Facebook ads linked to a Russian effort to disrupt the US political process are displayed as Facebook executives appear before the House Intelligence Committee on November 1, 2017. (Reuters / Aaron Bernstein)
The Nation: 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.”
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WNU Editor: This blog has been claiming the same thing for the past two years. But what like about this post is that it summarizes everything very nicely.
