Update 1/10/22 2:45 p.m. ET: Paul has responded publicly on Twitter, saying Pearl was rehomed a second time without his knowledge, and casting doubt on whether there was a dead pig in the vicinity when she was picked up by The Gentle Barn.
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Hm. Another strangely off piece in The Intercept.
Compare that to the organization that produced the study, which qualifies the results:
I haven’t gone through the study itself, but I noticed some caution flags. Their list of Russian disinformation accounts was provided by Twitter itself. I’m not sure that Twitter is all that good at spotting disinformation accounts. Did they sanity-check it against other organizations that track Russian nets?
The study analyzed a three-wave longitudinal survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. respondents conducted by YouGov. The respondents, who consented both to provide their Twitter account information for research purposes and to answer questions concerning their political attitudes and beliefs at multiple points during the 2016 U.S. election campaign,
So many selection biases baked into those results. 
(I’ll leave the question of if 1500 is a statistically significant sample compared to Twitter’s US userbase to qualified people.)
The Intercept ignores questions like that, and cherry-picks this quote:
“We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures,” the scholars wrote in the journal Nature Communications. “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.”
First and second are exactly what I’d expect from a disinformation campaign. They want to narrowcast to people who agree with them, or almost agree. Everyone else is a waste of time, and it’s better if they don’t see the campaign. Bring the almost into closer agreement, and make the agreers unshakable in the face of contrary evidence. Also, raise their activity level so that they get out and vote, rally, get a MAGA cap, other emergent behavior, etc. Third, what were the “domestic news media” that they counted, and did it include echoes of the Russian campaign? The Finally seems based on their sample and magic hand-waving.
It’s a pretty fluff opinion piece from Sam Biddle.
If I do a dive into the study itself, I’ll be looking to see how they handle Russia’s anti-Syrian refugee Islamophobia campaigns. That was going strong even before the US election campaign started. (I saw Russia-connected attempts on WeWeProtest/Chanology. Unlike Twitter, the moderators shut that down.)
eta: In the study, the authors do acknowledge limitations in their sample.
IMO, the main problem is that they’re looking at the wrong time window and asking the wrong questions.
We estimate, for example, that at least 32 million US Twitter users were potentially exposed to posts from Russia-sponsored accounts in the eight months leading up to the 2016 election.
A proper study would need to go back at least two years. Russia was constructing an Islamophobic anti-immigrant platform long before Trump appeared, elbowed Ted out of the way, and ascended it for the GOP nomination.
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Well, The Intercept is after all where Glenn Greenwald landed for awhile.
Maybe its oligarch owner has developed a sudden allergy to windows.
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Couldn’t have said it better myself. Even without imminent defenestration as a factor, it seems like reputation laundering by an outlet that served, at best, as a pawn for Russian disinfo.
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Seems this is just coming out now. Wish I could say I was surprised
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Let’s not forget that he’s in Elon’s inner circle of asskissers too
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Partly the reason for my lack of surprise. That, and he has always seemed like an asshole in general
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I mean that’s kinda the vibe I also picked up on the guy before getting tired of his writing
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Based on everything I heard it’s not writing. It’s just verbal diarrhea in the booth. Which I mean is definitely a talent, but one I have gotten tired of a while ago. I made it through 3 minutes of High On Life on Gamepass before uninstalling
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Oh yeah i seen footage of the game. It’s like “let’s take the very annoying talking gun thing from the Borderlands games and flesh that out to be an 10 hour long seizure” haha
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Dallas area red pandas are scared shitless because of that jerk
Edit:
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I’m just glad to hear they didn’t just kill it.
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No paywall:
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