• Rojo27 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      51·
      9 days ago

      I remember several studies, all the ones done by firms that weren’t getting paid by the DNC, showed that the actual impact of Russian bot farms was actually very minuscule. If you ever checked any of the linked posts that came from the bot farms you’d often see engagement often in the hundreds to low thousands. Nothing that was as widespread as the MSM reported.

      • What_Religion_R_They [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        32·
        9 days ago

        Similarly for Twitter:

        The emails inadvertently suggest how marginal and ineffective the accounts that were genuine Russian disinformation efforts actually were. Describing Russian accounts they’d purged in advance of voting in 2020, one internal email reports some decidedly underwhelming figures: 345 had been inactive, and the ten that were active “had little reach and low follower counts.”

        […] In fact, much of the supposedly suspicious activity had nothing to do with adversarial governments at all. The FBI repeatedly passed on suspicions and forwarded news articles alleging sinister foreign hands behind the George Floyd protests, the existence of pro-Trump African Americans, and various suspect accounts, only to be told they were all of domestic origin. One analyst “found no links to Russia,” they wrote, and neither did another worker who carried out a thorough double-check. “I can brainstorm with [redacted] and see if we can dig even deeper and try to find a stronger connection,” the analyst helpfully offers.

        che-smile