If you swing over to Truth Social, you will see that Donald Trump has a new cause celebre. A survey was taken that proves that Russian trolls did not in fact influence the 2016 election.
We guess that means that Robert Mueller was wrong. What could he possibly know, right, he was only the head of the FBI?
And you will love who else jumped right on the bandwagon: Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk.
The only road to redemption for mainstream media orgs begins will a full self-audit of the Russiagate fiasco, which includes Pulitzers that need rethinking. It’s not a left or right issue, they just got this completely wrong on the facts, and need to own it. https://t.co/mynVG09BSH
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 10, 2023
Russian influence operations on Twitter in the 2016 presidential election reached relatively few users, most of whom were highly partisan Republicans, and the Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior, according to a study out this morning.
The study, which the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics helmed, explores the limits of what Russian disinformation and misinformation was able to achieve on one major social media platform in the 2016 elections. […]
“Now we’re looking back at data and we can see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population, and how the fact that people who were being exposed to these were really, really likely to vote for Trump,” [report author josh] Tucker said. “And then we have this data to show we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes.”
That’s the ball that Taibbi and Musk are running with. Now, in the next paragraph, in bold, are these words.
But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.
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It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
- Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
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Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.
This is my reason for saying maybe they simply didn’t read this article, or the report it’s based upon, because the obvious ploy here is to take a narrowly constructed report and conflate it to reach a much broader and more profound conclusion than it in fact does.
The article goes on to discuss the differences between Twitter and Facebook and shares the fact that so many more people were tuned into Facebook at that time than Twitter. Simply, Taibbi and Musk are endorsing a posture on the part of this report, which the report isn’t in fact taking. Read the entire article and you’ll see, over and over, that the conclusion reached is a very narrow one and it’s clearly stated.
“The key thing to understand here is there’s different pieces of the Russian foreign influence attempt,” Tucker said. “The vast majority of what we’ve learned so far is about what happened, not what the impact of it was.”
And again.
Given the small margins of victory in some states for Trump, could even a small number of people who changed their attitudes as a result of Russian influence operations online have swayed the vote? The sample size of the Twitter study suggests not, but “we’ll never really know,” Tucker said. “We cannot reject out of hand that there wasn’t some incredibly unlikely confluence of things here that happened in this regard.”
This is almost satirical, it’s so ironic. there was an “incredibly unlikely confluence of things” that took place which allowed Donald Trump to pull an inside straight and get elected, period. Russian interference is only one of those factors. That fact has never been disputed.
What is happening here is an attempt to pitch this article as debunking the theory of Russian interference as being a factor at all. That’s not what the report says. The report is an analysis of data which was obtained and it hedges its conclusions carefully. Taibbi and Musk are not hedging its conclusions at all, they’re calling for the entire industry of mass media to recant its reportage, and even to give back its Pulitzers, as unearned and undeserved.
This is sophistry, plain and simple. Sophistry is “the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intent of deceiving.”
Such is the world we live in, in 2023.
What happened to Matt Taibbi? Back in 2017, he wrote a book about Trumpler entitled “Insane Clown President,” whose title sorta gives his approach away in advance. Taibbi was then being lauded as the “new Hunter S Thompson,” which was undeservedly high praise. Even Bernie Sanders raved that Taibbi was “one of the few journos who speaks truth to power.” So what (or who) got to him?
Maybe he wants to date Maria Bartiromo. 😆
He used to.be a,real.journalist back.when he caught McCrhystal’s aides behaving badly. What happened? He did some good work at Rolling Stone.
That’s a question I’ve asked myself again and again about Taibbi and Greenwald. My best guess is that they started reading the reviews praising them as contrarians and carried that tendency to an implausible extreme. Now they seem to believe that everything about American politics is evil and the system is under control of some kind of “shadow government.” It’s too bad, because they were once levelheaded social critics. Now they’re just trolls.
“the obvious ploy here is to take a narrowly constructed report and conflate it to reach a much broader and more profound conclusion than it in fact does.”
The Fox playbook.
Musk is very lucky he was born into the family he was-he would be pushing a shopping cart with all his worldly possessions otherwise.
If I were prone to conspiracy theories, I would say Matt Taibbi has been replaced with a clone. 🙂
Has anyone asked for Jack Dorsey’s response? It’s a low bar to say he’s smarter than Musk, but he does reach it.