The trolls helped
by digby
I have no idea if this study is reliable but it's interesting anyway, particularly in light of Jimmy Carter's recent comments:
A new study found that for every 25,000 retweets that a known Russian troll account received during the 2016 election, Donald Trump's poll numbers jumped 1%.
The study, conducted by a team headed at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville and published in the peer-reviewed University of Illinois-Chicago journal "First Monday," suggests that — despite protests to the contrary by Republicans and Trump allies — the Russian disinformation campaign was successful in influencing the 2016 election.
Details: The Tennessee-Knoxville study analyzed 770,005 tweets in English from known Russian troll accounts, as well as corresponding poll data from FiveThirtyEight's archive of multiple polling outlets.
Every 25,000 retweets of Russian accounts correlated to a 1% increase in Trump's poll numbers one week later.
Given the frequency of tweets from Russian accounts, 25,000 retweets would average around 10 retweets per tweet.
Retweets did not have a similar effect on Hillary Clinton's poll numbers.
Caveat: Correlation does not always mean causation. If a Trump talking point encouraged a particularly viral Tweet, for example, it may have also encouraged a change in Trump's polling on its own.
It's also worth noting that the U.S. intelligence community has not conclusively weighed in on whether Russia's interference in 2016 had a tangible impact on the results of the election.
I've always figured it probably had some effect. But it can never be proven that it had the effect of handing Trump his extremely meager victories across three swing states. There was a lot going on in that election, much of it under-handed and unusual.
But let's just say it's not exactly a radical conspiracy theory to think that the Russian sabotage of Clinton's campaign and the social media dirty tricks may have had an effect. Of course they did.
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