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"This Got Way Overhyped": 2016 Russian Twitter Trolls Were Dismal Failure: WaPo

• https://www.zerohedge.com, by Tyler Durden

In a report that should come as a surprise to no one (especially after the TWITTER FILES drops), Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 US election via Twitter were a dismal failure that reached relatively few users, and had "no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior," according to the Washington Post, citing a study published Monday from the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics.

"My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped," said report co-author Josh Tucker, who co-directs the NYU center. "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," he added.

"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."

Key findings via the Post:

Only 1 percent of Twitter users accounted for 70 percent of the exposure to accounts that Twitter identified as Russian troll accounts.

Highly partisan Republicans were exposed to nine times more posts than non-Republicans.

Content from the news media and U.S. politicians dwarfed the amount of Russian influence content the electorate was exposed to during the 2016 race.

There was no measurable impact on "political attitudes, polarization, and vote preferences and behavior" from the Russian accounts and posts.

Recall just three weeks ago we learned that Twitter saw little to no evidence of foreign influence in the 2016 US election, which the FBI repeatedly sought.


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