Study on the 2016 US presidential election

Russian Twitter campaigns didn’t influence voting behavior

The exposure to Russian coordinated influence accounts was heavily concentrated: only 1% of users in the study accounted for 70% of exposures. In addition, those who identified as “Strong Republicans” were exposed to roughly nine times as many posts from Russian foreign influence accounts than were those who identified as Democrats or Independents.

The researchers also concluded that there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, voting behavior and polarization, that is, whether respondents had taken more extreme views with regard to certain policy areas, such as migration policy.

“Almost all existing research has focused on whether state-sponsored tweets are widely circulated, but even wide circulation does not imply that such tweets are effective at changing citizens’ attitudes or voting behavior,” says Jan Zilinsky, PhD, researcher at the Chair of Digital Governance at the Technical University of Munich and one of the authors of the paper, which appeared in the journal Nature Communications.

“Despite the massive effort to influence the presidential race on social media and a widespread belief that this interference had an impact on the 2016 U.S. elections, potential exposure to tweets from Russian trolls that cycle was, in fact, heavily concentrated among a small portion of the American electorates,” adds Prof. Joshua Tucker, co-director of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics.

The study also found that exposure to the Russian influence campaign on Twitter was significantly eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. On average, the study’s respondents were exposed to roughly four posts from Russian foreign influence accounts per day in October of 2016. But, over the same period, they were exposed to an average of 106 posts on average per day from national news media and 35 posts per day from US politicians.

“In other words, online users saw 25 times more posts from national news media and nine times as many posts from politicians than those from Russian foreign influence accounts,” says TUM researcher Jan Zilinsky, “to say nothing of what they might have learned about the election from other media, such as television or online news.”

Despite these results, the researchers caution that Russia attempts to alter the outcome of the election may have had other effects. “It would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” says the University of Copenhagen’s Prof. Gregory Eady, one of the study’s co-lead authors. Prof. Tom Paskhalis from Trinity College Dublin, the other co-lead author, adds: “Debate about the 2016 US election continues to raise questions about the legitimacy of the Trump presidency and to engender mistrust in the electoral system, which in turn may be related to Americans’ willingness to accept claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and future elections.”