> 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.
But people have tried.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
> 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.