to be present multiple times on both lists. Pence was first identified in the In-Group on 12 December and the Out-Group on 15 December. However, Pence’s In-Group memberships ceased on 29 December, corresponding with his statements that he would not get in the way of legal vote count procedures. Pence’s membership in the Out-Group continued to 7 January, where he was blamed for not stopping the election certification and causing the Capitol Building riots. Generalized professions were also identified in the Out-Group. Journalists were mentioned negatively 20 times and were consistently referred to as being an enemy to “real Americans.” Law enforcement was also identified in the Out-Group 13 times, beginning on 17 November with a post lamenting that police would not allow “poll watchers” to interact with vote counters; however, most of the negative “othering” of police came after the 6 January Capitol Riot.
The “Places” Out-Group membership was grouped as such because they were all physical, geographical places. There were 15 unique places identified as belonging to the Out-Group a total of 35 times. This can be seen in Table 3. Although the most frequently identified Out-Group location was China with 11 mentions, the other locations were almost entirely places where Trump lost the election and claimed there was fraud involved, including the entire states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Georgia, along with the cities of Detroit and Philadelphia and two counties: Fulton County, Georgia, and Maricopa County, Arizona. Arizona itself was not identified in the Out-Group despite also being a close swing state called for Biden. Only three unique In-Group locations were identified, and those were Texas, Poland, and Israel. They were only identified six times. All three represent states or countries with conservative governments.
Frequencies of Identified “Places” Members of the Out-Group Based on Being Mentioned in Headlines of Content Posted to TheDonald.win, As Well As the Date Range They Represent and Details.
The “Jargon, Identities, and Ideology” In-Group and Out-Groups were the next to be analyzed. There were 8 unique members of the In-Group mentioned a total of 50 times, compared to 12 unique members mentioned a total of 48 times for the Out-Group. There was little that was unexpected here, with all of the In-Group and Out-Group components reflecting terms popular in online right-wing discourse. Of note are two key posts that occurred on 10 January, where two posts put the notion of “democracy” in the Out-Group. The highest ranking of those was a self-post with a positive upvote count of 5,076, 414 comments, and a headline stating: I’m so sick of people saying “this is terrible for democracy,” I don’t give a fuck about Democracy, I care about God given individual rights that are supposed to be protected by the Constitution. Democracy is fucking mob rule that leads to Socialism.
Also of note is that “Normies,” or the slang term on TheDonald.win for people not literate in digital culture, appear in both the In-Group and Out-Group.
Next was the “Companies and Agencies” In-Group and Out-Group membership. There were 6 unique members of the In-Group mentioned a total of 42 times, compared to 16 unique members mentioned a total of 113 times for the Out-Group. The most frequently mentioned Out-Group member in this set was Dominion Voting Systems, a company that manufactures voting equipment, with 39 mentions. The company became a frequent target in many of the lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and others like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, and Dominion also became a frequent target of misinformation on TheDonald.win, as will be discussed in the next paragraph. Seven of the Out-Group members were tech companies, connecting to the common theme of tech censorship. Three Out-Group members were news media brands, including Fox News, which found itself in the Out-Group on 7 November for calling Arizona for Biden. The In-Group consisted entirely of conservative social media outlets such as Parler, Gab, and 4chan along with conservative news media, such as OAN, Gateway Pundit, and Newsmax. To connect the themes, the conservative media outlets were the ones that refused to call the election for Biden and parroted Trump’s accusations of fraud, and the conservative social media outlets were the ones that were not adding fact-check labels on content claiming the election was fraudulent.
Misinformation
After analyzing In-Group and Out-Group members, the next step was to qualitatively analyze the claims that were initially coded “as-is” for misinformation. There were three groupings found based on a common rhetorical framework: Election misinformation, January 6 Capitol Riot misinformation, and COVID-19 misinformation. The last of which was not analyzed in this study as it was not the target of inquiry. For election misinformation, the most common form of misinformation was general, unspecified accusations of election fraud, appearing in 165 posts. These accusations carried no specific claim about a method for fraud, a location of fraud, or even who was committing the fraud, but nevertheless insisted that fraud had occurred. These vague claims persisted throughout the entire period of data collection. The second most common were claims that, specifically, the Georgia election was fraudulent, which lasted from 7 November until 15 January. No other state was close to Georgia, with the next being claims the Pennsylvania election was fraudulent.
