New analysis finds that publicity to Russian ‘foreign influence’ campaigns on Twitter didn’t considerably have an effect on voting behaviour within the 2016 US presidential election.
Russian Twitter campaigns in the course of the 2016 presidential race within the US reached a small variety of customers, most of whom had been extremely partisan Republicans who had been already doubtless supporters of Donald Trump and arguably least more likely to want influencing, a report printed this week says.
In addition, the research discovered that regardless of Russia’s affect operations on the platform, there have been no measurable modifications in attitudes, polarisation, or voting behaviour amongst voters.
For years, the Kremlin has denied interfering within the 2016 election received by Donald Trump, with President Vladimir Putin as soon as categorically saying that “we didn’t meddle, we aren’t meddling and we will not meddle in any elections”.
The latest research, conducted by the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics and published in the journal Nature, investigates the relationship between Russia’s foreign influence campaign on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election and the political attitudes and voting behaviour of ordinary US social media users. It finds there is no significant relationship between the two.
“My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped,” Josh Tucker, one of many report’s authors and co-director of the Centre for Social Media informed The Washington Post.
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Multiple points
“Now we’re looking back at data and we can see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population, and how the fact that people who were being exposed to these were really, really likely to vote for Trump,” Tucker said. “And then we have this data to show we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes.”
The study, carried out by researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Trinity College Dublin, and the Technical University of Munich, examined survey data containing responses from 1,496 US respondents who consented to provide their Twitter account information, as well as answer questions concerning their political attitudes and beliefs at multiple points during the 2016 US election campaign.
The research examines the traits of customers who had been extra more likely to be uncovered to Twitter posts from the Russian international affect marketing campaign, specializing in their political beliefs. It then estimates combination publicity throughout the United States and turns to the query of voters’ selection.
Key findings
The research finds that publicity to posts from Russian international affect accounts was restricted to a small group of customers, with just one p.c of customers accounting for 70 p.c of all exposures.
It additionally discovered that publicity to Russian international affect tweets was overshadowed by the quantity of publicity to conventional news media and US political candidates.
Respondents with the very best ranges of publicity to posts from Russian international affect accounts had been these arguably least more likely to want influencing – particularly, those that recognized themselves as extremely partisan Republicans, who had been already doubtless favorable to Donald Trump.
The authors of the report acknowledged quite a lot of limitations of their research: the out there information are from a yr after the 2016 US election occurred, cowl a brief one-month time window, and had been collected after Twitter eliminated many Russian international influences accounts from its platform. It additionally doesn’t study different social media platforms, just like the much-larger Facebook.
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Source: TRTWorld and businesses
