MSBKyle wrote:
Even if Russia did collude in our elections, I don't believe it affected the outcome. People voted the way they voted because of who they felt would be better for the United States, not because another country told them how to vote.
These are not mutually-exclusive phenomena. Russia's meddling did not consist of saying "we prefer Donald Trump". I don't even have much issue with that sort of behaviour. Instead, Russia engaged in a prolonged propaganda campaign with the intent of changing people's opinions without making it apparent that was what they were doing.
Some of the things that Russia did to influence the American election:
- They created fake Facebook groups trying to further polarise wedge issues, and used those groups to spread provocative content.
- They created fake Twitter accounts and used them to try and, amongst other things, convince Bernie Bros to vote for Donald Trump.
- They made fake Tumblr posts trying to convince people that, amongst other things, Hillary was just as racist as Donald Trump and it would be better to vote third party or not vote at all.
This content reached millions of Americans. It often resonated deeply, as shown by the number of times it was liked and shared. It helped alter people's opinions, often falsely; there are people in this very thread repeating the falsehoods that the Russians tried to spread. It almost certainly changed the voting behaviour of a significant number of people. There's a good chance that it swung a couple of Great Lakes states. It's entirely plausible that it swung the election overall.
I suspect at some point in the future we will be better at quantifying these sorts of things and may be able to say with a greater degree of confidence whether the Russians swung PA, FL, or OH (fwiw my gut says that OH would still have gone for Trump but it's too hard to say for the others).
America seems particularly vulnerable to this sort of meddling because there's not much you can do to make your people less vulnerable, but information can make it easier for meddlers to meddle, and America has the single most studied political system in any democracy - the Russians had access to reams of information about demographics, issues, language, and geography, in addition to the ordinary stuff about psychology. America also uses winner-take-all voting systems, which are more vulnerable to catastrophic hijacking than proportional systems.
The UK's EU referendum would also have been an obvious target, but I don't think as much work has been done to investigate the extent of Russian meddling there. By all accounts, there was significant attempted meddling in the French Presidential election, but a) that was a losing cause from the start because Macron had the popularity that Hillary deserved and Le Pen had the unpopularity Trump deserved, b) the Russians didn't seem to be as good at speaking French as they were at speaking English and would frequently make implausible mistakes in their writing. I've heard that they tried to target Spanish-speaking communities in the US but I can't really recall how successful they were. Could be entertaining going forward.
20 Jul 2018, 7:57 am
