A new study has claimed Russia’s online interference tried to aid the conservative movement and Donald Trump. There’s a big problem with that assessment. It comes from a left-wing operation that previously classified more than 11 different conservative outlets as “junk news.” And two of those authors were also involved in this report.
The study was released by the Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika. It argued that fake accounts, ads, and tweets “all clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party -- and specifically Donald Trump”
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Previous Post: U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report Details Russia's Use Of Social Media During The U.S. Election (December 17, 2018).
WNU Editor: The commissioned US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report is here .... The IRA and Political Polarization in the United States (The Computational Propaganda Project: Algorithms, Automation and Digital Politics). With people now claiming that the authors of this US Senate report are biased, I decided to read the 47 page report myself. Conclusion .... I am underwhelmed and deeply skeptical of their conclusions. I have been involved in social media campaigns and we never got the impact that the authors of this report are claiming that these Russian troll farms got. Albeit my social media campaign was not based on politics (it was/is based on promoting reading/education/etc.), I learned certain truths when it came to social media campaigns. To begin, there are three basic rules. To keep and grow a social media audience you must have good content, a quick response time, and a budget smartly used to promote your Facebook page to a bigger audience. What these so-called Russian troll farms did is the exact opposite of what I would do. The content sucks (from what I have seen so far), there is no response time (they are trolls after-all), and more importantly, their $73,000 budget is laughable when compared to the tens of millions if not hundreds of millions that were spent by political parties and special interest groups in the last campaign.What the U.S. Senate should do is request the same report using the same methodology that was used in examining these Russian troll farms, but apply it to all the political parties and special interest groups that were using social media in the last campaign. I can tell you the results right now. When compared to what the Russians are claimed to have done to what everyone else did in the last campaign .... the Russians would not even be 0.1%
