Tim Graham: The Latest Collapse of Collusion Conspiracies

When you are “breaking news” Is anyone noticing the Russian collusion phantom? The Washington Post report is easily missed if you blink. “A study finds minimal impact from Russian influence operations on Twitter in the Trump-Clinton presidential race.”

For most of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was that left-wing media had pounded everyone’s heads with that. “Russian interference” Trump’s win was due in large part to the fact that he had survived a media bombardment campaign. If the American people had remained unmolested and free from Russian bots in 2016, President Hillary Clinton could have made a glorious, radical-feminist record.

Six authors have now published a new study in Nature Communications. “exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: only one percent of users accounted for 70 percent of exposures.” Putin’s bots were also included. “eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians.” In the last month of the campaign, the average user was exposed to 4 posts per day from Russian bots. That compares to 106 by national news websites and 35 by politicians.

You can giggle at the idea that four Russian bots posts can easily influence 106 posts by our nattering national media nabobs. “My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped,” Josh Tucker, one the report’s author, stated this. No kidding!

It gets even funnier. They discovered “highly partisan Republicans were exposed to nine times more posts than non-Republicans.” Also, those who were predisposed to vote against Clinton and Trump were not necessarily the key constituency that would allow them to influence the outcome of a close race.

The authors came up with the following conclusion: “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

This finding echoes a 2019 review by Science magazine that found that just 1% of Twitter users were exposed to 80% of the misinformation present, and these tended to be older, extremely partisan users — people who were already voting for Trump. While you might not like the info-diet these voters used, they were actually quite helpful. “persuadables.”

To dissuade Trump’s swing voters, every horror movie scenario was made in 2016. CBS contributor Nancy Giles played the doctor and declared him dead “clinically insane.” Bob Garfield, then-public radio host, suggested Trump exuded. “a nuclear recklessness, reminiscent of a raving meth head with a machete on an episode of ‘Cops.'” Jacob Weisberg, Slate editor, said for the press that comparing Hillary Trump to… “rancid meat.”

The historical analogies followed. Rachel Maddow was studying “when Hitler first became chancellor.” Keith Olbermann has added Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden’s list, Stalin, Pol Pot and all the rest of the mass killers. Sally Kohn warned. “When he institutes internment camps and suspends habeas, we’ll all look back and feel pretty bad.”

After all that, they claimed that tweets coming from overseas sources somehow overpowered their wild screeds. PolitiFact did not flag any of these comments as being in need of “fact-checking.”

Journalists often see themselves as the lifeblood for democracy. When their most dire warnings were ignored too many voters, they incessantly declared that democracy was dying. It was poisoned with evil bots from Moscow. They will not accept any evidence to the contrary. But it should.

Tim Graham is the director of media analysis for the Media Research Center. He also serves as the executive editor of NewsBusters.org. You can learn more about Tim Graham or read cartoons by other Creators Syndicate writers at www.creators.com.

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