Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters | Hacker News Reader

Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters

washingtonpost.com

7 pointsagomez3147 comments

Original paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9

"We estimate, for example, that at least 32 million US Twitter users were potentially exposed to posts from Russia-sponsored accounts in the eight months leading up to the 2016 election. Facebook has estimated, by comparison, that 126 million users had the potential to view Russian state-sponsored content on its platform over a two year period"

Seems like all the political influence action was on Facebook. Twitter was just more "public" than the "walled garden" of FB.

"potentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Kremlin's information warfare is a real thing. I highly recommend Jessikka Aro book "Putin's Trolls: On the Frontlines of Russia's Information War Against the World". Kremlin does it on multiple fronts and had significant negative influence.

As my wife puts it, there's no reason to look for conspiracy where things can be explained by plain human stupidity. It's not Putin, or Xi, who broke U.S. politics. It's the stupidity of people who vote, which goes from bad to worse while manipulation techniques - driven by arms of race of ever more brainwash-y advertisements, in a market of enormous volume, easy measurement, and vast leverage for the winner - get better and better by the day.

It will be interesting longer term to see how / if the idea of "misinformation" is overblown. This paper is suggesting that only a small group of people are looking at it, and it's not really changing minds. It would not surprise me to find that misinformation exists mostly as a construct by people with some agenda than as something that's actually out there corrupting people. Like heresy generally

The problem, as I see it, is that the misinformation exists even if it wasn't spread by paid Russian trolls.

For example: at the time, almost half of Republicans said they don't think Obama was born in the US, and another quarter said they didn't know. Only 1 in 4 Republicans could agree on that basic fact, long after the man had released the long form birth certificate they had demanded. (I haven't seen any polls more recent than that, but given that it was already 4 years since Obama had left office I doubt it has changed much.)

The misinformation is clearly out there. The only thing we learn from having it spread by paid Russian trolls is to have it identified as misinformation; they have no interest in spreading actual facts. (Or if they say things that are true, to put them into a context that is misleading.)

The trolls mostly just repeat the kinds of things that are repeated on right-leaning media. They're ineffective, but only because they're only telling people what they already believe. It doesn't mean that people don't believe false information, only that they've already heard it.

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