Russian Influence Measured

[Koyaanisqatsi]

This is from a different thread that I think warrants it’s own (in spite of the fact that I think I already started a thread along these lines). Regardless, the point here is to see how welll we can now estimate the actual impact of the Russian influence on the 2016 election.

First, this from a clandestine study understaken by Facebook that is strong evidence proving what Russia did works:

Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people.

The study is also summarized here:

But now Facebook, the world's biggest social networking site, is facing a storm of protest after it revealed it had discovered how to make users feel happier or sadder with a few computer key strokes.

It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of "emotional contagion".

In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users' news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' "positive emotional content", resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to "negative emotional content" and the opposite happened.

The study concluded: "Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks."

Presciently:

Jim Sheridan, a member of the Commons media select committee, said the experiment was intrusive. "This is extraordinarily powerful stuff and if there is not already legislation on this, then there should be to protect people," he said. "They are manipulating material from people's personal lives and I am worried about the ability of Facebook and others to manipulate people's thoughts in politics or other areas. If people are being thought-controlled in this kind of way there needs to be protection and they at least need to know about it."

Most notably in regard to the timeline leading up to the 2016 election:

It was claimed that Facebook may have breached ethical and legal guidelines by not informing its users they were being manipulated in the experiment, which was carried out in 2012.

And then, finally, there is this (emphasis in original):

The effect the study documents is very small, as little as one-tenth of a percent of an observed change. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, though, as the authors add:

Given the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences. […] After all, an effect size of d = 0.001 at Facebook’s scale is not negligible: In early 2013, this would have corresponded to hundreds of thousands of emotion expressions in status updates per day.

That’s just from Facebook’s own study. Here is a more in-depth study: The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018 that is summarized here:

If you’ve only checked into this narrative occasionally during the last couple of years, the Comprop report is a great way to get a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing, with no “we take this very seriously” palaver interrupting the facts.

If you’ve been following the story closely, the value of the report is mostly in deriving specifics and some new statistics from the data, which Oxford researchers were provided some seven months ago for analysis. The numbers, predictably, all seem to be a bit higher or more damning than those provided by the companies themselves in their voluntary reports and carefully practiced testimony.

Previous estimates have focused on the rather nebulous metric of “encountering” or “seeing” IRA content put on these social metrics. This had the dual effect of increasing the affected number — to over 100 million on Facebook alone — but “seeing” could easily be downplayed in importance; after all, how many things do you “see” on the internet every day?

The Oxford researchers better quantify the engagement, on Facebook first, with more specific and consequential numbers. For instance, in 2016 and 2017, nearly 30 million people on Facebook actually shared Russian propaganda content, with similar numbers of likes garnered, and millions of comments generated.

Note that these aren’t ads that Russian shell companies were paying to shove into your timeline — these were pages and groups with thousands of users on board who actively engaged with and spread posts, memes and disinformation on captive news sites linked to by the propaganda accounts.

The content itself was, of course, carefully curated to touch on a number of divisive issues: immigration, gun control, race relations and so on. Many different groups (i.e. black Americans, conservatives, Muslims, LGBT communities) were targeted; all generated significant engagement

Here’s their breakdown:

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Executive summary from the Oxford study:

Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) launched an extended attack on the United States by using computational propaganda to misinform and polarize US voters. This report provides the first major analysis of this attack based on data provided by social media firms to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).

This analysis answers several key questions about the activities of the known IRA accounts. In this analysis, we investigate how the IRA exploited the tools and platform of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to impact US users. We identify which aspects of the IRA’s campaign strategy got the most traction on social media and the means of microtargeting US voters with particular messages.

• Between 2013 and 2018, the IRA’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter campaigns reached
  tens of millions of users in the United States.
  
  o Over 30 million users, between 2015 and 2017, shared the IRA’s Facebook and
  Instagram posts with their friends and family, liking, reacting to, and commenting on
  them along the way.
  o Peaks in advertising and organic activity often correspond to important dates in the US
  political calendar, crises, and international events.
  o IRA activities focused on the US began on Twitter in 2013 but quickly evolved into a
  multi-platform strategy involving Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube amongst other
  platforms.
  o The most far reaching IRA activity is in organic posting, not advertisements.​
• Russia's IRA activities were designed to polarize the US public and interfere in elections by:
  o campaigning for African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting
  procedures in 2016, and more recently for Mexican American and Hispanic voters to
  distrust US institutions;
  
  o encouraging extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational; and
  o spreading sensationalist, conspiratorial, and other forms of junk political news and
  misinformation to voters across the political spectrum.​
• Surprisingly, these campaigns did not stop once Russia's IRA was caught interfering in the
  2016 election. Engagement rates increased and covered a widening range of public policy
  issues, national security issues, and issues pertinent to younger voters.
  
  o The highest peak of IRA ad volume on Facebook is in April 2017—the month of the
  Syrian missile strike, the use of the Mother of All Bombs on ISIS tunnels in eastern
  Afghanistan, and the release of the tax reform plan.
  o IRA posts on Instagram and Facebook increased substantially after the election, with
  Instagram seeing the greatest increase in IRA activity.
  o The IRA accounts actively engaged with disinformation and practices common to
  Russian “trolling”. Some posts referred to Russian troll factories that flooded online
  conversations with posts, others denied being Russian trolls, and some even complained
  about the platforms’ alleged political biases when they faced account suspension.​

Key elements here are the parts about who they targeted (and how) as well as the fact that it was "organic" (which is an industry term meaning non-paid, so it wouldn't be traced, but more importantly it would be clandestine; i.e., seem to be coming from a source the user trusted or otherwise had no reason to distrust).

As to the who and how, they clearly targeted minority Democrats to suppress their votes while at the same time alt-right to inflame their hatred/bigotry; two primary targets that benefited ONLY Donald Trump. And since they started long before Trump even announced he was running--and Trump's entire strategy right out of the gate was to inflame alt-right hatred/bigotry--that, to me, is a direct correlation of preconceived strategy that could not possibly have been mere coincidence.

Iow, Trump was just another bot; another component of the same strategy that was evidently first "activated" (as I've argued for years now) in Moscow in 2013 (but evidently first formed even earlier, as the study lists 2012 as the first time Russian fake twitter accounts shifted their focus onto US citizens):

Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) began targeting US voters for misinformation as early as 2012, using some of the techniques it had deployed on its own citizens and those of neighboring countries in Eastern Europe. The Twitter dataset contains posts in a variety of languages. Some of the accounts were also “re-purposed” in their targeting. For example, some were shifted from operating in Indonesian for an Indonesian audience to operating in English for a US audience (see Appendices for additional data). While the IRA targeted a few different countries and language communities, the vast majority of its output was written in Russian and English.

Exactly when in 2012 is not mentioned, but it should be noted that 2012 also corresponds with the first signs of tension between Obama and Putin that famously culminated in the Magnitsky Act in December of 2012:

President Obama signs into law the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. With William Browder’s urging, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) had sponsored the legislation, which the House and Senate then voted overwhelmingly to pass.

The Magnitsky Act freezes assets and bans visas both for Russians who had a hand in Magnitsky’s 2009 death and for other Russians involved in serious human-rights abuses. Putin is furious with the sanctions and retaliates by banning US adoptions of Russian children.

