Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/01/study-says-trumps-2016-poll.html
Yes, Russian internet propaganda and military disinformation attacks may really have elected Trump.
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It must have given those Russian propagandists a lot of job satisfaction to see their work reflected directly in poll results.
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Trumps interactions with Putin make one of two things clear:
- Either he is in direct cahoots and doesn’t care who knows it.
or
- Despite the Russians trying to directly influence him, they went around him to influence the votes. And either Trump doesn’t care, or he is so narcissistic and naive to think they played no real role in him getting elected and he thinks all of this is just a made up Democrat conspiracy.
I am kinda leaning towards that the is too stupid to know he is being played. He’s being played by NK as well.
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Trump is what during the first Cold War the Russians called a useful idiot.
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Shocked to the absolute minimum amount.
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We already suspect/know that national political polling has sunk to a crisis of inaccuracy due to a lack of any viable method to acquire a properly random sample of the electorate, (e.g. how is it possible to get cell-phone survey data from as many under the age of say 50 as above?). So is it terribly tin-foil-hat to think that the Russians have hacked/provided polling agencies with databases of numbers to phone which lead to trump friendly respondents who are more than willing to ‘take the survey’? It is useful to keep in mind that pollsters generally phone up numbers just until 1000 respondents are acquired, (so they can dubiously state a margin of error of +/- 3% <= sqrt(1/1000))
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Related:
BB BBS trolley numbers went up each time stories on Russian Internet Research Agency Twitter accounts became active
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I kind of agree with some criticism I read of this study (or more accurately the reporting if the study) that stresses the correlation is not causation point. It could be argued that re-tweeting of Russian social media crap increased as Trump’s popularity rose.
Hard to argue when the relation found was that the bot-tweet bumps preceded the poll bumps. If they happened at the same time, maybe, but they didn’t.
We find that changes in opinion poll numbers for one of the candidates were consistently preceded by corresponding changes in IRA re-tweet volume, at an optimum interval of one week before. In contrast, the opinion poll numbers did not correlate with future re-tweets or ‘likes’ of the IRA tweets.
Yes, the quantum of available shock is quite low.
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