But the social media campaign “may still have had consequences,” NYU researchers warned
The study, which was led by NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, is based on a survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. respondents’ Twitter activity. The researchers—who also include scholars from the University of Copenhagen, Trinity College Dublin, and Technical University of Munich—concluded that while “the online push by Russian foreign influence accounts didn’t change attitudes or voting behavior in the 2016 U.S. election,” the disinformation campaign “may still have had consequences.”
Yesterday @NatureComms published our paper about Russia’s foreign influence efforts *on Twitter* in the 2016 election. We've seen many claims about the implications of the findings, so we want to be clear about what the paper says and what it doesn’t. 1/
— NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics (@CSMaP_NYU) January 10, 2023
https://t.co/coMxO2JR3j
“Despite this 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 electorate—and this portion was more likely to be highly partisan Republicans,”