Over at National Review, Dan McLaughlin joins the throng of conservatives who are crowing today over a new study that owns the libs big time. Remember all that Russian influence that helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016? Never happened:
Today, however, the Post‘s own cybersecurity columnist Tim Starks offers a reality check: "Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior, according to a study out this morning."
....This is common sense. The volume of campaign spending, coverage, and commentary in an American presidential election is colossal, most Americans are accustomed to being exposed to all manner of things that aren’t trustworthy or persuasive, and people are likeliest to fall for misinformation when it simply confirms their preexisting beliefs.
Hmmm. Note that this is solely an investigation of Twitter, not of Russian influence in general, which took many forms.
But let's see what the study says anyway. Here's the first set of charts showing exposure to Russian tweets:
Thanks to the huge y-axis, Russian exposure looks like it might as well be zero! But let's zoom in:
The average person was exposed to about five Russian tweets a day in the month before the election, and about 15 tweets on Election Day. Anyone who uses Twitter knows that this isn't trivial regardless of how many other tweets you're looking at.
Here's the estimated impact on voting under three different scenarios:
Oddly, these results suggest that exposure to Russian tweets drove people to vote for Hillary Clinton, not Trump. This is doubly odd since the authors also say that virtually all of the Russian tweets were directed at conservatives. But what kind of propaganda campaign manages to produce negative results even after successfully targeting the most receptive possible voters?
To summarize:
- This is a study solely of Twitter.
- It demonstrates that Twitter users were exposed to a meaningful number of Russian tweets.
- But the alleged effect of the tweets makes no sense. This ought to raise some skepticism about the methodology of the study.
I'm not aware of anyone who ever thought that the Russian Twitter campaign had a large effect all by itself, so this study doesn't really produce any unexpected results. It does show that the Russians were serious about trying to interfere with the election, but that's about all it possibly could have done. At the very least, you'd need to study the entire Russian hacking and disinformation campaign to produce any kind of evidence about how well it worked.¹
In other words, there's not much here.
¹For the record, my own view is that the effect was small even if you account for every single thing the Russians did. I would be surprised if it affected the vote by more than 1%.
"I would be surprised if it affected the vote by more than 1%." That would been several orders of magnitude more than necessary to turn the election if one assumes that the 1% were not uniformly distributed geographically.
Exactly -- WI, MI & PA had margins well under 1% -- enough to swing the whole thing.
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Ding ding ding!
Plus the whole Russian ratfuckery setting some meta-narratives (or helping to solidify them) and all that.
I think facebook interactions were probably more impactful, given how certain demographics voted in the election (e.g., generations older than Y and Z being generally more plugged in to facebook at that time, especially for content/news).
BINGO! Not sure why KDrum thought that, in 2016, 1% was insignificant.
Well, 1% in key close states is really big....
Yes they twitted. But there was also contributions to NRA, and possibly super-pacs, not to mention the hacks and drip release of "e-mails" (not Hillary's).
Of course Comey trumped everything.
I want to call Comey a ratfucker, but he's just a rat.
Good points.
"The average person was exposed to about five Russian tweets a day in the month before the election"
I realize the context of this blog post is all about Twitter users; but,
the average person isn't on Twitter at all, and so wasn't exposed to any Russian tweets ...
just sayin.
You don't need to be on Twitter to be exposed to tweets. Merely visiting any type of news site, blog, etc., is enough to expose any person to several tweets a day.
Exactly. I don't even have a Twitter account, and haven't for years, but still get exposed to plenty of twits.
So many distinctions, so little time.
However, the main one is that whatever libs felt in the otherworldly scene following the actual election of Trump (i.e., how did this happen? Must be some explanation!) , now the vast, vast, vast majority have moved on from what effect Russia might have had to focusing on winning elections.
We know the explanation, about 40% of the voting population are despicable human beings, who hardly require Russian influence to achieve their current state of non-grace.
You don't see libs storming buildings over Russian interference.
I was not a Twitter user at that time, although I did have an account for following accounts as an easy way to make announcements on a website I wrote. However, I was active on Facebook and saw large numbers of Russian FB posts, several a day, during the fall of 2016. Just because it didn't work, doesn't mean they didn't try.
Heh indeed, this (Facebook) is the notable omission, isn't it? I mean, besides the hacked DNC emails, of course. Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Gosh, I wonder why that didn't examined ?
The Russian disinformation campaign failed, so what are you libs whining about?
