Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior
Gregory Eady, Tom Paskhalis, Jan Zilinsky
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Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker
Abstract There is widespread concern that foreign actors are using social media to interfere in elections worldwide. Yet data have been unavailable to investigate links between exposure to foreign influence campaigns and political behavior. Using longitudinal survey data from US respondents linked to their Twitter feeds, we quantify the relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and attitudes and voting behavior in the 2016 US election. We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. The results have implications for understanding the limits of election interference campaigns on social media.
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Russia has systematically used social media to spread propaganda and disinformation within the United States, targeting the general public and specific groups to influence political attitudes, exacerbate divisions, and interfere in electoral processes. These efforts have been well-documented by academic research, U.S. intelligence assessments, and criminal indictments.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-us-election-interferenc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
> source: a link you posted to HN in 2020
Is it surprising that someone interested enough to post in this thread would have had a past interest in the subject as well? It's hard for me to understand how this is a good-faith, thoughtful response. There have been many other takedowns and a lot of other reporting as well, but the link provides some decent insight with a level of detail that an HN reader would appreciate. The tl;dr: most of the "Russian bots" research was, as I summarized, bunk, and pushed by people such as Bill Kristol and other establishment people behind prior false propaganda. I am not sure what "look, you posted this before" is supposed to mean.
>…
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Source: you
Here is an article published in Nature.
Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian [specifically the IRA] foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
> Source: you
Sure, but you can find op-eds and comments everywhere opining that the "new" nature of disinformation and misinformation on the Internet requires corporate-state collusion to censor and repress, lest those people who are susceptible to these campaigns (never, of course, the experts or the people in government) vote the wrong way.
Although I am reluctant to even mention it due to its politicization, the Hunter laptop story is a fine example; claiming the story was Russian disinformation with a total lack of evidence (a claim that persists in some quarters to this day!) damaged the credibility of news institutions and intelligence agencies more than any actual Russian disinformation. The fact the actual story was largely a nothingburger makes it even worse. It gives the appearance that people in positions of influence and power attempted to repress a story that did nothing more than paint someone related to the President in a bad light. Indeed, it's incredible and shameful that the NYT took years to print stories like this [1] which could have been used to refute people quoting the "don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary" text because they preferred to leave responsible people with the impression that it was all total fiction and Russian disinformation. Rather than trusting the electorate, the NYT, Twitter, and government intelligence agencies believed it was better to mislead them rather than risk them voting incorrectly. In other words, people are not capable of self-government.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
>Following the prior example, the vast majority of people dug into the side they already supported and didn't really affect party choice.
In case you missed it there was a recent paper on this topic:
>Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
Summary thread: https://twitter.com/CSMaP_NYU/status/1612449687218397194
> How instrumental their impact was in achieving a specific result in elections is debatable, simply because the effects of propaganda are difficult to quantify by definition.
But people have tried.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
> Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior
> It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, yet you're actively claiming otherwise without a shred of proof.
The burden of proof is on people claiming that foreign countries doing the same thing they've always done with a new delivery…
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mechanism has changed anything. And given the amount of bad faith disinformation already put out by the primary actors insisting this is the case - not people in comment threads, I mean organizations like New Knowledge and other sources used by NYT and USGov - the burden of proof is pretty high. If you have to blatantly make stuff up, your credibility goes down.
> that the current sociopolitical climate can be explained by "legitimate dissent".
Why?
This seems like a very puzzling statement when considering the past century. Aside from the impacts of increasing atomization and social disintegration related to population churn and mass media (not news, but movies, TV, Instagram, etc.), the only really unusual thing about today's socio-political environment is the degree to which dissent is not tolerated and treated as fundamentally subversive. And even that's not too unusual; for example, the pacifists and isolationists today are Russian bots, the pacifists and isolationists of yesteryear were Nazi apologists, secret communists, etc.
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