If you were alive and conscious in 2016, you definitely remember the media making a HUGE DEAL out of the idea that Russia was doing Facebook and Twitter posts to subvert democracy.
I mean this was BIG news you guys. CRITICAL. An attack on America! CYBERWARFARE. And Hillary thinks that is why she lost. Or rather, that it’s part of how the election was stolen from her! (She’s allowed to say that.)
But guess what? NOPE.
Even the Washington Post has been forced to come to terms with the narrative utterly disintegrating.
Yeah big surprise right? That this huge election with massive implication and inconceivable amounts of advertising and MSM biased coverage and money and rallies and conversation wasn’t swayed by bots on Facebook?
From that WaPo article:
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.
You will note that it does not take any BLAME for that overhype.
Here’s Reason putting it plain.
Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor by influencing voters on Twitter had no discernible impact whatsoever, according to a new study by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics.
“We find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior,” wrote the study’s authors.
…
“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,” The Washington Post notes on the NYU study.
The Post’s Tim Starks highlighted the study’s findings in a recent article. The news probably came as a surprise to many readers; unfortunately, mainstream and liberal consumers of political news have been conditioned to believe that misinformation—often of foreign and Russian origin—is the source of countless modern maladies. But time and time again, data tell a different story.
Yeah no kidding.
But you tell that to kids today…
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