What we didn’t learn from Twitter’s news dump on Russiagate

To begin, it only covers the IRA related numbers, which was only one node in the Russian effort. Nor does it reveal how many actually viewed the efforts of this subset or their impact by percentage of tweets or views on a per-topic basis, which would flesh out the actual impact — not just on the election, but on issues within it.

As an illustration, the Twitter account of Trump surrogate-turned-National Security Advisor-turned-confessed liar Gen. Michael Flynn, followed at least five of these documented Russian influence ops accounts, pushing out their messaging to all his almost two hundred-thousand followers at least 25 times. Similarly, @Ten_GOP, which called itself the “Unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans,” but was actually a Russian account, was followed by over 100,000 people. Its messages echoed out to potentially millions via retweets from influential figures like Donald Trump Jr. and Kellyanne Conway, who each have over two million followers. Indeed, on Election Day 2016, it was the seventh-most-retweeted account of the entire network

Nor does the data show the echo effect of such accounts beyond the network. Another such account was @Jenn_Abrams , which posed as an American girl with strong views on everything from Kim Kardashian’s clothes to immigration and the need to support Donald Trump. “She” not only built up 70,000 followers, but, due to the now-lamentable media practice of embedding tweets in articles without confirmation of the source, was also quoted in The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, USA Today, Fox, BET, Yahoo Sports, Sky News, IJR, Breitbart, The Washington Post, Mashable, New York Daily News, Quartz, Dallas News, France24, HuffPost, The Daily Caller, The Telegraph, CNN, the BBC, Gizmodo, The Independent, The Daily Dot, The Observer, Business Insider, The National Post, Refinery29, The Times of India, BuzzFeed, The Daily Mail, and (unsurprisingly) InfoWars, Russia Today, and Sputnik. But “she” still only counts as a 1 in the Twitter count.

Singer notes that there are other problems in Twitter’s account:

Another key gap in the data is the timing. It only looks at the period of 10 weeks before the November 8, 2016, election. That is, it misses the entire nomination process that dragged out for well over a year. None of the data thus includes the period that social media arguably mattered most, when it was a key force to both the rise of Donald Trump (who went from outsider to an unstoppable force online) amid a crowd of 19 Republican candidates and in shaping the enduring narratives that Hillary Clinton would prove unable to shake. It also, of course, doesn’t cover the efforts by Russia that have continued since. From the election to today, Russia has maintained an effort to reshape and distort American political discourse on everything from the Charlottesville killing to this week’s #releasethememo tempest in a teapot.

Singer says that Twitter at least is to be applauded for meeting the bare minimum of at least attempting to contact the people who followed such accounts (notably via email), to let them know they have been played by Russian government propagandists.

[But] there is a problem in even how this only partial story is communicated, not just to the public, but the targets themselves. If you are one of those to be contacted by Twitter, their message doesn’t tell the user any specifics about either the content or the account that they were fooled by. So there is no way for the person to know how the Russian campaign worked against them personally, on what topic, nor how to avoid being taken in again. It is akin to your car company reaching out to say that “Something on your car is wrong and we kinda did something about it.”

….

Overall, the timing and limited content of the Twitter release, combined with Facebook’s announcement that it would defer the battle against misinformation to a new system of user votes (which will surely be manipulated by the very same attackers, as well as partisan troll armies and TV talk show hosts), shows a core problem. The companies that operate our new media ecosystem are still to come fully to grips with both the role that misuse of their platforms played in shaping our current politics and the responsibilities they bear in ensuring it never happens again.

Read the article: Peter W. Singer, “What we didn’t learn from Twitter’s news dump on Russiagate,” Defense One (20 January 2018)