by Caitlin Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone:
Research conducted by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Which is to say that all the years of hysterical shrieking about Russian trolls interfering in US democracy and corrupting the fragile little minds of Americans — a narrative that has been used to drum up support for internet censorship and ever-increasing US government involvement in the regulation of online speech — was false.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
And to be clear, this isn’t actually news. It was established years ago that the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency could not possibly have had any meaningful impact on the 2016 election, because the scope of its operations was quite small, its posts were mostly unrelated to the election and many were posted after the election occurred, and its funding was dwarfed by orders of magnitude by domestic campaigns to influence the election outcome.
What’s different this time around, six years after Trump’s inauguration, is that this time the mass media are reporting on these findings.
“Journalists” do this thing where they hype Party propaganda when needed, and then when the story is no longer relevant they quietly publish the truth about how they were totally lying. This way they can say “we DID report the facts!”
Truly bad people. https://t.co/NlIkeIpVKy
— ⚡David Angelo⚡ (@MrDavidAngelo) January 9, 2023
The Washington Post has an article out with the brazenly misleading headline “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters“. Anyone who reads the article itself will find its author Tim Starks acknowledges that “Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior,” but the insertion of the word “little” means anyone who just reads the headline (the overwhelming majority of people encountering the article) will come away with the impression that Russian trolls still had some influence on 2016 voters.
“Little influence” could mean anything shy of tremendous influence. But the study did not find that Russian trolls had “little influence” over the election; it failed to find any measurable influence at all.
Starks does some spin work of his own in a bid to salvage the reputation of the ever-crumbling Russiagate narrative, eagerly pointing out that the report does not explicitly say Russia definitely had zero influence on the election’s outcome, that it doesn’t examine Russian trolling behavior on Facebook, that it doesn’t address “Russian hack-and-leak operations,” and that it doesn’t say “doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.”
None of these are valid arguments. Claiming Russia definitely had no influence on the election at all would have been beyond the scope of the study, the report’s authors do in fact argue that the effects of Russian trolling on Facebook were likely the same as on Twitter, the (still completely unproven) “Russian hack-and-leak operations” were outside the scope of the study, as is the question of whether foreign influence operations can be a threat in general.
What Starks does not do is make any attempt to address the fact that mainstream news and punditry was dominated for years by claims that Russian internet trolls won the election for Donald Trump. He does not, for example, make any mention of his own 2019 Politico article telling readers that the Russian Twitter troll operation ahead of the 2016 election “was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known.”
Read More @ CaitlinJohnstone.com