In subsequent testimony on July 26, 2017, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Magnitsky’s former client Browder testifies that Putin took the Magnitsky Act personally because “since 2012 it’s emerged that Vladimir Putin was a beneficiary of the stolen $230 million that Sergei Magnitsky exposed.” Browder testifies that this worries Putin because “he keeps his money in the West and all of his money in the West is potentially exposed to asset freezes and confiscation. Therefore, he has a significant and very personal interest in finding a way to get rid of the Magnitsky sanctions.” According to Browder, the sanctioning also creates a problem for Putin because it “destroys the promise of impunity he’s given to all of his corrupt officials.”

What was Trump doing in 2012?

Trump Again Considers Presidential Bid

According to Roger Stone, Donald Trump again considers running for president. Stone becomes a consultant.

But, that's largely beside the point for the purposes of this thread. Here I'd prefer it if everyone focused on analyzing--to the best extent possible--how effective was the Russian attack.

From the Facebook study, we see that even a tiny effect has huge consequences, and they only partially manipulated their users (and only affecting upwards of 700,000). According to the NYT, Russian "trolls" reached 126 million US accounts through Facebook alone, evidently from the 30 million users that shared or liked or otherwise were the conduit for Russian--primarily organic (i.e., clandestine)--targeted influencing.

That's an important distinction; that the Russians used primarily organic (but also paid) strategies.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Now factor in this from the New Yorker regarding, among other things, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know (emphasis mine):

This expertise helped Jamieson notice something odd about the three debates between Trump and Clinton. As she told me, “The conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton had done pretty well.” According to CNN polls conducted immediately after the debates, she won all three, by a margin of thirteen per cent or greater. But, during the period of the debates, Jamieson and others at the Annenberg Center had overseen three telephone surveys, each sampling about a thousand adults. In an election that turned more than most on judgments of character, Americans who saw or heard the second and third debates, in particular, were more likely than those who hadn’t to agree that Clinton “says one thing in public and something else in private.” Jamieson found this statistic curious, because, by the time of the first debate, on September 26th, Clinton’s reputation for candor had already been tarnished by her failed attempt to hide the fact that she’d developed pneumonia, and by the revelation that, at a recent fund-raising event, she’d described some Trump supporters as “deplorables”—a slur that contradicted her slogan “Stronger Together.” Other Annenberg Center polling data indicated to Jamieson that concerns about Clinton being two-faced had been “baked in” voters’ minds since before the first debate. Clinton “had already been attacked for a very long time over that,” Jamieson recalls thinking. “Why would the debates have had an additional effect?”

After insuring that the surveys had been properly conducted, Jamieson analyzed whether this change in a voter’s perception of Clinton’s forthrightness predicted a change in his or her candidate preference. To her surprise, she found that it did: as she put it to me, there was a “small but significant drop in reported intention to vote for her.” This statistic, too, struck Jamieson as curious; she knew from years of scholarship that Presidential debates, barring major gaffes, typically “increase the likelihood that you’re casting a vote for, rather than against,” a candidate.
...
Jamieson began her study of the 2016 election with an open mind. But, in the fall of 2017, as she watched the House and the Senate hold hearings on Russia’s social-media manipulations, and reviewed the sampling of dozens of Facebook ads released by the House Intelligence Committee—all paid for by Russians during the Presidential campaign—she developed suspicions about the reasons behind Trump’s victory. Before the hearings, Facebook’s chairman and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, had maintained that the amount of Russian content that had been disseminated on social media was too small to matter. But evidence presented to the Senate committee revealed that material generated by the Kremlin had reached a hundred and twenty-six million American Facebook users, leading Senator Dianne Feinstein to call the cyberattack “cataclysmic.”

House Democrats later released not only the ads but also their “targeting data”—the demographics and the geographic locations of users receiving them—which indicated to Jamieson “whom the Russians were going for.” Among other things, she could discern that the Russians had tried “to minimize the vote of African-Americans.” Bogus Kremlin-sponsored ads that had circulated online—including one depicting a black woman in front of an “african-americans for hillary” sign—had urged voters to tweet or text rather than vote, or to “avoid the line” and “vote from home.”

Jamieson’s Post article was grounded in years of scholarship on political persuasion. She noted that political messages are especially effective when they are sent by trusted sources, such as members of one’s own community. Russian operatives, it turned out, disguised themselves in precisely this way. As the Times first reported, on June 8, 2016, a Facebook user depicting himself as Melvin Redick, a genial family man from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, posted a link to DCLeaks.com, and wrote that users should check out “the hidden truth about Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other leaders of the US.” The profile photograph of “Redick” showed him in a backward baseball cap, alongside his young daughter—but Pennsylvania records showed no evidence of Redick’s existence, and the photograph matched an image of an unsuspecting man in Brazil. U.S. intelligence experts later announced, “with high confidence,” that DCLeaks was the creation of the G.R.U., Russia’s military-intelligence agency.

Academic research has also shown that political messages tend not to change the minds of voters who have already chosen a candidate; they are most likely to persuade undecided voters. And in 2016 an uncommonly high percentage of voters liked neither candidate and stayed undecided longer than usual. By some counts, about thirty-seven million Americans—fifteen per cent of the electorate—were still undecided in the final weeks before the election.

Jamieson argues that the impact of the Russian cyberwar was likely enhanced by its consistency with messaging from Trump’s campaign, and by its strategic alignment with the campaign’s geographic and demographic objectives. Had the Kremlin tried to push voters in a new direction, its effort might have failed. But, Jamieson concluded, the Russian saboteurs nimbly amplified Trump’s divisive rhetoric on immigrants, minorities, and Muslims, among other signature topics, and targeted constituencies that he needed to reach.

A "small but significant drop."

And as the newer research shows, Jamieson has her conclusion reversed. It was the Russians who first fomented the strategy that Trump then rode right out of the gate. Iow, the impact of Trump's campaign was enhanced by its consistency with messaging from the Russian cyber war. Not the other way around.

Remember that these comments came from his official announcement speech:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
...
It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.

Islamic terrorism is eating up large portions of the Middle East. They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them.

And, yes, one could just say, "Well, those are typical conservative talking points and scare tactics," but if you look at the entire speech and then look at the topics in the Russian influence campaign, they are nearly identical and are unquestionably weighted toward the right and against the left, but in an openly inflammatory manner.

Iow, there is clear intent and clear strategy involved and not merely random bumfuckery.

But most importantly is how Trump began; by not just saying the normal GOP blather about needing to strengthen our borders, but by calling Mexicans rapists straight out. Emotional triggering, iow.

Now, is that something that can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt by a Special Prosecutor? Evidently not, which is why Mueller used very carefully chosen words (like "could not establish" and "does not exonerate him" and the like) to convey this very fact, imo.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

A lot of focus has been placed on Facebook, but Instagram was also targeted, and, perhaps more revealing, continues to be targeted:

Instagram on the rise

Based on the narrative thus far, one might expect that Facebook — being the focus for much of it — was the biggest platform for this propaganda, and that it would have peaked around the 2016 election, when the evident goal of helping Donald Trump get elected had been accomplished.

In fact Instagram was receiving as much or more content than Facebook, and it was being engaged with on a similar scale. Previous reports disclosed that around 120,000 IRA-related posts on Instagram had reached several million people in the run-up to the election. The Oxford researchers conclude, however, that 40 accounts received in total some 185 million likes and 4 million comments during the period covered by the data (2015-2017).

A partial explanation for these rather high numbers may be that, also counter to the most obvious narrative, IRA posting in fact increased following the election — for all platforms, but particularly on Instagram.

Why is this important? Because Instagram skews to a younger audience; i.e., 18-30.

