[pacala]

Not sure if "completely false" is appropriate. There was some Russian activity. The scale of which appears somewhat underwhelming:

> Through our supplemental analysis, we have identified 13,512 additional accounts, for a total of 50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content during the election period, representing approximately two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.

If that small of an effort can make that much of an impact on the core democratic process, then we need to consider a significant scale back of XXI century globalism to allow for second half of XX century democracy to survive. Not a popular opinion on a tech forum, where more users means more money, and there are always significantly more users outside one's national boundaries. Sigh.

[chance_state]

>Through our supplemental analysis, we have identified 13,512 additional accounts, for a total of 50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content during the election period, representing approximately two one-hundredths of a percent (0.016%) of the total accounts on Twitter at the time.

The comparison of "50,258 automated accounts that we identified as Russian-linked and Tweeting election-related content" to "the total accounts on Twitter at the time" makes no sense at all. It seems intended to mislead.

It would be more informative to know how many total accounts tweeted about the election, or how many politically active twitter accounts that bot army reached.

And in general, the election was decided by ~80,000 people [1]. To think that ~50,000 bots spamming Twitter with non-stop propaganda had no impact on that is extremely naive (especially when you consider that Twitter was just one piece in the overall interference).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/do...

[pacala]

Using a very rough ballpark estimate, it costs $1 / month to run a twitter bot using readily available technology, see, for example, https://jarvee.com/get-now pricing list. To think that for $50k / month anyone in the world can have a [significant?] impact on US elections is bizarre.

In practice, there is a negligible probability that posting a tweet from a random bot will end up in the feeds for a target demographic. The feed space of the 80k people WP claims decide the election is finite, and it costs significantly more money to reach them than setting up small scale botnets. Ultimately, Twitter is in control of the feeds, and it's their business model to happily direct any message from the highest bidder to the critical demographic, regardless of who or where the highest bidder is.

[nradov]

Most of those 80K voters weren't active Twitter users so your analysis is invalid.

[cvwright]

In comparison, Mike Bloomberg totally failed to take over a US presidential primary, and he spent almost half a billion dollars.