Russia's impact on the 2016 Presidential election was virtually nil

By HSG on Tue, 01/17/2023 - 12:13pm |

Sadly though anybody looking for contrition and an acknowledgement of error from the useful idiots who blamed the bogus Russiagate conspiracy for Clinton's loss will be waiting a long time.

URL:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/09/russian-trolls-twitter-had-little-influence-2016-voters

6255 reads

Comments

The headline of the article is actually Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters, and not what you posted.

Ignoring your spin on it, I like the article very much, so thanks for pointing it out!

Tim Sparks is clearly an analyst to follow, as he reviews studies like this with a skeptical eye and tries to intuit what they tell us and what they don't. The beginning is especially good -

[.....] The study, which the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics helmed, explores the limits of what Russian disinformation and misinformation was able to achieve on one major social media platform in the 2016 elections.

“My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped,” Josh Tucker, one of the report’s authors who is also the co-director of the New York University center, told me about the meaningfulness of the Russian tweets.

“Now we’re looking back at data and we can see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population, and how the fact that people who were being exposed to these were really, really likely to vote for Trump,” Tucker said. “And then we have this data to show we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes.”

(Tucker is an editor of The Monkey Cage, a blog that partnered with The Post.)

But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.

Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.

Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

Let’s dive into the numbers.

The results

Key findings of the report:

Only 1 percent of Twitter users accounted for 70 percent of the exposure to accounts that Twitter identified as Russian troll accounts.

Highly partisan Republicans were exposed to nine times more posts than non-Republicans.

Content from the news media and U.S. politicians dwarfed the amount of Russian influence content the electorate was exposed to during the 2016 race.

There was no measurable impact on “political attitudes, polarization, and vote preferences and behavior” from the Russian accounts and posts.

The study, published this morning in Nature Communications — an offshoot of the science journal Nature magazine — is years in the making. That’s due to the amount of time needed to acquire data from Twitter, conduct the study, carry out surveys and run it through the peer review process, Tucker said.

And Twitter is easier to get data from than Facebook, given that posts are public, among other reasons, he said. Thus, the focus on Twitter, despite its smaller user base.

Plus, there were some fundamental differences with observing how people absorbed information on Twitter versus Facebook, Tucker said. “One of the super interesting things we were able to do in this paper is show that lots of what people were exposed to here was not because they were following the accounts of these Russian trolls, but because they follow people who retweeted tweets that came from these Russian trolls, and that’s easier on Twitter, where almost everything is open,” Tucker said.

The limits [.....]

by artappraiser on Tue, 01/17/2023 - 3:29pm

His entire schtick is that mainstream media uncritically reports what intelligence officials say, so the solution is uncritically report what Russian intelligence officials say?
— Matt Bernardini (@MattBernardini7) January 17, 2023

In fact, we learned Putin DID have secrets Trump was lying to keep. One of those was the Trump Tower deal, which may have been pitched precisely SO Putin would have something on Trump. Cohen and Trump lied--Cohen to Congress--to hide that he reached out to the Krelmin in 1/16.
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 17, 2023

Trump also was hiding a back channel Robert Foresman tried to set up during the transition. https://t.co/Vr3nSldSiH
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 17, 2023

BS, but I was always frustrated they didn’t impeach Trump specifically for this code violation, which forbids soliciting “anything of value” to influence elections…i.e. the sham investigation Trump wanted Zelensky to announce to aid his re-election bid https://t.co/g6kLIgDnVG
— Evander (@evander_87) January 16, 2023

I guess Hal likes coming here to look dumb after posting tiny misleading blips of larger important news stories. He so much wants to be Matt & Max & Aaron and these other fellow travellers i guess, the "Kool kids".

by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 01/17/2023 - 6:25pm

This is so hilarious coming from you PP. As I noted useful idiots won't acknowledge their error. And you know why you won't don't you? Because you're nearly always wrong on virtually everything. Trade. Inequality. Bernie v. Hillary. Remember when you refused to admit that Trump was tied with Hillary in the latest 538 survey by pointing to a 30-day old poll. ROFLMFAO!

by HSG on Wed, 01/18/2023 - 12:48pm

Ride that socialist wave, Hal. If you got 1 horse in the corral, that's the one to ride.if u got none, go begging or "fake it til you make it".