Here are some relevant stats from PEW regarding social media:

Facebook remains the most widely used social media platform by a relatively healthy margin: some 68% of U.S. adults are now Facebook users. Other than the video-sharing platform YouTube, none of the other sites or apps measured in this survey are used by more than 40% of Americans.

The Center has asked about the use of five of these platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest) in several previous surveys of technology use. And for the most part, the share of Americans who use each of these services is similar to what the Center found in its previous survey of social media use conducted in April 2016. The most notable exception is Instagram: 35% of U.S. adults now say they use this platform, an increase of seven percentage points from the 28% who said they did in 2016.

As was true in previous Pew Research Center surveys of social media use, there are substantial differences in social media use by age. Some 88% of 18- to 29-year-olds indicate that they use any form of social media. That share falls to 78% among those ages 30 to 49, to 64% among those ages 50 to 64 and to 37% among Americans 65 and older.

At the same time, there are pronounced differences in the use of various social media platforms within the young adult population as well. Americans ages 18 to 24 are substantially more likely to use platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter even when compared with those in their mid- to late-20s. These differences are especially notable when it comes to Snapchat: 78% of 18- to 24-year-olds are Snapchat users, but that share falls to 54% among those ages 25 to 29.

So we see Instagram being used in 2016 (evidently to influence young voters, which were a key demographic as discovered through the Clinton/Sanders primary) and then ramped up post election, indicating that understanding (that the young voters are a key component going forward).

Note, too, the impact of YouTube that was also utilized effectively by the Russians.

Again, we see that this was no general "let's fuck things up in America" for no other reason. It was extensive, focused and specifically targeted with a clear agenda to support Trump and fuck-over Clinton and had to be planned with Trump in mind long before Trump announced.

If you remove Trump from the equation and assume that the only goal was to be anti-Clinton, then the voter suppression tactics would make sense, but not the inflame hatred/bigotry of the alt-right.

Jeb Bush was the most logical frontrunner before Trump castrated him and Trump has always been a joke when it comes to running for President. He's done it, he quits, he's in, he's out, etc. So, there would be zero reason to think that Trump would even last beyond the initial publicity stunt, let alone any kind of sustained campaign (unless it was planned from the beginning).

So, take Trump out of the equation and Russia would have had to assume that Jeb Bush would be pitted against Clinton as the most logical prediction.

With that in mind, nothing about what the Russians targeted on the right would have applied to a Jeb Bush campaign, with the possible exception of immigration, but as has been pointed out by nearly every one of my Trump supporting cousins, Obama had a strong anti-immigrant stance too, including putting children into cages.

Here was Jeb's position on Immigration in September of 2015:

Jeb Bush admitted Monday his views on immigration may not be "mainstream" in the Republican Party. But he praised the "vitality" of a multicultural society as other GOP presidential candidates find themselves in trouble over comments about minorities.

"If we embrace a set of shared values, then it shouldn't matter if you have a 'z' at the end of your name, or your accent might be different, 'cause guess what? There are people in this country, that have accents different from mine and mine's different from theirs. It doesn't matter," Bush said to a roomful of Hispanics.

The former Florida governor, who boasts proudly of the bicultural family that he started with his wife, who's from Mexico, was in his comfort zone when he addressed the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Houston.
Though he was interrupted at the start of his remarks by pro-immigration protestors, Bush won applause from the audience when he re-asserted that he's in favor of earned citizenship for individuals who were brought to the country illegally as children, also known as DREAMers.

"And I'll continue to be consistently for it, irrespective of what the political ramifications of that are," he said, ending a tense moment with protesters who emerged from multiple corners in the ballroom.

And remember, orchestrating such an extensive strategy is not something that can happen overnight. Particularly one that starts nearly three years before the primaries even begin.

In fact, the only reason to begin so early is precisely to help your guy--Trump--win the primary first and foremost. Fan the hatred--prime the pump--and then it's just a matter of Trump making bold statements that align perfectly with an audience that no one knows (including themselves) have already been primed to emotionally respond to everything he says.

And as this piece published in Newsweek evidences, Putin did precisely that (emphasis mine):

When exactly did the Russian influence campaign begin? In an interview with Just Security , former FBI special agent Clint Watts explained that the Russian approach to its influence campaign involved an earlier starting point than many assume. Watts said:

What many people miss is that a first principle of effective information wars is to win over the audience first. The Russians developed an alt-right audience in the United States, including testing how they would respond to different messages, well before the primaries began. The Russians were then ready for whichever candidate suited them.

During a March 30, 2017 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Watts testified about how the Russian operation took shape once the primary got underway:

Through the end of 2015 and start of 2016, the Russian influence system began pushing themes and messages seeking to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s overt media outlets and covert trolls sought to sideline opponents on both sides of the political spectrum with adversarial views towards the Kremlin.

They were in full swing during both the Republican and Democratic primary season that may have helped sink the hopes of candidates more hostile to Russian interests long before the field narrowed.

Departing from his written testimony, Watts told Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), “in my opinion, you anecdotally suffered from these measures.”

Following the hearing, Watts told reporters that the Russian activities were combined in the form of “pumping up Trump while tamping down the others,” and specifically identified Rubio, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Jeb Bush.
...
Clint Watts and Andrew Weisburd mark an earlier date for the start for the Russian propaganda campaign in support of Trump. After exhaustive research, they assess that as “early as August 2015, Russian English-language outlets and their social media allies were promoting Trump.”
...
The focus here is on the primary season, and it is useful to recall that Steele said he was first hired to investigate Trump by a Republican source during the primary.

Stunningly, Steele’s dossier anticipated the recent revelations about the Trump campaign’s meeting with Russians in June 2016. Specifically, Steele’s reporting refers to the Trump team receiving information from the Russians about Hillary Clinton. But what’s more significant for our purposes is that Steele seems to be referring also to information on rival primary candidates.

His first report, dated June 20, 2016, states: “he [Trump] and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.”

And then there is also this from the Oxford study (emphasis mine):

Figure 3 shows that ad volume increased steeply during the first part of the primaries (February to May 2016), peaking in May, the month when candidates Ted Cruz and John Kasich suspended their campaigns and Trump crossed the delegate threshold for the GOP nomination.
...
Figure 5 indicates that up to June 2015 there are very few organic posts, often just a single post per day, even after the launch of the Clinton and Sanders campaigns in April 2015. Activity picks up in early June, before the Jeb Bush and Trump campaigns were launched in June 2015.

Note that Bush had dropped out in late February just before Cruz and Kasich.

Side note from the piece on Newsweek in regard to a probable mention of Roger Stone:

According to the reporting by the WSJ ’s Shane Harris, the Russians discussed “meetings held outside the U.S. involving Russian government officials and Trump business associates or advisers.”

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Addendum to the previous post that noted Trump calling Mexicans rapists in his presidential announcement speech. The day of that speech, his first interview has him fawning over Putin:

The day Trump announced his run for President, June 16, 2015, Bill O’Reilly said Trump “wanted his first post announcement interview to be on The Factor,” the show that O’Reilly hosted on Fox News at the time.

During the interview, Trump made headlines by signaling strong support for Putin and the relationship he said he would forge with Putin if he became President of the United States:

TRUMP: Well, Putin has no respect for our president whatsoever. He’s got a tremendous popularity in Russia. They love what he’s doing, they love what he represents.

So we have a President who is absolutely, you look at him — the chemistry is so bad between those two people.

I was over in Moscow two years ago and I will tell you – you can get along with those people and get along with them well. You can make deals with those people. Obama can’t. He’s not —

O’REILLY: So you could make a deal with Putin to stop his expansion?

