Perhaps in addition to forcing Hillary Clinton to abandon the rust belt, Vladimir Putin has infiltrated Duke University?
Source: Zero Hedge
A recent study from Duke University appears to support former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s February 2018 announcementthat Russian internet trolls did not affect the outcome of the 2016 US election – a campaign which the New York Times described as “the Pearl Harbor of the social media age.”
Researchers analyzed the “6 distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors” of 1,239 Republican and Democratic Twitter users from late 2017 over a one-month period.
Lead researcher Chris Bail notes that while “many studies have analyzed the content and strategy of these campaigns,” hardly anyone has looked at their actual impact.
By combining a massive data set released by Twitter in the wake of the 2016 US election with their own data from a late-2017 study, the team found that Russian efforts had “no significant effects,” and that people who interacted with troll accounts were “primarily those who are already highly polarized.”
Offering suggestions as to why this is the case, Bail says their finding is consistent with the theory of “minimal effects” in political communication research, which is that “people who are most likely to engage with political messaging are the least likely to be influenced by it.”
Another thought is that “interactions with trolls were relatively rare and usually very brief/sporadic.”
