Twitter Says It Exposed Nearly 700,000 People To Russian Propaganda During Election (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Twitter this evening released a new set of statistics related to its investigation on Russia propaganda efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including that 677,775 people were exposed to social media posts from more than 50,000 automated accounts with links to the Russian government. Many of the new accounts uncovered have been traced back to an organization called the the Internet Research Agency, or IRA, with known ties to the Kremlin. The data was first presented in an incomplete form to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last November, which held hearings to question Facebook, Google, and Twitter on the role the respective platforms and products played in the Russian effort to help elect President Donald Trump. Twitter says it's now uncovered more accounts and new information on the wide-reaching Russian cyberintelligence campaign.

"Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States who followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked a Tweet from these accounts during the election period," writes Twitter's public policy division in a blog post published today. "Because we have already suspended these accounts, the relevant content on Twitter is no longer publicly available."

Comments

Twitter? What is it?

[comodoro]

Is it that ad ridden social network full of crackpots, some of them threatening with nuclear war? Does anybody sane still use it?

So what?

[azcoyote]

I'm fairly sick of Twitter and Facebook going on about this. The Internet is full of propaganda. The world is full of propaganda. We should not be surprised if Russia meddled a bit, because we meddle in everyone else's affairs, especially in the Middle East. I don't like Trump much either, but the fact is that people are using this merely as a way to comfort themselves about him having won the election. But does it really make a difference? Were we really naive enough to think that democracy was truly fair in the first place?

Let's think about this rationally. 700,000 were exposed; that's a tiny number. A Google search says that almost 139,000,000 voted. So that means that about 0.5%--a mere half percent of voters may have been exposed. But chances are that only some of those who were exposed actually voted. And then most of them probably already were Trump supporters in the first place, who merely grabbed hold of the propaganda as confirmation of their already-held point of view. So it's impossible to say how much it affected the vote--especially given the complexities of the electoral college and the fact that we do not know where these viewers lived--but chances are that it did not affect it enough to have swayed anything.

Or let's put it another way: the burden of proof would be on those who would claim that Russia actually changed the outcome of the election. Prove it. I sincerely doubt that it will ever be proved, but people will go on and on about it because it gives them a kind of comfort to think that it was really the fault of some sinister external force. People love blaming outsiders, or even internal minorities who are treated as outsiders--such as Mexicans like myself--but it is a sad, pathetic, illegitimate comfort.

Re:So what?

[SuricouRaven]

It's hard to say with only incomplete information, but what little commentary I have seen on he Russian efforts suggests it wasn't aimed just at electing Trump. It was aimed to fuel division and increase hostility by producing material aimed at both left and right to convince them that the opposing faction are not merely in disagreement, but are a dangerous and evil force that must be fought and exterminated, and that only traitors seek compromise.

They saw a trend that was to their favor. They pushed further in that direction.

Re:So what?

[jonsmirl]

You are missing a big piece -- the horrible ineffectiveness of Internet ads. So what if 700,000 people were exposed. I am exposed to several thousand Internet ads a day. I remember none of them. They are just clutter that I ignore. You probably need to expose me to an ad 5,000 times before I will notice it. I may have been exposed to the Twitter and Facebook ads, who cares, I never noticed them.

This Russian ad spend was on the order of a few hundred thousands dollars. A couple hundred thousand does nothing when applied to large numbers of people. Put into perspective that the candidates spent two billion dollars.

You can then try to make the argument that the Russians highly focused the ads on to a specific target group. But that rapidly turns into preaching to the choir. It is easy to get a highly targeted group to do what the ads imply, that is simply because they were very likely to do whatever it was anyway. But there is no way that 700,000 people is a tightly selected group like that.

Re:Nope

[Entrope]

If someone asks for evidence, present the most compelling and convincing evidence you have. It is a lame dodge, and implicit admission that you have nothing, to demand that someone else define a standard of evidence -- because you would then just argue about their definition instead of providing evidence.

Re:Nope

[hey!]

That doesn't work because what convinces me won't necessarily convince you. That's because of differences in Bayesian prior beliefs.

Some people also like to waste your time demanding you marshal information they have no intention of looking at. It's like playing a game where they don't tell you the rules, or are free to change the rules to suit themselves.

Re:Nope

[RedK]

Would meetings by people in the campaign with what they believe to be people working for the Russian Government for purposes of obtaining favors rise to the level of collusion for you?

The definition of collusion is simple :

col . lu . sion
secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others.

So for this "meeting" to be collusion, it would require for it to be to "cheat" or "deceive" and have been secret or illegal. Does said meeting meet those requirements ?

Let's look at the other side. Was it in fact deception that even led to this meeting ? And did this deception require special steps from an outside influence ?

Is the fact the meeting took place collusion, or did collusion result in said meeting even taking place under false pretenses ? So what do you think about me thinking about a "simple meeting" being equal to collusion now ?

Re:Nope

[hey!]

People engage in Bayesian reasoning all the time, even if they don't know what that is. Everyone does this. If you actually believe anyone in the Trump organization would never collude with Russians, then Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin appears entirely innocent to you, even though Trump Jr. has openly admitted he was seeking Russian government supplied dirt on Clinton.

Likewise the meeting between George Papadopolous and Joseph Mifsud in which Mifsud offered a Russian government trove of emails from the Clinton campaign was perfectly innocent. Papadoploous lying about that meeting to the FBI was also a perfectly innocent mistake.

And when in response to Papadopolous's attempt to set up a meeting involving Trump Paul Manafort complained "It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal," he really meant that nobody in the campaign should be doing it.

So given that people who believe there isn't a shred of evidence of collusion aren't impressed by these fairly well-established facts attested to by the participants, I think it's perfectly legitimate to what level of evidence in your opinion constitutes "a shred"?