Same line of reasoning the right uses for everything. The attempted coup failed? Trump's attempt to extort Ukraine failed? Then there should be no consequences for breaking the law.
You're right, of course - "move along; nothing to see here."
Yah, but wattabout the DNC emails hacked by the Russians and freely distributed. The Russian effort went far beyond Twitter. Even on Kevin's site we had a troll who was probably Russian. Always making trouble, criticizing the Dems and Hillary, largely ignorant of the finer points of the country's history, and using the English language in a way that strongly suggested he wasn't a native speaker. I actually challenged him a few times and his defense was to deflect, not deny.
*Sigh*
Sorry, here I go again:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/us/florida-russia-hacking-election.html
The Russians hacked Florida’s computers and were “in a position to change voter roll data”. But they didn’t do it (according to Marco Rubio and Ron DeSantis) so “Whew!”, right?
Funny though how all the Florida polls were wrong and predicted it to be a close race, so close that Clinton kept campaigning there.
But the Trump campaign left Florida and went to states like Michigan and Wisconsin where they won narrow victories. Sure was smart of them to know that they had no worries in Florida.
And isn’t it funny how Trump was so convinced voting machines were tampered with in 2020? Almost as if he knew something like that was possible.
I think you are making a good point about Florida. It’s possibly one of the few places where the Republicans control enough of the state and local government to make tampering with the vote possible, albeit an extremely remote and very difficult possibility. The difficulty, as I see it, would be in manipulating the paper ballots and reconciling the obvious and substantial discrepancies.
But my experience is that every Republican accusation is actually a confession (worth noting that the only known cases of voter impersonation or improper voting someone else’s ballot have involved Republicans; indeed, a Republican election official was recently charged with criminal manipulation of ballots and voter records). The other point worth mentioning is that had it not been for Reality Winner, it’s almost certain that none of this would be public knowledge today and so you have to ask what does the government know about the Russian attack on this country that they’re keeping secret.
But it was Comey wot dun it no?
"Russian influence" campaign? Mueller showed pretty convincingly it was a Russian co-run campaign. And Trump won so it would seem it was pretty effective.
Not sure how you measure the counterfactual where Russia doesn't dump emails to distract from the Access Hollywood tape.
No one ever claimed Twitter had a large or decisive effect on the '16 election. A study showing Russian influence via Twitter had "no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior" only demonstrates what people assumed anyway.
It was Facebook!
"Without Facebook we wouldn't have won. Facebook, I mean, really and truly put us over the edge. Facebook was the medium that proved most successful for this campaign."
--Theresa Hong, from the Trump digital team (about 4:20 into the video)
https://twitter.com/bbcstories/status/896752720522100742
With regard to Drum's third point, that “the alleged effect of the tweets makes no sense,” what Drum misses is that the results are not statistically different from zero.
If you flip a coin 1000 times, you should expect the coin to come up heads about 500 times, but it would be surprising to get heads *exactly* 500 times. Similarly, if the Russian tweets had no effect, you wouldn't expect the study data to show the effect was *exactly* zero. Instead, you would expect the data to show a small effect favoring one candidate or the other, with the effect being too small to be statistically significant. That is exactly what we see in the study: Voters exposed to Russian tweets switched from Trump to Clinton more often than voters who were not exposed to Russian tweets, but the difference was too small to be statistically significant.
Note that while the data is consistent with the tweets having no effect, it is also consistent with the tweets convincing 1% of the recipients who were previously leaning towards Clinton to vote for Trump.
Was Russian influence on the 2016 election just a big nothingburger?
Robert Mueller certainly did not think so.
I guess it is perfectly fine for a so called red blooded, patriotic American running for president, to welcome and encourage election interference by a foreign adversary, and allow 170 contacts between their campaign and people connected with Russian military intelligence (GRU).
Kevin, you're missing the important fact that we don't elect presidents by the total popular vote. We elect them by moving small margins in swing states. The Russians reportedly targeted reliable Democratic voting blocs (e.g., urban Black voters in places like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia) in order to suppress their turnout or persuade them to cast a "protest" vote for Jill Stein. One of the tactics was to push the old story of Hillary Clinton calling Black gang members "super-predators" at some event back in the 1990's.
If someone wanted to determine Russian influence, they should focus on this stuff. We know that a few thousand votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania made all the difference.
Isn't it odd that the study was published in an Nature Communications?