TRUMP: I would be willing to bet I would have a great relationship with Putin. It’s about leadership.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Additional point from Jamieson worth noting:

She noted that Russian trolls had created social-media posts clearly aimed at winning support for Trump from churchgoers and military families—key Republican voters who seemed likely to lack enthusiasm for a thrice-married nominee who had boasted of groping women, obtained multiple military deferments, mocked Gold Star parents and a former prisoner of war, and described the threat of venereal disease as his personal equivalent of the Vietcong. Russian trolls pretended to have the same religious convictions as targeted users, and often promoted Biblical memes, including one that showed Clinton as Satan, with budding horns, arm-wrestling with Jesus, alongside the message “ ‘Like’ if you want Jesus to win!” One Instagram post, portraying Clinton as uncaring about the 2012 tragedy in Benghazi, depicted a young American widow resting her head on a flag-draped coffin. Another post displayed contrasting images of a thin homeless veteran and a heavyset, swarthy man wearing an “undocumented unafraid unapologetic” T-shirt, and asked why “this veteran gets nothing” and “this illegal gets everything.” It concluded, “Like and share if you think this is a disgrace.” On Election Day, according to CNN exit polls, Trump, despite his political baggage, outperformed Clinton by twenty-six points among veterans; he also did better among evangelicals than both of the previous Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain.

In her Post article, Jamieson wrote that it was “hard to know” if Russian propaganda and dirty tricks—including the steady release of hacked e-mails, starting with Democratic National Committee correspondence that was leaked just before the Party’s convention—had made a decisive difference in 2016. Nevertheless, she argued, the “wide distribution” of the trolls’ disinformation “increases the likelihood” that it “changed the outcome.”

After the article’s publication, she returned to her sabbatical project on the debates, with a newly keen eye for Russian trolls and hackers. After reviewing the debate transcripts, scrutinizing press coverage, and eliminating other possibilities, Jamieson concluded that there was only one credible explanation for the diminishing impression among debate viewers that Clinton was forthright: just before the second debate, WikiLeaks had released a cache of e-mails, obtained by Russian hackers, that, it said, were taken from the Gmail account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. They included excerpts from speeches that Clinton had given to banks, for high fees, and had refused to release during the campaign. The speeches could be used by detractors to show that, despite her liberal rhetoric, she was aligned with Wall Street. The hacked content permeated the discourse of the debates, informing both the moderators’ questions and the candidates’ answers. All this, Jamieson writes, gave legitimacy to the idea that Clinton “said one thing in public and another in private.”

During the second debate, on October 9th, before 66.5 million viewers, one of the moderators, Martha Raddatz, relayed a question submitted by a voter: Did Clinton think that it was acceptable for a politician to be “two-faced”? The question referred to a leaked passage from one of Clinton’s previously unreleased paid speeches; Russian hackers had given the passage to WikiLeaks, which posted it two days before the debate. In the speech, Clinton had cited Steven Spielberg’s film “Lincoln” as an example of how politicians sometimes need to adopt different public and private negotiating stances. The point was scarcely novel, but the debate question—which took her words out of context, omitted her reference to the movie, and didn’t mention that Russian operatives had obtained the speech illegally—made Clinton sound like a sneaky hypocrite. When Clinton cited “Lincoln” in order to defend the statement, Trump pounced.

“She got caught in a total lie!” Trump said. “Her papers went out to all her friends at the banks—Goldman Sachs and everybody else. And she said things, WikiLeaks, that just came out. And she lied. Now she’s blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln!”

The dynamic recurred in the third debate, on October 19th, which 71.6 million people watched. When Trump accused Clinton of favoring “open borders,” she denied it, but the moderator, Chris Wallace, challenged her by citing a snippet from a speech that she had given, in 2013, to a Brazilian bank: “My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.” Again, there was no mention of the fact that the speech had been stolen by a hostile foreign power; Wallace said that the quotation had come from WikiLeaks. The clear implication of Wallace’s question was that Clinton had been hiding her true beliefs, and Trump said to him, “Thank you!” His supporters in the audience laughed. Clinton said that the phrase had been taken out of context: she’d been referring not to immigrants but to an open-bordered electric grid with Latin America. She tried to draw attention to Russia’s role in hacking the speech, but Trump mocked her for accusing Putin, and joked, “That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders.” He then warned the audience that, if Clinton were elected, Syrians and other immigrants would “pour into our country.”

The fact-checking organization PolitiFact later concluded that Trump had incorrectly characterized Clinton’s speech, but the damage had been done. Jamieson’s research indicated that viewers who watched the second and third debates subsequently saw Clinton as less forthright, and Trump as more forthright. Among people who did not watch the debates, Clinton’s reputation was not damaged in this way. During the weeks that the debates took place, the moderators and the media became consumed by an anti-Clinton narrative driven by Russian hackers. In “Cyberwar,” Jamieson writes, “The stolen goods lent credibility” to “those moderator queries.”

As Jamieson reviewed the record further, she concluded that the Russian hackers had also been alarmingly successful in reframing the American political narrative in the crucial period leading up to the second debate. On Friday, October 7th, two days before it took place, three major stories landed in rapid succession. At 12:40 p.m., the Obama Administration released a stunning statement, by the Department of Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence, accusing the Russian government of interfering in the election through hacking. This seemed certain to dominate the weekend news, but at 4:03 p.m. the Washington Post published a report, by David Fahrenthold, on an “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Trump, on a hot mike, boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy.” Then, less than half an hour later, WikiLeaks released its first tranche of e-mails that Russian hackers had stolen from Podesta’s account. The tranche contained some two thousand messages, along with excerpts from the paid speeches that Clinton had tried to conceal, including those that would be mentioned in the subsequent debates. (Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, has denied working with the Russian government, but he manifestly despises Clinton, and, in a leaked Twitter direct message, he said that in the 2016 election “it would be much better for GOP to win.”)

If the WikiLeaks release was a Russian-backed effort to rescue Trump’s candidacy by generating a scandal to counterbalance the “Access Hollywood” tape and the intelligence report on Russian interference, Jamieson writes, it worked splendidly. The intelligence community’s report faded from the headlines; that Sunday morning, none of its authors were invited on any major talk show. Instead, the programs breathlessly discussed the “pussy” tape and the Clinton campaign’s e-mails, which were portrayed as more or less exposing both candidates as liars. Jamieson notes, “Instead of asking how we could know that the Russians were behind the hacking, the October 9 Sunday show moderators asked what effect the disclosures would have on the candidates’ respective campaigns and what the tape and speech segments revealed about the private versus public selves of the contenders.” If not for WikiLeaks, she writes, the media discourse in those crucial days likely would have remained locked on two topics advantageous to Clinton: Russian election subversion and Trump’s treatment of women.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

And this as well from the New Yorker profile of Jamieson (broken up not only because tl;dr but because it offers a different, yet equally important point regarding the key states that put Trump in the WH):

Joel Benenson, the Clinton pollster, was stunned when he learned, from the July indictment, that the Russians had stolen his campaign’s internal modelling. “I saw it and said, ‘Holy shit!’ ” he told me. Among the proprietary information that the Russian hackers could have obtained, he said, was campaign data showing that, late in the summer of 2016, in battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, an unusually high proportion of residents whose demographic and voting profiles identified them as likely Democrats were “Hillary defectors”: people so unhappy with Clinton that they were considering voting for a third-party candidate. The Clinton campaign had a plan for winning back these voters. Benenson explained that any Clinton opponent who stole this data would surely have realized that the best way to counter the plan was to bombard those voters with negative information about Clinton. “All they need to do is keep that person where they are,” he said, which is far easier than persuading a voter to switch candidates. Many critics have accused Clinton of taking Michigan and Wisconsin for granted and spending virtually no time there. But Benenson said that, if a covert social-media campaign targeting “Hillary defectors” was indeed launched in battleground states, it might well have changed the outcome of the election.