And you have fun with whatever poll you're hanging on to - god you're squeezing that thing to death. 7 years playing give a dog a bone

by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/18/2023 - 3:21pm

Who knows, Hal - were you referring to this:

CORRECTION (Nov. 7, 2016, 10:15 p.m.): An earlier version of the headline on the table in this article misstated Clinton’s average lead in recent polls. It is is 3 to 4 points, not 2 to 3 points.

Or this:

UPDATED 8:58 PM | NOV. 7, 2016

Seven of the 19 polls have Clinton leading by 4 points; another four have her ahead by 3 points, then we have a smattering of 1’s, 2’s and 6’s — along with two pollsters, IBD/TIPP and Los Angeles/USC Dornsife, who still have Trump ahead. (We admire the L.A. Times poll for not changing its methodology in midstream, even though the poll has its issues.) On average, Clinton leads by 2.9 points in the polls, although the highest-rated pollsters 2 have her a bit higher at 3.8 points, on average.

Or this:

It’s worth raising an eyebrow, though, when the polls (other than the L.A. Times) show a range this tight at the end of an election, especially given that they’d diverged so much earlier in the campaign. That probably reflects some degree of herding — for instance, because pollsters stick surveys that seem to be outliers in a file drawer rather than publishing them. So the tight range of polls shouldn’t be taken to mean that everyone’s figured exactly how to poll this challenging election just in the nick of time. Still, the polls clearly agree that Clinton is the favorite, and perhaps has a slight wind at her back for Election Day.

Or this:

First things first: Hillary Clinton has a 70 percent chance of winning the election, according to both the FiveThirtyEight polls-only and polls-plus models. That’s up from a 65 percent chance on Sunday night, so Clinton has had a good run in the polls in the final days of the campaign. Clinton’s projected margin of victory in the popular vote has increased to 3.5 percent from 2.9 percent.

Or this:

On Excellence

BETHANY HECK / GETTY IMAGES

NOV. 1, 2016, AT 8:07 PM

Election Update: Yes, Donald Trump Has A Path To Victory

If the race tightens any further, Clinton’s electoral edge is fragile.

By Nate Silver

Filed under 2016 Election

Tuesday was another pretty good day of polling for Donald Trump. It’s also not an easy day to characterize given the large number of polls published. You could cherry-pick and point to the poll that has Trump up 7 percentage points in North Carolina, for example, or the ABC News/Washington Post national tracking poll that has Trump up 1 point overall. And you could counter, on the Hillary Clinton side, with a poll showing her up by 11 points in Pennsylvania, or a national poll that gives her a 9-point lead.1

Our model takes all this data in stride, along with all the other polls that nobody pays much attention to. And it thinks the results are most consistent with a 3- or 4-percentage point national lead for Clinton, down from a lead of about 7 points in mid-October. Trump remains an underdog, but no longer really a longshot: His Electoral College chances are 29 percent in our polls-only model — his highest probability since Oct. 2 — and 30 percent in polls-plus.

Whenever the race tightens, we get people protesting that the popular vote doesn’t matter because it’s all about the Electoral College, and that Trump has no path to 270 electoral votes. But this presumes that the states behave independently from national trends, when in fact they tend to move in tandem. We had a good illustration of this in mid-September, when in the midst of a tight race overall, about half of swing state polls showed Clinton trailing Trump, including several polls in Colorado, which would have broken Clinton’s firewall.

Or this:

Trump has (almost) no path if he loses the popular vote by 3-5 points

Or see the graph through the election period - 538 only had Trump tied at the end of July, 3 months before the election (tho the swing state tightening occured in September - still long before most voters pay attention):

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

Russia's impact on the 2016 Presidential election was virtually nil

Comments

Sections

Bloggers