Only six election-based pieces of misinformation persisted past the January 6 Capitol Riot. The first was the claim that Dominion voting machines had been rigged against Trump, the second was the unspecific accusations of fraud, the third was that the election results were “statistically impossible,” the fourth was that Georgia’s election was fraudulent, the fifth was that Arizona’s election was fraudulent, and the sixth was that the rejected SCOTUS case, Texas v. Pennsylvania, definitively proved election fraud. None of the other specific accusations of election-based fraud, of which there were 35 unique claims for a total of 490 total claims, were repeated after the January 6 Capitol Riots.
The other misinformation grouping analyzed was misinformation claims specifically about the January 6 Capitol Riots. It provided one of the most striking results in this study. Two unique and mutually exclusive forms of misinformation appeared at the same time. The first form of misinformation appeared in seven different posts claiming that Trump supporters were set up by police, that the January 6 Capitol Riot was a sting operation equal to entrapment, and that the rioters were innocent protestors lured inside by security. This misinformation appeared on 7 January and lasted until 19 January. On 8 January, however, the first of seven posts claiming that the January 6 Capitol Riot was a false-flag operation committed by leftists and Antifa appeared. That claim would continue until 18 January. Essentially, there were two forms of misinformation being told at the same time, the same number of times, that claimed two entirely different stories, but with the same outcome that Trump supporters were innocent, that it must be someone else’s fault and not theirs.
Violent Rhetoric
Finally, the last step was to qualitatively analyze the content that was initially coded as containing violent rhetoric. When looking at the “direction” of the violence, there were 72% more instances where users of TheDonald.win saw themselves as the victims of violence than instances where they were the ones committing the violence. Most of the violent rhetoric toward the In-Group took the form of assumptions of what the future would be like if Biden were to be sworn in as president. There were calls to buy guns and body armor because of an envisioned future where Biden-supporting police would be kicking in their door, kidnapping their children, and eventually putting them in concentration camps. Although there were fewer instances of violence directed toward the Out-Group, there were some notable instances. The most frequent form of violent rhetoric pointed toward the Out-Group was the posted desire to throw people they dislike out of helicopters, similar to what Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was accused of doing to dissidents. Pinochet was also noted as a member of the In-Group of TheDonald.win.
Discussion
RQ1. How did the apparent membership of the In-Group and Out-Group form based on content posted to TheDonald.win, between the election being called for Joe Biden and Inauguration Day?
The boundaries of In-Group formation on TheDonald.win appear to be almost entirely based on the willingness of the individual to support Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was fraudulent. As evidence of that, the only individuals who changed from In-Group to Out-Group were Brain Kemp and Mike Pence, both conservative Republicans. The only common connecting theme in the rhetoric of the posts is that both Kemp and Pence slighted Donald Trump by not supporting his claims of fraud. The Supreme Court of the United States began in the In-Group, carrying the rhetoric that Clarence Thomas would overturn the election as revenge against Joe Biden. When the court did not hear Texas v. Pennsylvania, the court became a member of the Out-Group. Fox News, a news outlet noted for its conservative slant, was discussed in the Out-Group because Fox News reported Biden won the election. The common bond of membership within the In-Group was the willingness to support Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud. Democracy itself, which legally and democratically elected Biden in the United States, was listed as an Out-Group concept after the January 6 Capitol Riots, in two posts that garnered more than 5,000 other members’ support. The defining line was again, willingness to support Trump.
RQ2. What forms did misinformation/disinformation take in the content posted to TheDonald.win between the election being called for Joe Biden and Inauguration Day.