Benenson said, “We lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin—three states of our Blue Wall—by about eighty thousand votes. Six hundred and sixty thousand votes were cast in those three states for third-party candidates. Winning those three states would have got us to two hundred and seventy-eight electoral votes.” In other words, if only twelve per cent of those third-party voters were persuaded by Russian propaganda—based on hacked Clinton-campaign analytics—not to vote for Clinton, then Jamieson’s theory could be valid.

Benenson said that, when he first learned about the theft, he “called another consultant on the campaign and said, ‘This is unreal.’ ” The consultant reminded him that, in focus groups with undecided voters in the fall of 2016, “we’d hear these things like ‘I really hate Trump, but Hillary’s going to murder all these people’—all sorts of crazy stuff.” Benenson admitted that many Americans had long disliked the Clintons, and had for years spread exaggerated rumors of their alleged misdeeds and deceptions. But he wonders if some of those conspiracy-minded voters hadn’t been unknowingly influenced by Russian propagandists who were marshalling the Clinton campaign’s own analytics.

Philip Howard, the director of the Oxford Internet Institute, in England, agrees that the Russian interference could have been decisive, but he is less convinced that the stolen analytics were key. He told me, “It’s plausible, but the Russians wouldn’t have needed the Clinton campaign—they could just as easily have targeted the network of Bernie Sanders supporters."

Which, they did as well, so, hindsight combined with more information is giving us a much clearer picture of how earlier assumptions and a lack of information led many to the wrong conclusions, but by no means all.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

And just to get this out there for anyone still wishing to pretend that the Russians were not specifically supporting Trump, one of the unmistakable conclusions drawn in the Oxford study:

What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party—and specifically, Donald Trump. Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage members from voting. While the IRA strategy was a long-term one, it is clear that activity between 2015 and 2016 was designed to benefit President Trump’s campaign.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

While I encourage everyone to read the Oxford study, I know most won't, so that's why I'm posting chunks like this one to focus discussion:

When it comes to day-to-day hashtags, right-leaning IRA accounts talked about #news, #local, #world, and #TopNews; in contrast, left-leaning IRA accounts talked about #BlackLivesMatter, #BlackTwitter, and #PoliceBrutality. This suggests that IRA assets approached disinformation in ongoing topics differently based on the political affiliation of their target audience: US conservative audiences were targeted with tweets about general topics, such as the news, and African American audiences were targeted with tweets about more specific topics, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. This finding is consistent with the focus of IRA sponsored ads on topics relevant to African Americans and those following the Black Lives Matter movement. More broadly, this finding suggests the IRA strategy on the right included collecting a general conservative audience and pushing particular themes (#MAGA, #ISIS, #Trump), including mistrust of mainstream news and media (#WakeUpAmerica). The strategy for race-based appeal involved rallying African Americans around Black political identity and issues.

In conclusion, the IRA Twitter data shows a long and successful campaign that resulted in false accounts being effectively woven into the fabric of online US political conversations right up until their suspension. These embedded assets each targeted specific audiences they sought to manipulate and radicalize, with some gaining meaningful influence in online communities after months of behavior designed to blend their activities with those of authentic and highly engaged US users.

I think I'll stop for now to see other's responses and additions.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

One more section from the Oxford study, as this is likewise on point and, I believe, demonstrates a clear indication that the Russians knew long before the election that they would be laying the groundwork specifically for Trump (in spite of the caveats presented, as, again, if you consider the alternative frontrunners--which I do not believe the researchers did--then no other potential candidate fits this narrative):

In early 2016, just over half (3,799 of 7,451) of all organic posts were for campaigns targeting rightwing users (Being Patriotic, Heart of Texas, South United, and Stop All Invaders). This content prior to Trump’s securing the Republican nomination was not particularly oriented towards his campaign. In 2015, there are relatively few mentions of him on these campaigns targeting right-wing voters. Rather, they stressed (and inflated) the harms of immigration, with a particular focus on Muslims and terrorism. Many ads focused on President Obama, accusing him of being a Muslim, building on ongoing biased reporting on Obama. While antagonism towards Muslims and President Obama were common in 2015, the majority of posts were positive stories about members of the armed services and patriotic slogans, often consistent with the content in the sponsored ads. Explicit mentions of Donald Trump increased in early and mid-2016, as his primary campaign gained momentum. These campaigns, however, seemed to
be geared towards extending the anti-immigrant rhetoric that Trump’s campaign frequently made use of.

United Muslims of America significantly increased its activity in this period, as did Blacktivist. For Blacktivist, United Muslims of America, and LGBT United, organic posts in the primary season were not particularly focused on any candidates—for example little mention is made of Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. During this time, Blacktivist tended to post information on attacks on African Americans by police officers, Black Lives Matter, and messages about slavery and ongoing discrimination and mass incarceration affecting African Americans. United Muslims of America tended to provide a positive image of Islam and Muslims and often condemned terrorist attacks across the world. There is little evidence to suggest that during the primaries, these campaigns were focused on ongoing political campaigns by Clinton, Sanders, or Trump. Rather. The goal may have been to create a following for these pages, laying the foundation to later push content to audiences in 2016 and 2017.

In the last six months of 2016, Figure 14-Figure 16 show a much more diverse set of campaigns emerging and posting organic content. In the last six months of 2016, there were a total of 9,373 organic posts produced by these ten campaigns (the “Army of Jesus” and “Brown Power” campaigns had just launched in late 2016). Of these posts, 4,596 (49%) were for right-wing campaigns and 2,355 (25%) were for campaigns targeting African Americans. Until the election, 50% of the posts produced by these top 10 campaigns targeted right-wing audiences. However, after the election, this proportion reduces to 45%. The analysis of the ads clearly suggests that African American audiences were targeted with the most ads. However, the majority of the activity of the IRA’s most successful campaigns, measured by likes and prior to the election, was actually focused on conservatives. While the black community is another important bloc, it is one among a handful of others. From the perspective of the campaigns, the primary focus appears to be on right-wing audiences. Just prior to the election, attacks on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton became more frequent among these campaigns, often offering opinions on data regarding their purported decrease of funding in services for US citizens while allegedly earmarking funds to support refugees. In September, October, and November, 1,597 posts targeted conservatives and other right-wing voters. While there are temporary increases in daily posting following each presidential debate, these increases are neither particularly acute nor do they often mention anything that was discussed during the debates.

It is evident that the campaigns sought to demobilize African Americans, LGBT, and liberal voters. This was attempted through organic posts that attacked Hillary Clinton. Content referred to President Clinton’s 2016 signing into law of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as an attack on the gay community, and in another, argued that Hillary supports Muslims, who the post insinuates are anti-gay.

Attacks on Clinton and calls for voter disengagement were particularly clear in Blacktivist during September, October, and November 2016, with statements such as “NO LIVES MATTER TO HILLARY CLINTON. ONLY VOTES MATTER TO HILLARY CLINTON” (Blacktivist, 29 October 2016), another one argues that black people should vote for Jill Stein (Blacktivist, 7 October 2016), or not vote at all, with the claim: “NOT VOTING is a way to exercise our rights” (Blacktivist, 3 November 2016).

