> This is irrelevant in the discussion that such campaigns were conducted, which you agree with yourself, and the fact that they're wildly successful.
I absolutely dispute the fact they were "wildly successful." People want to make this claim because it conveniently makes their political opposition ignorant tools befuddled by foreign powers rather than legitimate dissent. One might argue that nothing is more "destabilizing" than the polarizing idea your domestic opposition is brainwashed by foreign enemies.
>? We also know that social media is filled with bot accounts that spread disinformation. This also isn't new, and you don't need to be a researcher to verify it.
Except we keep finding the alleged bots aren't bots at all. My own Twitter account was, according to these groups, a bot. Perhaps we don't really "know" that at all. Perhaps most actual bot accounts have close to zero engagement.
> This war is not new, as you say, but with the advent of the internet it has become the most efficient and effective way to destabilize a nation.
No amount of Facebook ads can destabilize a nation, and nothing out of the Internet-era has come even close to the impact of past influence campaigns, although no doubt as t -> infinity, we'll see something.
> I absolutely dispute the fact they were "wildly successful." People want to make this claim because it conveniently makes their political opposition ignorant tools befuddled by foreign powers rather than legitimate dissent.
You're disputing this based on... what exactly?
The effectiveness of propaganda is widely studied and known, so it's unsurpising that an industry that applies it using modern tools would be very profitable. Companies like Cambridge Analytica have been successful all around the world for decades now. See https://www.propagandamachine.tech/ca-map
How instrumental their impact was in achieving a specific result in elections is debatable, simply because the effects of propaganda are difficult to quantify by definition. But it's ignorant to claim that this impact is negligible, or that the current sociopolitical climate can be explained by "legitimate dissent".
> No amount of Facebook ads can destabilize a nation, and nothing out of the Internet-era has come even close to the impact of past influence campaigns
How do you reach this conclusion? The internet is the greatest propaganda delivery method the world has ever seen, and we've known the effects of propaganda for a long time. It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, yet you're actively claiming otherwise without a shred of proof.
> How instrumental their impact was in achieving a specific result in elections is debatable, simply because the effects of propaganda are difficult to quantify by definition.
> Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior
> It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together, yet you're actively claiming otherwise without a shred of proof.
The burden of proof is on people claiming that foreign countries doing the same thing they've always done with a new delivery mechanism has changed anything. And given the amount of bad faith disinformation already put out by the primary actors insisting this is the case - not people in comment threads, I mean organizations like New Knowledge and other sources used by NYT and USGov - the burden of proof is pretty high. If you have to blatantly make stuff up, your credibility goes down.
> that the current sociopolitical climate can be explained by "legitimate dissent".
Why?
This seems like a very puzzling statement when considering the past century. Aside from the impacts of increasing atomization and social disintegration related to population churn and mass media (not news, but movies, TV, Instagram, etc.), the only really unusual thing about today's socio-political environment is the degree to which dissent is not tolerated and treated as fundamentally subversive. And even that's not too unusual; for example, the pacifists and isolationists today are Russian bots, the pacifists and isolationists of yesteryear were Nazi apologists, secret communists, etc.
I absolutely dispute the fact they were "wildly successful." People want to make this claim because it conveniently makes their political opposition ignorant tools befuddled by foreign powers rather than legitimate dissent. One might argue that nothing is more "destabilizing" than the polarizing idea your domestic opposition is brainwashed by foreign enemies.
>? We also know that social media is filled with bot accounts that spread disinformation. This also isn't new, and you don't need to be a researcher to verify it.
Except we keep finding the alleged bots aren't bots at all. My own Twitter account was, according to these groups, a bot. Perhaps we don't really "know" that at all. Perhaps most actual bot accounts have close to zero engagement.
> This war is not new, as you say, but with the advent of the internet it has become the most efficient and effective way to destabilize a nation.
No amount of Facebook ads can destabilize a nation, and nothing out of the Internet-era has come even close to the impact of past influence campaigns, although no doubt as t -> infinity, we'll see something.