A new in-depth study has concluded that the Russian government’s efforts to deploy troll farms on Twitter to sway the 2016 election did not have any measurable impact on the outcome of that race.
The U.S. government has been largely united in its assessment that the Kremlin attempted to use online proxies and false internet personas to harm former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to help former President Donald Trump in 2016, but didn’t reach specific conclusions on whether those efforts actually affected the election.The door on that topic, according to the new university study, has now been closed.
The study said: “We do not find statistical evidence in support of a relationship between exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts and changes in respondents’ issue positions or perceptions of polarization. ... For ideological and issue positions, the estimated relationships are neither significant nor in a direction consistent with one favorable toward Donald Trump.”
The special counsel said the Russian trolls “posted derogatory information about a number of candidates” and that, by early to mid-2016, their operations included “supporting” Trump’s campaign and “disparaging” Clinton. The newly-released university study indicates that these efforts were not successful at moving the needle at all.
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