Throughout the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency, the Washington Post and all the other corporate media propagandists claimed Russian influence was what made Hillary Clinton lose. Every minuscule story that even hinted about Russia using bots and spreading pro-Trump messaging on social media was blown up to be massive front page news.
They’ve finally published a story about Russian influence in the 2016 election that didn’t make the front page. In fact, you’d have a hard time finding it on their website if you weren’t looking for it specifically. This is because it highlights a recent study that shows Russia’s “massive” digital influence in the 2016 election didn’t really do anything at all.
The article, titled “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters,” paints a picture that goes against every Russian collusion narrative the leftist outlet has ever published. According to the article:
Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior, according to a study out this morning.
The study, which the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics helmed, explores the limits of what Russian disinformation and misinformation was able to achieve on one major social media platform in the 2016 elections.
“My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped,” Josh Tucker, one of the report’s authors who is also the co-director of the New York University center, told me about the meaningfulness of the Russian tweets.
“Now we’re looking back at data and we can see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population, and how the fact that people who were being exposed to these were really, really likely to vote for Trump,” Tucker said. “And then we have this data to show we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes.”
They could have ended the article there and moved on. Instead, it behooved them to spend the rest of the unnecessarily long article talking about how this doesn’t prove they were wrong the past six years. They even made a list of all the reasons the study itself is probably inaccurate. Seriously. The next line in their article is even printed in bold to make sure their readers don’t think this study is conclusive (which it is):
But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.
Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be operating in the same arena as a “news” outlet like the Washington Post.