Most of the misinformation was about the election, but the accusations tended to be vague, not specifying a method, actor, or location of any particular fraud. Often the language would imply that knowledge of the fraud was so apparent that it was no longer in question. Misinformation related to specific accusations of election fraud, such as the claim a woman in Atlanta exchanged a briefcase full of votes and was caught on camera, tended to have a limited time frame, and follow a specific pattern—after the claim would be debunked by mainstream media, the claim would continue on TheDonald.win for about 1 week after, then the claim would cease on the site. The longest lasting specific shape of misinformation was the claim that Dominion rigged the election against Trump. Perhaps because the accusations were against a company and not the legally transparent voting process, it was easier to work around dissonances.
Misinformation about the January 6 Capitol Riot offers evidence that many users of TheDonald.win do not carry a single source of information from which they draw their conclusions. The exact same number of claims were made that Trump supporters were innocent and were entrapped in the Capitol by law enforcement as were made that claimed Antifa and leftists were the actual perpetrators and were committing a false flag to make Trump supporters look bad. These are mutually exclusive claims, yet they were posted the same number of times during the same time period and gathered close to the same amount of upvotes and comments.
RQ3. What kind of violent rhetoric was used in the content posted to TheDonald.win between the election being called for Joe Biden and Inauguration Day.
Members of TheDonald.win were more likely to post that they were, or were going to be, the victims of violence than they were to post about the violence they wanted to do to others. This shows they see themselves as victims, and it also shows they see their own real-world violence as a form of self-defense, convincing themselves that they truly are in danger if Trump is no longer in office. This supports previous work into the ideological demographics of those most likely to find support in a radicalized digital space: feelings of alienation and fear of the future (Macnair, 2020).
Conclusion
The goal of this study was to contribute to the knowledge of radicalized digital spaces. The results indicate radicalized digital spaces disconnected from the enforced rules of a shared platform turn into the home for rampant misinformation and disinformation, violent rhetoric, and the belief that democracy is not as important as the will to impose power on those they do not like. Especially concerning is that most of the violent rhetoric was in the form of violence they were assuming was directed back toward them, especially assuming that they would be killed, kidnapped, and rounded up if Biden took office.
Perhaps one of the most important findings for future work to explore when studying radicalized digital spaces is the connection between a shrinking ingroup and heightened levels of violent rhetoric. Although the hinge-point for inclusion into the In-Group was clearly defined in this research as a willingness to support Trump’s false claims of election rigging, that may not always be the case with other observable forms of In-Group collapse. Yet that dynamic, the collapse of the In-Group and the transfer of members and components of the In-Group to the Out-Group appears to be a trigger point for increased violence and rhetoric. More work should be done honing in on different outcomes from that dynamic.
Another important note on the results: this study ultimately falls into a category of work that contributes to data about the true level of predetermination of the January 6 Capitol Riot. The results of this study indicate that the riot was not directly planned on TheDonald.Win. Instead, TheDonald.Win’s contribution was the cultivation of the kind of digital environment needed for people to make themselves feel angry, alienated, and afraid enough to commit such acts. Without the site-wide rules limiting violence and hate speech found on Reddit that kept /r/The_Donald more controlled, users of TheDonald.Win were able to push each other into more and more extreme anger-driven rhetoric. Yet there were extremely few instances of direct planning in this study’s sample. There were few posts regarding any meaningful coordination of action. The only two topics noted in the data that appear to be preplanning included dialogue about the safety of using the Washington D.C. subway system and if it was safe to bring firearms into D.C. However, the dialogue was that the subway system would be used to “trap” protestors and that firearms would be needed for self-defense against Antifa and other assumed enemies.
Based on the results of this study, TheDonald.win acted as a radicalized space that allowed for the kinds of Out-Group derogation, misinformation, and violent rhetoric needed for someone to convince themselves they should storm the Capitol building. However, the site did not act as the place where specific plans, if they existed, were ever made.
There is a serious limitation with this study that exists within every study dealing with the spread of misinformation, regardless of methodology or theoretical approach: intent. Spreading propaganda that supports your In-Group and hurts your Out-Group is politically advantageous. Knowing this advantage, it is impossible, short of having the power to see into someone’s mind, to know if someone is posting misinformation because they genuinely believe the misinformation to be true, or if they are posting misinformation because they believe the misinformation will be useful if others believe it.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
