Rejecting the Null Hypothesis of Apathetic Retweeting of US Politicians and SPLC-defined Hate Groups in the 2016 US Presidential Election
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We characterize the Twitter networks of both major presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, with various American hate groups defined by the US Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). We further examined the Twitter networks for Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, and Paul Ryan, for 9 weeks around the 2016 election (4 weeks prior to the election and 4 weeks post-election). By carefully accounting for the observed heterogeneity in the Twitter activity levels across individuals under the null hypothesis of apathetic retweeting that is formalized as a random network model based on the directed, multi-edged, self-looped, configuration model, our data revealed via a generalized Fisher's exact test that there were significantly many Twitter accounts linked to SPLC-defined hate groups belonging to seven ideologies (Anti-Government, Anti-Immigrant, Anti-LGBT, Anti-Muslim, Alt-Right, Neo-Nazi, and White-Nationalist) and also to @realDonaldTrump relative to the accounts of the other four politicians. The exact hypothesis test uses Apache Spark's distributed sort and join algorithms to produce independent samples in a fully scalable way from the null model.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".