"Now, The Washington Post is finally admitting it was all nonsense. Citing a new study, the Post reports that there was no appreciable impact made by Russian “trolls” operating on Twitter during the 2016 election.
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.
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.”
This was common sense at the time, but apparently, our betters in the national press possess none of that. People tend to follow and interact with like-minded people on social media platforms. The exception is in dealing with large accounts with a public profile. So a person on Twitter almost certainly won’t follow or give the time of day to a random, low-follower troll account (i.e. one run by Russia), but they will follow Joe Biden, not to accept influence from him, but to counter his opinions."
