While we know for a fact that efforts were made by the Russian Internet Research Agency to spread disinformation and spew divisive messages during the 2016 election cycle, we don’t really have clear indicator of how effective they were. To contextualize a little, the suspected reach of these internet trolls was around 126 million Americans. As a direct result of this discovery, Twitter, Facebook, and even the U.S. Senate released statements and have suggested changes. The problem is, are they really that dangerous?
A survey study comprised of 1,239 Twitter users from the Republican and Democrat political parties sought to do just this. Two surveys were used, one about the attitudes and behavior of the Twitter users while the other was about what accounts the Internet Research agency interacted with. It turns out that only around 19% of users surveyed came into contact with these Russian accounts. When the sets of data were compared, no conclusive evidence was found that these interactions changed people’s opinions or impacted their votes.
From this data, it seems like the impact of the Russian troll was much lesser than expected. Other sources have also echoed this sentiment, with a few scientists suggesting that the mictotargeting done by Cambridge Analytica didn’t do so much. However, it is important to understand that this data can’t say anything concrete about the 2016 election cycle since the data was collected after the fact. Despite this, it’s important information to keep in the back of your mind in case a situation like this arises again.
LIS 4022 Spring 2020 