from the researchers-ftw dept
Right after the 2016 election that saw Donald Trump elected President, there was this collective wail among many who were unable to comprehend how this could have happened, searching for someone to blame. Two targets quickly emerged: social media and Russia. Often the two were combined into “Russian trolls on social media.” As we’ve noted, those Russian trolls certainly existed, and certainly were trying to influence the election, but it seemed dubious to us that they had any real effect. As we noted the day after the election, it was silly to claim that social media magically made people vote for Trump.
In the time since then, we’ve seen more and more evidence showing that the impact of social media was really not at all what many people seem to believe. We’ve talked about the studies that have, repeatedly, shown that cable news had way more of an impact than anything that came out of social media, not just for the election, but also for COVID disinfo.
Now there’s a very interesting new study, published in Nature with a long list of researchers (George Eady, Tom Paskhalis, Jan Zilinsky, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua Tucker), looking at whether or not Russian trolls on social media had any real impact on the 2016 election and the summary is no, they did not.
There is widespread concern that foreign actors are using social media to interfere in elections worldwide. Yet data have been unavailable to investigate links between exposure to foreign influence campaigns and political behavior. Using longitudinal survey data from US respondents linked to their Twitter feeds, we quantify the relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and attitudes and voting behavior in the 2016 US election. We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. The results have implications for understanding the limits of election interference campaigns on social media.
Basically, yes, the trolls showed up and tried to sow discontent. But, the people who interacted with it were always going to vote for Trump anyway, and again, existing media was way, way, way more influential than the Russian trolls on social media.
The full report is all sorts of fascinating, and again shows how little impact the Russian trolls actually had. Especially compared to existing news media and US politicians.
The research does show that those who identified as “strongly Republican” were way more likely to encounter/interact with Russian propaganda, but that’s little surprise since that was a key (but not only) target of Russian propaganda. But, again, those individuals were never going to vote for Hillary Clinton in the first place. The study used various models to determine the impact on voting and found it basically negligible.
As estimates in the first panel indicate, the relationship between the number of posts from Russian foreign influence accounts that users are exposed to and voting for Donald Trump is near zero (and not statistically significant). This is the case whether the outcome is measured as vote choice in the election itself; the ranking of Clinton and Trump on equivalent survey questions across survey waves; and with the broader measure capturing whether voting behavior more generally favored Trump or Clinton through voting abstentions, changes in vote choice, or voting for a third party. The signs on the coefficients in each case are also negative, both for the count and binary measure, a result that would be inconsistent with a relationship of exposure being favorable to Trump. It is also worth noting that none of the other explanatory variables (with the exception of sex in some models) used as controls appear to be statistically significant predictors of the change in voting preferences
As the researchers conclude:
Taking our analyses together, it would appear unlikely that the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter could have had much more than a relatively minor influence on individual-level attitudes and voting behavior for four related reasons. First, we find that exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts was concentrated among a small group of users, with only 1% of users accounting for 70% of all exposures. Second, exposure to Russian foreign influence tweets was overshadowed by the amount of exposure to traditional news media and US political candidates. Third, respondents with the highest levels of exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts were those arguably least likely to need influencing: those who identified themselves as highly partisan Republicans, who were already likely favorable to Donald Trump. Fourth, we did not detect any meaningful relationships between exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts and changes in respondents’ attitudes on the issues, political polarization, or voting behavior. Each of these findings is not independently dispositive. Jointly, however, we find concordant evidence between exposure to Russian disinformation—which is both lower and more concentrated than one might expect to be impactful—and the absence of a relationship to changes in attitudes and voting behavior.
The researchers do note that there are some limitations to their research (focused just on tweets, and just on identified Russia influence campaigns), but it does seem noteworthy.
This is a really useful addition to the research out there, though it’s not going to stop the, ahem, disinformation that social media magically impacted the election from continuing to spread. Even if that’s disinformation about disinformation.
Filed Under: 2016 election, disinformation, donald trump, hillary clinton, influence, politics, research, russian trolls, studies
Companies: twitter
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