After the election, campaigns targeting conservative and right-wing voters continued to constitute the plurality of content. As Figure 14-Figure 16 show, “Brown Power,” which targeted Latin Americans, only began producing organic posts after the election. These broadly followed similar patterns to those of “Blacktivist” and “Black Matters”— repeating narratives of positivity towards Mexican Americans and posting commentaries on stories that affect this community. The “Army of Jesus” campaign also started in the same timeframe. These posts are rather different to others that targeted conservatives and right-wing users. Instead of negative messaging about immigrants and antagonism towards liberals, these messages involved a more conciliatory discourse centered on Christianity as a means to heal the divides that crystallized in the US by the end of 2016. These posts encouraged users to put less faith in politics and instead be faithful to God: “America is in trouble and the solution is not in the politics, not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. The only hope for this nation is God…Like if you agree!” (Army of Jesus, 6 November 2016). Other campaigns continued their general themes, and significant differences have not been observed, though qualitative observations about the differences between content after the election requires further exploration.

 

[Trausti]

Ah, damn it dude. You really need to turn it off and get outside. Nice out here.

 

[barbos]

Ah, damn it dude. You really need to turn it off and get outside. Nice out here.

I second this motion

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Ah, damn it dude. You really need to turn it off and get outside. Nice out here.

I second this motion

Nice! Idiotic responses from two prime suspects proves I'm hitting bone. Thanks.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

So, let's dive first into the Facebook study from 2012. Here we see an important element that relates directly to the use of "organic" strategy employed by the Russians:

On Facebook, people frequently express emotions, which are later seen by their friends via Facebook’s “News Feed” product (8). Because people’s friends frequently produce much more content than one person can view, the News Feed filters posts, stories, and activities undertaken by friends. News Feed is the primary manner by which people see content that friends share. Which content is shown or omitted in the News Feed is determined via a ranking algorithm that Facebook continually develops and tests in the interest of showing viewers the content they will find most relevant and engaging.

Purchased advertisements get factored into the algorithm differently. Thus, anything that is not an ad that you share or read or like, etc., is given a higher ranking by Facebook's algorithm, which in turn means that it will bring you more content like the content you have shared/liked/spent any time on. That and the fact that an ad is traceable, while an organic post is not (or at least not easily traceable; it just looks like it came from normal user) make the organic strategy far more effective, but also a better indicator of attempted influence rather than just general mayhem.

As already noted, but it bears repeating in regard to, once again, the effectiveness of an organic strategy:

The results show emotional contagion. As Fig. 1 illustrates, for people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks (3, 7, 8), and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network.

And this, of course, is not the only study to show how influential is social media--particularly of the organic variety--only the following study (also conducted in 2012 and referenced in the Facebook study) is specifically in regard to politics. From the abstract:

Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people. Furthermore, the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users’ friends, and friends of friends. The effect of social transmission on real-world voting was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves, and nearly all the transmission occurred between ‘close friends’ who were more likely to have a face-to-face relationship. These results suggest that strong ties are instrumental for spreading both online and real-world behaviour in human social networks.

Further they found (emphasis mine):

Figure 2 shows that the observed per-friend treatment effects increase as tie-strength increases. All of the observed treatment effects fall outside the null distribution for expressed vote (Fig. 2b), suggesting that they are significantly different from chance outcomes. For validated vote (Fig. 2c), the observed treatment effect is near zero for weak ties, but it spikes upwards and falls outside the null distribution for the top two deciles. This suggests that strong ties are important for the spread of real-world voting behaviour.

Who did the IRA target to influence their voting behavior in favor of Trump? The alt-right extremists (i.e., people with strong ties to each other). In regard to minorities--particularly African Americans, who were the most mobilized in 2008/2012 and significantly suppressed in 2016--the strategy was only to encourage a more general, negative, voter suppression tactic. There are still strong ties in that community, but nowhere near the fanatical paranoia-fuelled ties of the alt-right as we have seen in overwhelming abundance.

Among their conclusions (emphasis mine):

Although acts of political self-expression and information seeking are important in their own right, they do not necessarily guarantee that a particular user will actually vote. As such, we also measured the effect that the experimental treatment had on validated voting, through examination of public voting records. The results show that users who received the social message were 0.39% (s.e.m., 0.17%; t-test, P 5 0.02) more likely to vote than users who received no message at all. Similarly, the difference in voting between those who received the social message and those who received the informational message was 0.39% (s.e.m., 0.17%; t-test, P 5 0.02), suggesting that seeing faces of friends significantly contributed to the overall effect of the message on real-world voting.
...
These results show that online political mobilization can have a direct effect on political self-expression, information seeking and
real-world voting behaviour, and that messages including cues from an individual’s social network are more effective than information only appeals. But what about indirect effects that spread from person to person in the social network? Users in our sample had on average 149 Facebook friends, with whom they share social information, although many of these relationships constitute ‘weak ties’. Past research indicates that close friends have a stronger behavioural effect on each other than do acquaintances or strangers 9,11,13,21. We therefore expected mobilization to spread more effectively online through
‘strong ties’.

To distinguish users who are likely to have close relationships, we used the degree to which Facebook friends interacted with each other on the site (see Supplementary Information for more detail). Higher levels of interaction indicate that friends are more likely to be physically proximate and suggest a higher level of commitment to the friendship, more positive affect between the friends, and a desire for the friendship to be socially recognized 29. We counted the number of interactions between each pair of friends and categorized them by decile, ranking them from the lowest to highest percentage of interactions. A validation study (see Supplementary Information) shows that friends in the highest decile are those most likely to be close friends in real life (Fig. 2a). We then used these categories to estimate the effect of the mobilization message on a user’s friends.
...
For each close friend who received the social message, a user was 0.224% (null 95% CI –0.181% to 0.174%) more likely to vote than they would have been had their close friend received no message. Similarly, for information seeking behaviour we found that for each close friend who received the social message, a user was 0.012% (null 95% CI –0.012% to 0.012%) more likely to click the link to find their polling place than they would have been had their close friends received no message. In both cases there was no evidence that other friends had an effect (see Supplementary Information). Thus, ordinary Facebook friends may affect online expressive behaviour, but they do not seem to affect private or real-world political behaviours. In contrast, close friends seem to have influenced all three.

Now, again, consider the fact that, for alt-right extremists in particular, pretty much ALL of their online "friends" are considered to not just be close, but brothers united by "race." As this more recent piece from 208 in the Atlantic, Trump Is the Glue That Binds the Far Right evidences currently at least, while there are differences, they are unified as a "political bloc":

I recently analyzed about 30,000 Twitter accounts that self-identified as alt-right or followed someone who did, for vox-Pol, the European academic network studying extremism on social media. The results were illuminating.

The alt-right is often described as a movement or an ideology. It is better understood as a political bloc that seeks to unify the activities of several different extremist movements or ideologies. While it is international in reach, its center of gravity is in the United States. Because the alt-right is a bloc, it has to be understood by mapping its components and analyzing how they overlap and how they differ.
...
To fully understand the alt-right, it’s important to move past these competing patterns of belief and look at structural elements that cross ideological lines. This is where the alt-right finds its best opportunities for cohesion. Commonalities shared by a majority of the alt-right’s component movements included:

Opposition to immigration or Muslims: Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim hate was endemic in the network, frequently paired with articles from anti-immigrant news sources, which ranked among the most tweeted and retweeted content. Aside from its cynical use as a rhetorical dodge against charges of racism, anti-immigrant rhetoric helped unite white nationalists with other nationalists who are not overtly concerned with race, including people of color who advanced anti-immigrant views and themes. Anti-Muslim bigotry was not always paired with anti-immigrant themes, but the two traveled together often enough to justify collapsing them into one category.

