
Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections - ljf
https://labsblog.f-secure.com/2019/05/24/live-coverage-of-a-disinformation-operation-against-the-2019-eu-parliamentary-elections/
======
marcus_holmes
To answer the question at the end of the post: probably none.

As others have said, it's incredibly unlikely that a tweet is going to change
your mind about anything.

Having worked both in and out of the journalism industry, I know that
journalists get a lot more worked up about what people say online than
everyone else does. They think it matters a lot more than it does (probably
why they got into the job of saying things online in the first place). Twitter
is completely irrelevant to most people. They're vaguely aware it exists, but
it really doesn't matter.

In TFA, you can see each tweet getting a few hundred to a few thousand
likes/retweets, and most of those identified by the analysts as bots. So each
tweet is maybe reaching an audience of a couple hundred humans, at best (and
it'll be the same few hundred humans for all such tweets). How many of those
humans are going to change their vote because of that tweet?

It's irrelevant.

But it is dangerous. Politicians get very nervous about elections. If the
politicians are persuaded that any of this matters, then they'll be more
inclined to stop it mattering. And that means laws that curb free speech
online, monitor communication, prevent encryption, and all the rest of the
shitstorm we're facing.

~~~
gonvaled
You should probably relay this information to those spending huge amounts in
advertising.

~~~
marcus_holmes
I have a good friend who spends millions of dollars in advertising every year,
and who is convinced that almost none of that has much impact on customer
behaviour.

There are exceptions, of course, and advertising can be effective, but there
is a lot of wasted money spent trying to persuade people of things.

------
blunte
It’s useful to know details such as these, but the bigger problem is that the
audience that most “enjoys” and retweets this stuff honestly doesn’t care that
it is false.

I personally know people that, when provided clear evidence of entirely false
and manipulative stories will justify them by saying, “well, this story may
not be true, but there are a lot of stories like this that you haven’t seen
which are true”.

The point is, they believe what they want to believe, and no amount of proof
to the contrary will change their mind. In fact, they often just double down
on their arguments.

~~~
lopmotr
Sure, that's normal human pleasure from having their beliefs reinforced. It's
probably and even bigger problem for vague unfalsifiable ideas like "police
are racist", "capitalism is evil" or "immigration is bad". If a news story
appears to support such a belief, the person will have their belief
reinforced, even if it's wrong and the (true) news story is an exception. One
photo of an immigrant vandalizing a statue or one photo of a border guard
making a child cry says "See? You were right! That whole political party is
bad!".

------
dev_dull
It feels like 2016 all over again, with (some) people desperate for an
explanation for why things happened the way they did which doesn’t involve
people holding ideological differences than what’s found among the elite.

------
lopmotr
That's interesting to analyze and everything, but it's surely inconsequential
compared to what real people say and all their misinformation, rhetoric and
general bias. What's the difference between a popular influencer with a public
persona spreading politically biased stories and an faceless account doing the
same thing?

It sounds like they're looking for someone to blame for right wing candidates'
success in the same way people blamed Russian bots for Trump's success because
they can't believe that real people could possibly be voting for such
obviously "wrong" candidates of their own free will and they must surely have
been fooled into it by clever tricksters.

~~~
DFXLuna
Didn't the FBI and the Mueller report pretty thoroughly lay out the massive
scope of Russian social media influence on the 2016 election and beyond? I
thought this was a decided issue but maybe I'm wrong.

~~~
rjf72
The report is publicly available here. [1] This is mostly covered on pages
~22-26. Quite a short read since it's redacted like crazy. The 'massive
influence' seems to have been a company that setup some fake accounts on
Facebook with a total advertising spend of $100k, and one that also had a few
thousand spam bots on Twitter that 1.4 million people had "been in contact
with" \- a phrase which was left undefined.

[1] -
[https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf](https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf)

~~~
tsimionescu
Thanks for the link, but it mostly disproves your dismissive attitude:
according to the report, posts generated by accounts controller by the Russian
company reached 29 million people on Facebook alone (and " may have reached an
estimated 126 million people."), with hundreds of thousands of direct
followers for several individual accounts. That is not nothing.

~~~
mediocrejoker
It's not nothing, but it's interesting to note that the amount they spent is
dwarfed by the amounts currently being spent by top democrats (and Trump's re-
election campaign), several of which are in the low millions of dollars.

> According to Facebook, the IRA purchased over 3,500 advertisements, and the
> expenditures totaled (sic) approximately $100,000

I think everyone would like to know how much actual influence it had in the
election but I'm not sure we will ever know definitively.

------
sittingnut
racist prejudice displayed in this article is nauseating. seems users from
certain asian countries showing interest in european politics automatically
become members and proof of disinformation campiagn. shame!

------
senseijoe
Interesting how bad twitter is at banning fake accounts. However, 200 russian
bot accounts are not responsible for the populist shift in european politics,
which is what a lot of people want to believe.

