![]() ![]() And nothing on that scale was discovered this time around. ![]() Renée DiResta: What we saw in 2016 were influence operations that involved the creation of pages, fake accounts and dynamics in which the adversary created audiences of hundreds of thousands for its subversive propaganda accounts. SP: Do you think social media influence from Russia and other foreign actors had the same role in the 2020 election that it did in 2016? You don’t you have a control group, let alone a clear outlining of who saw what and what else was going on in their media environment. But there isn’t really any good concrete evidence. So there are hypotheses about the impact and whether or not the Russians were successful in their campaigns. One hypothesis could be that these were the targeted areas where disinformation campaigns by domestic actors and by the Russians were being coordinated, because in the battleground states one or two votes can make a difference. We found that in swing states, there was a higher proportion of what we call ‘junk news’ being shared by users. On Twitter, we specifically looked at the quality of news that people were sharing. We were analyzing what people were sharing and the lead up to the vote. There are bits of evidence that I would cite to say that, yes, Russia did have an impact, including some of the work that we’ve done on the computational propaganda project at Oxford. will pick up certain narratives that will fit what they’re trying to do in terms of polarizing the US electorate and creating resentments towards the other side of the political spectrum. There’s an overlap in what the Russians do and what is happening domestically. It didn’t come directly from them it started in 4chan and 8chan and some of those other more domestic channels. The second challenge is that even if we do have a concrete example of something like the Pizzagate conspiracy, it wasn’t necessarily a Russian-based disinformation campaign. And, you know, seeing that content online, it’s a mix of factors: our environment, the other kinds of media that we’re consuming, the friends that we have, the conversations that we have, the radio pieces that newspapers, the shows that we watch on TV. It’s not something that just happens after seeing one piece of news or seeing one story. There are lots of different factors that go into how people formulate their political opinion. It’s really hard to draw the connection between someone seeing a post on Facebook and then changing their minds and going to vote Trump or deciding that they’re going to stay home and not participate in the election. What we do know in terms of impact is very, very little. And when we do look to the things that people remember about the 2016 election – take the Pizzagate conspiracy, for example – we can say that these narratives worked in a sense, because a proportion of the American population still believes that Hillary Clinton and her campaign managers were involved in a pedophile ring. Samantha Bradshaw: I think this is a little bit of a complicated question, because we still don’t have very good evidence that what the Russians did actually had an impact. Stanford Politics (SP): In broad strokes, how would you describe the impact of foreign election disinformation in the 2016 U.S. I spoke to DiResta and two other researchers at the Observatory, Shelby Grossman and Samantha Bradshaw, about the nature of disinformation, election security and the Observatory’s role in preserving democracy and truth around the world. They have recently focused on the 2020 election in the United States and disinformation campaigns. The Observatory’s goal, in the words of its research manager, Renée DiResta, is to study and develop solutions for the “misuse of the internet,” including election disinformation, trust and safety engineering issues and the social impact of web-to-web encryption. One such group is the Internet Observatory, a branch of the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Cyber Policy Center. Cyberspace has been a fraught place here and abroad, and several Stanford groups have worked to make the internet a safer place for us all. N the wake of the 2020 election, we’ve witnessed the SolarWinds cyberattack by Russian nationals against US infrastructure, deep mistrust of US election fidelity, and an attack on the US Capitol Building spurred on by President Trump’s tweets and a plethora of extreme right social media accounts. ![]()
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