Conspiracy theories: Accounts for prominent conspiracy websites and their associated personalities ranked among the top influencers. QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory, was the third-most-tweeted hashtag in the data set, although this ranking was exaggerated by coordinated tweeting activity by that theory’s adherents. An alternative-news ecosystem was shared by people with sometimes very divergent views.

Support for Trump: This, more than anything else, was the glue that held the alt-right social network together. Support for Trump was shared by virtually all parts of the network and was reflected in nearly every metric, including tabulations of the most followed, most retweeted, and most influential accounts; the most used words in Twitter profiles; and in the top two hashtags (#maga, which outperformed all other hashtags by a wide margin, and #trump).​

The alt-right bloc synchronizes activity that starts on the far-right edge of mainstream conservatism and continues through the far reaches of genocidal white supremacy. There are common goals threaded through its various factions, including undermining the purveyors of real information about the world with a barrage of conspiratorial alternatives, eroding support for immigration within multiple demographic groups, and, most visibly, providing political support to Trump.
...
Russian troll influenced: The third-largest cluster tweeted about Syria more than any other hashtag, with a secondary focus on anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant themes such as #StoptheCaravan. (The data we analyzed were collected earlier this year, so this was a reference to events in April rather than the current right-wing freak-out.) The prominence of Syria hashtags, disproportionately and uncontextually outperforming all other content, strongly suggests this group includes, or was influenced by, Russian-troll activity with respect to U.S. policy on Syria. Various segments of the U.S. far right have strong opinions about Syria, but pro-Assad hashtags in this group dramatically outperformed all others, including #maga.

If you look again at the opening salvos of Trump's presidential announcement speech--the first official, "I'm going to run" speech in his campaign from June 16, 2015--he starts out on jobs and the standard China/Japan boilerplate, but then ramps it up significantly going from calling Mexicans rapists to the Middle East to Syria/Islamic terrorists in three moves:

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.

It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.

Islamic terrorism is eating up large portions of the Middle East. They’ve become rich. I’m in competition with them.

They just built a hotel in Syria. Can you believe this? They built a hotel. When I have to build a hotel, I pay interest. They don’t have to pay interest, because they took the oil that, when we left Iraq, I said we should’ve taken.

And, of course, muslims/Syria become central to his campaign: ‘I think Islam hates us’: A timeline of Trump’s comments about Islam and Muslims.

Most notably, in September of 2015 he creates the conspiracy theory of Syrian "refugees" infiltrating our country through our borders:

Sept. 30, 2015: At a New Hampshire rally, Trump pledged to kick all Syrian refugees — most of whom are Muslim — out of the country, as they might be a secret army. “They could be ISIS, I don't know. This could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time. A 200,000-man army, maybe,” he said. In an interview that aired later, Trump said: “This could make the Trojan horse look like peanuts.”

And of course the famous lie about watching muslims dance in celebration on 9/11. Which never happened, but he said it did repeatedly and with conviction:

Nov. 21, 2015: At a rally in Alabama, Trump said that on Sept. 11 he “watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.”

Nov. 22, 2015: On ABC News, Trump doubled down on his comment and added: “It was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.” (While there were some reports of celebrations overseas, extensive examination of news clips turn up no such celebrations in New Jersey.)

He also reinforces conspiracy theories while at the same time openly advocating murder:

Dec. 3, 2015: The morning after Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., Trump called into Fox News and said: “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” (Killing the relatives of suspected terrorists is forbidden by international law.) Later, in a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump criticized Obama for not using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” and commented: “There's something going on with him that we don't know about.”

Again, this is precisely in lock-step with the Russian strategy. But that strategy had to be formulated long before Trump ever announced, so how is it that he's in lock-step right from the start if he hadn't already been coached at least by people who knew what the Russians were up to and were in turn in lock-step with them (assuming Trump was somehow kept out of the loop)?

And, perhaps more importantly, how would this strategy have helped any other GOP candidate that was running at the time (let alone the presumed frontrunner, Jeb Bush)?

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Now let's dig a little deeper into the quantifiable effects of social media influence as it relates to impacting one's actual vote. If we turn again to the 61 million person study, we have the following (emphasis mine):

Moreover, the scale of the number of users, their friendship connections and the potential voters in a given election is very large. We estimated the per-user effect (the per-friend effect multiplied by the average number of friends per user) and the total effect (the per-user effect multiplied by the total number of users) on the behaviour of everyone in the sample (see Supplementary Information). The results suggest that friends generated an additional 886,000 expressed votes (11.4%, null 95% CI 21.1% to 1.1%), and close friends generated a further 559,000 votes (10.9%, null 95% CI –0.3% to 0.3%). In the Supplementary Information we also show that close friends of close friends (2 degrees of separation) generated an additional 1 million expressed votes (11.7%, null 95% CI –0.8% to 0.9%). Thus, the treatment clearly had a significant impact on political self-expression and how it spread through the network, and even weak ties seem to be relevant to its spread.

However, the effect of the social message on real-world validated vote behaviour and polling-place search was more focused. The results suggest that close friends generated an additional 282,000 validated votes (11.8%, null 95% CI –1.3% to 1.2%) and an additional 74,000 polling-place searches (10.1%, null 95% CI –0.1% to 0.1%), but there is no evidence that ordinary friends had any effect on either of these two behaviours. In other words, close friendships accounted for all of the significant contagion of these behaviours, in spite of the fact that they make up only 7% of all friendships on Facebook.

To put these results in context, it is important to note that turnout has been steadily increasing in recent US midterm elections, from 36.3% of the voting age population in 2002 to 37.2% in 2006, and to 37.8% in 2010. Our results suggest that the Facebook social message increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes. That represents about 0.14% of the voting age population of about 236 million in 2010.

However, this estimate does not include the effect of the treatment on Facebook users who were registered to vote but who we could not match because of nicknames, typographical errors, and so on. It would be complex to estimate the number of users on Facebook who are in the voter record but unmatchable, and it is not clear whether treatment effects would be of the same magnitude for these individuals, so we restrict our estimate to the matched group that we were able to sample and observe. This means it is possible that more of the 0.60% growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook.

Ok, so now we have strong empirical evidence indicating that the idea of a 40,000 vote differential in just three states, for a ready example, could in fact easily be attributable to a clandestine organic social media influence campaign alone.

Now add into that mix another conclusion they drew from their research:

Online mobilization works because it primarily spreads through strong-tie networks that probably exist offline but have an online representation. In fact, it is plausible that unobserved face-to-face interactions account for at least some of the social influence that we observed in this experiment. More broadly, the results suggest that online messages might influence a variety of offline behaviours, and this has implications for our understanding of the role of online social media in society.

Remember, that study was published back in 2012. Now fast-forward and note how the target of the IRA trolls were the alt-right extremists who most definitely have "strong-tie networks" that also exist offline, but also note the fact that all throughout the primaries--and to this day--Trump held an unprecedented number of "rallies" where he could exploit findings like online messages having an influence on offline behaviors (Charleston anyone?), etc.

According to good ol' Wiki, during the campaign,Trump had a total of 323 rallies; 186 for the primary season and 137 for the general election with total people attendance of around 1.4M+

Why is that significant? All candidates, after all, have such rallies. Well recall that Trump ran unopposed in the Republican primaries, so why such an unprecedented number of rallies during the primaries? He certainly did not need them to prove himself the best candidate as he was already the only candidate running.

