• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

First Charges Filed in Mueller Investigation

New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics

Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.

https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-elections-interference/

The release of two Senate-commissioned reports has sparked a new round of panic about Russia manipulating a vulnerable American public on social media. Headlines warn that Russian trolls have tried to suppress the African-American vote, promote Green Party candidate Jill Stein, recruit “assets,” and “sow discord” or “hack the 2016 election” via sex-toy ads and Pokémon Go. “The studies,” writes David Ignatius of The Washington Post, “describe a sophisticated, multilevel Russian effort to use every available tool of our open society to create resentment, mistrust and social disorder,” demonstrating that the Russians, “thanks to the Internet…seem to be perfecting these dark arts.” According to Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, “it looks increasingly as though” Russian disinformation “changed the direction of American history” in the narrowly decided 2016 election, when “Russian trolling easily could have made the difference.”
Click to expand...

• 2016 Election Content: The most glaring data point is how minimally Russian social-media activity pertained to the 2016 campaign. The New Knowledge report acknowledges that evaluating IRA content “purely based on whether it definitively swung the election is too narrow a focus,” as the “explicitly political content was a small percentage.” To be exact, just “11% of the total content” attributed to the IRA and 33 percent of user engagement with it “was related to the election.” The IRA’s posts “were minimally about the candidates,” with “roughly 6% of tweets, 18% of Instagram posts, and 7% of Facebook posts” having “mentioned Trump or Clinton by name.”
Click to expand...

• Spending: Also hurting the case that the Russians reached a large number of Americans is that they spent such a microscopic amount of money to do it. Oxford puts the IRA’s Facebook spending between 2015 and 2017 at just $73,711. As was previously known, about $46,000 was spent on Russian-linked Facebook ads before the 2016 election. That amounts to about 0.05 percent of the $81 million spent on Facebook ads by the Clinton and Trump campaigns combined. A recent disclosure by Google that Russian-linked accounts spent $4,700 on platforms in 2016 only underscores how miniscule that spending was. The researchers also claim that the IRA’s “manipulation of American political discourse had a budget that exceeded $25 million USD.” But that number is based on a widely repeated error that mistakes the IRA’s spending on US-related activities for its parent project’s overall global budget, including domestic social-media activity in Russia.
Click to expand...

• Sophistication: Another reason to question the operation’s sophistication can be found by simply looking at its offerings. The IRA’s most shared pre-election Facebook post was a cartoon of a gun-wielding Yosemite Sam. Over on Instagram, the best-received image urged users to give it a “Like” if they believe in Jesus. The top IRA post on Facebook before the election to mention Hillary Clinton was a conspiratorial screed about voter fraud. It’s telling that those who are so certain Russian social-media posts affected the 2016 election never cite the posts that they think actually helped achieve that end. The actual content of those posts might explain why.

• Covert or Clickbait Operation? Far from exposing a sophisticated propaganda campaign, the reports provide more evidence that the Russians were actually engaging in clickbait capitalism: targeting unique demographics like African Americans or evangelicals in a bid to attract large audiences for commercial purposes. Reporters who have profiled the IRA have commonly described it as “a social media marketing campaign.” Mueller’s indictment of the IRA disclosed that it sold “promotions and advertisements” on its pages that generally sold in the $25-$50 range. “This strategy,” Oxford observes, “is not an invention for politics and foreign intrigue, it is consistent with techniques used in digital marketing.” New Knowledge notes that the IRA even sold merchandise that “perhaps provided the IRA with a source of revenue,” hawking goods such as T-shirts, “LGBT-positive sex toys and many variants of triptych and 5-panel artwork featuring traditionally conservative, patriotic themes.”
Click to expand...

Based on all of this data, we can draw this picture of Russian social-media activity: It was mostly unrelated to the 2016 election; microscopic in reach, engagement, and spending; and juvenile or absurd in its content. This leads to the inescapable conclusion, as the New Knowledge study acknowledges, that “the operation’s focus on elections was merely a small subset” of its activity. They qualify that “accurate” narrative by saying it “misses nuance and deserves more contextualization.” Alternatively, perhaps it deserves some minimal reflection that a juvenile social-media operation with such a small focus on elections is being widely portrayed as a seismic threat that may well have decided the 2016 contest.
Click to expand...

So in summary, y'all spending alotta time worrying about internet trolls.
 
palmab03 said:
New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics

Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.

https://www.thenation.com/article/russiagate-elections-interference/











So in summary, y'all spending alotta time worrying about internet trolls.
Click to expand...

No shit. I don’t think the lack of spending is a sign they didn’t influence. It’s a sign that Americans spend too much on elections.
 
The Nation

They also have been criticized for being a Pro-Russia publication by both conservatives and liberals. Here is a quote from the right leaning Washington Free Beacon: “The Nation’s modern day Russia coverage has been criticized as too pro-Putin. Stephen F. Cohen, who is the husband of editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, has been characterized as a Putin apologist.”
Click to expand...
 
PhDeac said:
No shit. I don’t think the lack of spending is a sign they didn’t influence. It’s a sign that Americans spend too much on elections.
Click to expand...

As the article stated, do you have any examples of the propaganda used to influence? The most liked pieces involved Yosemite Sam and didn’t even mention the election.
 
There has been plenty written showing what the Russians used and did. What more do you want? You can find actual ads. You can find events they organized that were attended by real American voters.

You keep minimizing their impact but you don’t seem to have a basis for it. Saying they were trying to influence more than just the election doesn’t make your point at all.
 
Wouldn’t know based on the random shit he keeps throwing at the wall on these threads.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top