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.
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The door on that topic, according to the new university study, has now been closed.
“We find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior,” concluded the Monday study, published in Nature Communications by authors at New York University, the Technical University of Munich, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Copenhagen.
The new study focused mostly on the efforts by Russian troll farms on Twitter during the 2016 election. “Data have been unavailable to investigate links between exposure to foreign influence campaigns and political behavior,” the new study said. “We demonstrate, first, that exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians.”
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.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller filed a February 2018 indictment against the Internet Research Agency and a July 2018 indictment against a dozen Russian military intelligence officers.
Mueller said the Internet Research Agency and other Russian troll farm operatives “had a strategic goal to sow discord” in the U.S. political system during the 2016 election.
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 Justice Department ended up dismissing part of Mueller’s case against an IRA subsidiary company in 2020, arguing the Russian entity was seeking to take advantage of the U.S. justice system without honestly participating in the process itself.
Mueller’s indictment against the Internet Research Agency and its troll farm operatives contended that “these social media accounts became Defendants’ means to reach significant numbers of Americans for purposes of interfering with the U.S. political system, including the presidential election of 2016.”
The newly-released university study indicates that these efforts were not successful at moving the needle at all.
“The absence of meaningful relationships between exposure to Russian foreign influence accounts and voting behavior is also consistent with the evidence presented earlier that exposure to these foreign influence accounts was concentrated, and was confined to a small group of respondents who identified themselves with the Republican Party and thus those least likely to vote for Clinton irrespective of exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign,” the study concluded.
Mueller’s report ultimately concluded in April 2019 that “the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.”
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But the special counsel “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
According to Mueller, Russia’s efforts were carried out through social media disinformation campaigns by Russia-based troll farms, including the Internet Research Agency, as well as through cyberattacks and email hacking carried out by Russian military intelligence.