Those weren't just ego-boosters for Trump. Those were--and continue to be--part of the exact same Russian-fuelled influencing strategy; to reinforce and provide face-to-face confirmation offline of the online messaging.

I used to think they were just eg-boosts, but now I understand they were far more important.

And recall that he did an additional 19 rallies after the election as well, right up into December of 2017 (recall that the IRA starting switching to Instagram at that time as well, which skews younger) and note that these rallies were only in the states he won.

Hence the "thank you," but again, it goes much deeper than that. They were necessary to help reinforce and solidify the online influencing.

He then started up again in March of 2018 for rallies supposedly in favor of the 2018 midterms and only stopped the rallies because of the overwhelming turnout of the Dems counteracting any such influencing tactics where it mattered; in the voting booth.

He's only had two rallies in 2019 (i.e., post midterms); one in February and one in March.

 

[TSwizzle]

Hillary lost, better luck next time

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Hillary lost, better luck next time

Yet another vapid non-response response from a usual suspect. This is great! Thanks you guys. You're perfect reverse barometers.

 

[ZiprHead]

Hillary lost, better luck next time

Yet another vapid non-response response from a usual suspect. This is great! Thanks you guys. You're perfect reverse barometers.

It seems Tswizzle is just fine with another country interfering in our elections. More evidence Republicans can't win unless they cheat and they're just fine with that.

 

[Bomb#20]

Why is that significant? All candidates, after all, have such rallies. Well recall that Trump ran unopposed in the Republican primaries, so why such an unprecedented number of rallies during the primaries? He certainly did not need them to prove himself the best candidate as he was already the only candidate running.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries

More Republicans voted against him than for him in the primaries. He won because the anti-Trump voters couldn't agree among themselves about which non-Trump to unite behind.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Why is that significant? All candidates, after all, have such rallies. Well recall that Trump ran unopposed in the Republican primaries, so why such an unprecedented number of rallies during the primaries? He certainly did not need them to prove himself the best candidate as he was already the only candidate running.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries

More Republicans voted against him than for him in the primaries.

In the end, yes, but by Super Tuesday (March 1st)--which Trump took by 7 out of 11 states--Trump was a delegate lock, but Cruz got a misguided ego-boost from winning his home state. By the beginning of May (when Cruz finally dropped out and Trump took Indiana), it was officially over, but it was Super Tuesday that coronated Trump and he'd already won all of the early states (except Iowa) by huge percentages. So, I guess I should have said Trump effectively ran unopposed to qualify I wasn't being literal, but I took that as granted.

But the fact that it was all in spite of your point--that more Republicans voted against him in the end than for him--only underscores the fact that he should not have been doing as well as he did (in the primaries or in the general). So something else was helping him along the way. Something that he rode and exploited that was counter to even Republican sensibilities.

The common narrative that formed to explain it was that he had tapped into some fundamental zeitgeist sentiment that had been dormant or just below the surface, which was the same tactic that Sanders rode and equally bullshit.

And now we have direct evidence of how that "fundamental zeitgeist sentiment" was actually planted and inflamed.

This isn't something new, either. If you go back over any of the threads from the primaries, many of us were pointing out then that the economy had never been better; that there were abundant jobs for white working class and unemployment was at its lowest; etc.

While there is always such rhetoric spewing out of Republican assholes during any general election, we were seeing the same arguments being fostered under Sanders' banner. And the vehemence--the emotional responses--to any intellectual challenge was noticeable and often overwhelming.

There simply was no reasoning with Sanders bots in particular and Republicans were having the same "what the fuck is going on" reaction to Trump. As I (and others) would point out repeatedly, there was a messiah complex we were dealing with on both sides; it was church to the fanatics, not a job interview.

Iow, it was emotion--strongly held among the extremists (strong ties)--that we were fighting, which seemed inexplicable, but now, in light of this research, not so much.

And, yes, of course, all candidates undertake such campaigns to tug at the heart strings and promote emotional content, but the difference here is that what the Russians were doing was clandestine, targeted and separate from what was the baseline for all of the other candidates using the same methods overtly.

Iow, when you have all candidates doing the same overt strategy, then it effectively neutralizes each other's efforts far more so than a clandestine strategy would. If I see you coming, my guard is going to be up, even if you're a friend not a foe. That's precisely why we require candidates to personally affirm they "approved this message" and require PACs to clearly identify themselves in any ad they buy or post they distribute, etc.

So, if you and I are running against each other in a campaign and we both use the same overt tools to communicate our policies and messages, etc., then the advantage of the tools themselves are essentially equal and it instead becomes a matter of crafting better content.

We both have the same kind of hammer, iow, so it then becomes a measure of how accurately you hit your nails as opposed to how I hit mine.

But if you don't know that I actually have a laser guided alignment device hidden on my hammer--such that I will be able to better hit the nail in the perfect spot to drive it into the wood faster and more efficiently than you--even if that only gives me a tiny advantage with each nail hit, it's still an advantage that, given the volume of nails we both have to hit, can push me significantly ahead of you, even though we are essentially both doing the same work.

To everyone else watching, however, they would have to come up reasons why I am somehow better at hitting the nail in the right spot more consistently than you, so, not seeing the laser, they are going to attribute false qualities to make sense of it all. I have a better eye, in spite of the fact that I wear glasses; a stronger arm, but clearly do not; my nails must be sharper or the wood I'm hitting softer in spite of the fact that both are equal to yours; etc.

Iow, the "tell" is in the fact that I should not be performing better than you yet continue to do so in spite of my faults. And in Trump we had blatant and considerable faults that the pundits--not seeing the laser in the hammer--could only say must be some unknown magic sauce that only Trump (and Sanders, which is even more revealing) could tap into. Everyone's emotionally disgruntled because "establishment" or "tired of the swamp" or "business as usual" etc.

Yet NONE of those things were actually true. Emotions outpaced facts in an unprecedented fashion, imo. And trying to argue against emotions--as we all know around here--is nearly impossible. We (Dems) spent hundreds of millions of dollars in a bitterly divisive civil war that never should happened ALL because of emotions, not reason or logic or practical concerns.

Sanders just refuse to get out of a race he knew he could not possibly win (ironically) in March as well. And the result was another six months of escalating emotional divisiveness that served no purpose whatsoever. No policies were fundamentally changed; no "Dems were forced more to the left thanks to Sanders the Magnificent" bullshit. None of that actually happened. It was all more emotional nonsense; more we can't see the laser, so these are the best explanations we can come up with to fill in the void.

And it's still happening! Everyone is on a hair trigger--emotionally--when it comes to anything political these days. Exactly like someone turned up the heat a few degrees here and a few more there and then one more here to the point now where the first responders here (for a ready example) are attacking the man, not the argument.

I've never seen ad hominem, tu quoque and false equivalence being thrown around with such gleeful vitriol in my entire 53 years on the planet. It's a badge of pride now for deplorables in particular to attack the man emotionally and never address the argument.

And now, at least, in what is slowly coming to light with studies like these and--hopefully, the Mueller report--is that we weren't all crazy (including the 53% Republicans that voted not-Trump in the primaries and the fact that Clinton won the popular vote by millions, but nevertheless lost the presidency by mere thousands); that something else was and still is turning up the emotional override without our knowledge, just like the Facebook team did in 2012 and the Russians, evidently did, starting just after.

But unlike before, now we have proof.