{"id":380542,"date":"2018-10-11T14:44:17","date_gmt":"2018-10-11T13:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-shaky-case-that-russia-manipulated-social-media-to-tip-the-2016-election-consortiumnews\/"},"modified":"2018-10-11T14:44:17","modified_gmt":"2018-10-11T13:44:17","slug":"the-shaky-case-that-russia-manipulated-social-media-to-tip-the-2016-election-consortiumnews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-shaky-case-that-russia-manipulated-social-media-to-tip-the-2016-election-consortiumnews\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shaky Case That Russia Manipulated Social Media to Tip the 2016 Election \u2013 Consortiumnews"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\">The idea promoted by NYT\u2019s Shane &amp; Mazzetti that the Russian government seriously threatened to determine the 2016 election does not hold up when the larger social media context is examined more closely, reports Gareth Porter.<\/span><\/span><br \/><span id=\"more-30613\"\/><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><b>By Gareth Porter<br \/><\/b><\/span><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><i>Special to Consortium News <\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/porter_gareth-600x675.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/lazy-load\/images\/1x1.trans.gif\" data-lazy-src=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/porter_gareth-600x675-150x150.jpg\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-26989\" alt=\"\" width=\"81\" height=\"81\"\/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-26989\" src=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/porter_gareth-600x675-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"81\" height=\"81\"\/><\/noscript><\/a>In their long recapitulation of the case that Russia subverted the 2016 election, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti of <\/span><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><i>The New York Times<\/i><\/span><\/span><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\"> <a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2018\/09\/20\/us\/politics\/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html\">painted a picture<\/a> of highly effective Russian government exploitation of social media for that purpose. Shane and Mazzetti asserted that \u201canti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference\u201d in the election. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u201c<span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\">What we now know\u00a0with certainty:\u00a0The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come,\u201d they write elsewhere in the 10,000-word article.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\">But an investigation of the data they cite to show that the Russian campaigns on Facebook and Twitter were highly effective reveals a gross betrayal of journalistic responsibility. Shane and Mazzetti have constructed a case that is fundamentally false and misleading with statistics that exaggerate the real effectiveness of social media efforts by orders of magnitude.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\"><b>\u2018Reaching\u2019 129 Million Americans <\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\">The Internet Research Agency (IRA), is a privately-owned company run by entrepreneur Vevgeny V. Prigozhin, who has ties with President Vladimir Putin. Its employees poured out large numbers of social media postings apparently aimed at stoking racial and cultural tensions in the United States and trying to influence U.S. voters in regard to the presidential election, as Shane and Mazzetti suggest. They even <a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/file\/1035477\/download\">adopted false U.S. personas<\/a> online to get people to attend rallies and conduct other political activities. (An alternative explanation is that IRA is a purely commercial, and not political, operation.)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\">Whether those efforts even came close to swaying U.S. voters in the 2016 presidential election, as Shane and Mazzetti claimed, is another matter.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: medium;\">Shane and Mazzetti might argue that they are merely citing figures published by the social media giants Facebook and Twitter, but they systematically failed to report&#8230;<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/consortiumnews.com\/2018\/10\/10\/the-shaky-case-that-russia-manipulated-social-media-to-tip-the-2016-election\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The idea promoted by NYT\u2019s Shane &amp; Mazzetti that the Russian government seriously threatened to determine the 2016 election does not hold up when the larger social media context is examined more closely, reports Gareth Porter. By Gareth PorterSpecial to Consortium News In their long recapitulation of the case that Russia subverted the 2016 election, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2524,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-380542","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2524"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}