How effective was Russian propoganda on social media? Who many votes were switched? What other voter numbers are more significant?
But just how many Facebook users who saw this propoganda, actually bothered to vote? A 2010 study of Facebook users showed a small increase of 340,000 votes, nationwide, based on a direct get out the vote plea.
Then there were tens of millions who just didn’t vote, and Texas was worse than the nation, see table below.
Also, there was the GOP Operation Cross Check that eliminated upto 7 million minority votes from the 2016 election results.
And what about the large increase for third party candidates. In Galveston county Texas third party vote went from a historical average of 1.4% to 4.5%. Nationally the vote change for third party went from 1.7 in 2012 to 4.1 in 2016. And according to WikiPedia election results, the change in third party votes from 2012 to 2016 was 4,962,440 additional votes.
Many factors affected the 2016 election. This also includes media favoritism. Remember the CEO of CBS saying that DJT may be bad for the country but he’s great for the bottom line – profit. Tens of millions were spent on TV campaign ads telling voters what they already knew about DJT instead of investing in ground troops to make calls or go door-to-door to encourage voting. According to Steve Phillips in his book Brown Is the New White, some $20 million spent on TV ads for a 2014 losing Democratic Senatorial candidate could have resulted in 56,000 more votes for the loser if that money had instead been spent on the GOTV ground game.
Metrics on voting results show that voter turnout is increased by 5% with that kind of ground game. Add to that all the new voter suppression laws past by Republican controlled states with the help of ALEC and since SCOTUS ransacked the Civil Rights Act.
Elections are complex, multi-variant processes and blaming the results on one thing is grossly problematic and suspiciously distracting.
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Cambridge Analytica’s Electoral Psyops Campaign
Did you know that in 2016 the Trump campaign, with help from billianaire Robert Mercer, spent 1,000 times more money on social media ads in key states than the total spent on Russian ads?
"The methodology involved developing a profile of potential voters inspired by the OCEAN personality test, which drew from publicly available databased to identify how people rated on the basis of Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Integrating publicly available databases and information drawn from Facebook and Twitter, the American offshoot of SCL named Cambridge Analytics that is owned by Mercer identified key voters who scored high on Neuroticism and voted Democrat in the last election in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. The Trump campaign then paid for ads that targeted this base heavily with social media ads in October and November that would last for only a brief period, thus leaving no obvious electronic trail.
"While it is obviously impossible to prove that the ads made the difference in swinging these states to Trump’s advantage, it is certainly more plausible than blaming the Russian ads ..., especially since the Trump campaign shelled out 150 million dollars, while the Russian ads did not exceed $150,000."