{"id":65085,"date":"2023-02-22T07:23:17","date_gmt":"2023-02-22T12:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65085"},"modified":"2023-02-22T07:23:17","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T12:23:17","slug":"western-journalists-are-cowardly-approval-seeking-losers-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=65085","title":{"rendered":"Western Journalists Are Cowardly, Approval-Seeking Losers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Western Journalists Are Cowardly, Approval-Seeking Losers<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Listen to a reading of this article:<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Research conducted by New York University\u2019s Center for Social Media and Politics into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election\u00a0has found<\/a>\u00a0\u201cno evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is to say that all the years of hysterical shrieking about Russian trolls interfering in US democracy and corrupting the fragile little minds of Americans \u2014 a narrative that has been used to drum up support for internet censorship and ever-increasing US government involvement in the regulation of online speech \u2014 was false.<\/p>\n

And to be clear, this isn\u2019t actually news. It was\u00a0established years ago<\/a>\u00a0that the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency could not possibly have had any meaningful impact on the 2016 election, because the scope of its operations was quite small, its posts were mostly unrelated to the election and many were posted\u00a0after<\/em>\u00a0the election occurred, and its funding was dwarfed by orders of magnitude by domestic campaigns to influence the election outcome.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s different this time around, six years after Trump\u2019s inauguration, is that this time the mass media are reporting on these findings.<\/p>\n