The third big news story that was missed in 2018 was finding out that despite the claims of Russian interference in American politics, the truth was that this was mostly nonsense…
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.
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.”
The reports, from the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Projectand the firm New Knowledge, do provide the most thorough look at Russian social-media activity to date. With an abundance of data, charts, graphs, and tables, coupled with extensive qualitative analysis, the authors scrutinize the output of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) the Russian clickbait firm indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in February 2018. On every significant metric, it is difficult to square the data with the dramatic conclusions that have been drawn.
• 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.”
• Scale: The researchers claim that “the scale of [the Russian] operation was unprecedented,” but they base that conclusion on dubious figures. They repeat the widespread claim that Russian posts “reached 126 million people on Facebook,” which is in fact a spin on Facebook’s own guess. “Our best estimate,” Facebook’s Colin Stretch testified to Congress in October 2017, “is that approximately 126 million people may have been served one of these [IRA] stories at some time during the two year period” between 2015 and 2017. According to Stretch, posts generated by suspected Russian accounts showing up in Facebook’s News Feed amounted to “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content.”
• 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 minuscule 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.
• 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 urgedusers 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.”
• “Asset Development”: Lest one wonder how promoting sex toys might factor into a sophisticated influence campaign, the New Knowledge report claims that exploiting “sexual behavior” was a key component of the IRA’s “expansive” “human asset recruitment strategy” in the United States. “Recruiting an asset by exploiting a personal vulnerability,” the report explains, “is a timeless espionage practice.” The first example of this timeless espionage practice is of an ad featuring Jesus consoling a dejected young man by telling him: “Struggling with the addiction to masturbation? Reach out to me and we will beat it together.” It is unknown if this particular tactic brought any assets into the fold. But New Knowledge reports that there was “some success with several of these human-activation attempts.” That is correct: The IRA’s online trolls apparently succeeded in sparking protests in 2016, like several in Florida where “it’s unclear if anyone attended”; “no people showed up to at least one,” and “ragtag groups” showed up at others, including one where video footage captured a crowd of eight people. The most successful effort appears to have been in Houston, where Russian trolls allegedly organized dueling rallies pitting a dozen white supremacists against several dozen counter-protesters outside an Islamic center.
Opponents of Trump like to point to the Russian interference in the election to explain Trump winning, but I think blaming Russia for ‘hacking’ the US Election is deeply counter productive.
Firstly, it’s just outrageous that the American’s who have committed coups, electoral fraud and mass deceptions on 81 other nations over the years are in any position to lecture or complain about interfering in other peoples elections.
Secondly, it allows the Democrats off the hook. Instead of acknowledging they ran a terrible candidate and fielded neoliberal policies that hurt the very workers they had simply assumed would vote for them, the Democrats can avoid scrutiny of their own rigged primary process, the manner in which Bernie Sanders was unfairly treated and their hollow policies by blaming it all on Russia.
Newsflash to the Democrats – Trump didn’t win because of Russia, he won because you failed to appreciate how your embrace of neoliberal globalisation hurt the very voters you needed the most.
One estimate puts the budget of Russian interference in the election via social media advertising at $250 000. With all due respect for American Democracy, if you can influence an election with a mere $250 000, you have way bigger problems than Putin.
I was attacked and abused on the Standard for stating this about Russia.
Joe90, Stuart Munro, Andre and Te Reo Putake are cheerleaders for war against Russia on that centrist chattering club.
Yes Russia is not the boggy here.
NATO and some EU countries are now the agents of trouble here.
These dark forces want to break up Russia for their own “expansion plans as they did in 1941”
Old habits never die easily here.
Ed: “I was attacked and abused on the Standard for stating this about Russia.”
As was I. One of those you name called me a “Putin fanboy”! Much to the amusement of fellow members of this household.
Russia isn’t our – or the US’s – enemy. Neither is China. Nor Iran.
I would be greatly relieved if our current government would show that it has cajones, and take an independent stance on diplomatic relations and trade with all of these countries. Enough with the pusillanimous caving in to US and UK (and EU, for that matter) demands!
So are the westerners jealous of their sophistication if it’s true or amazed that they just don’t do what the west does by just telling lies and making shit up, like they do?
The whole Russiagate conspiracy theory has also been used to discredit Assange, and astonishingly, so many people who consider themselves intelligent leftists have bought it, lock stock and flaming barrel
Francesca:”…astonishingly, so many people who consider themselves intelligent leftists have bought it, lock stock and flaming barrel”
Amazing, isn’t it? It astonishes me that so-called lefties haven’t leapt wholesale to the defence of Assange. Not too much intelligence going spare in that sector, it seems to me.
Yes. The 80 000 IRA FB posts were buried by literally trillions of facebook posts and this over a 2 year period before and after the 2016 election. This is a mind numbingly small .0000000024 of total facebook content over that time. The story was always ludicrous.
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/02/33-trillion-more-reasons-why-the-new-york-times-gets-it-wrong-on-russia-gate/
So true Francesca, who the f are the Left now? Seems to me everybody but the workers who it seems they don’t care for.
Nick J: “who the f are the Left now?”
You might well ask. I consider myself an old-school leftie, but I find few points of agreement now between my views and those expressed, say, on The Standard. Or on this site, much of the time.
It seems to me that modern lefties are of the Woke variety (I had to ask a young relative what that even meant!). How has Martyn described RW pundits? Triggered snowflakes requiring emotional support peacocks: that’s it! In my view that characterisation applies as neatly to many young lefties nowadays.
100% Correct Martyn
The failure of the Democrats to face the cause of their failure will likely result in a subsequent loss in 2020, depending on the candidates.
Despite their marketing, the Democrats are as much sponsored by the ‘big end of town’ as the Republicans. Many of the leading Democrats come from ‘old money’. For example, Nancy Pelosi was put into office on the back of her billionaire husband’s wealth. John Kerry is married into the Heinz family. Overall it is Big Business that sponsors their election campaigns.
And it’s Big Business that doesn’t want Trump constraining the supply of cheap illegal immigrants (that drag down the wages of American workers) by building a wall.
As we’ve seen the last two years we don’t have 2 parties in Washington, there is one party of vested interests , backed by mainstream media, Hollywood and the various spy agencies versus Trump and a few loyal supporters. I think Trump has the Army behind him though, which is *quite* an asset.
It remains to be seen how long Trump can stay in power. Based on US history I am surprised that he has been assassinated yet. (you know – “lone madman” who is subsequently shot…)
2019/2020 is going to get crazy. Clearly there is bugger-all coming out of the Mueller investigation other than 3rd party technical illegality and FBI ‘perjury traps’. There will be no impeachment because he’s done nothing particularly impeachable. Meanwhile the investigation of the Clintons quietly proceeds but is naturally ignored by media.
Mainstream media is going to get even shriller. It is a dying industry that finds it’s lost control of the narrative. Today a Youtube blogger has more influence than the head of CNN. It must be galling :-). Only Fox is maintaining its rating and the rest are going down the toilet fast. CNN today is behind the Cartoon Channel and Nickelodeon as regards ratings. Their latest trick is to shutdown people in Twitter and Facebook and use PayPal and to de-fund alternative views. This will be the battleground for the coming year.
Overall – I’m pleased I live here!
Get with the programme Martin – this was FAKE NEWS!!!
As if the POTUS was a Russian agent…..lmfao
What part of the title spelt “so about all that Russia Hysteria” do you not understand?
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