A Facebook Experiment
Solid social science on the opinion pages (needless to say news reporters consider interest in randomized controlled experiments to be opinion.
Christian Caryl explains how it is possible to determine the effect of the Russian influence campaign on the 2016 presidential election.
Sinan Aral, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [skip] says he and his colleagues want to study the Russian influence campaign in precisely this geographical context. The MIT scholars have developed a robust methodology for assessing how social media campaigns influence the behavior of their targets — and now they want to bring it to bear on the Russian meddling in 2016 [skip]
“For example, Facebook and Twitter constantly test new variations on their feed ranking algorithms, which cause people to be exposed to varying levels of different types of content,” they write. “One underpublicized A/B test run by Facebook during the 2012 U.S. presidential election caused users to be exposed to more ‘hard news’ from established sources, with effects on political knowledge, preferences, and voter turnout.” Given access to adequate data, the researchers claim they can estimate the impact of the Russian influence campaign in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida “with 95% to 99% confidence.”
Facebook performed the necessary experiment, because they perform experiments all the time aiming to maximize user engagement. These are genuine randomized controlled experiments (because Facebook’s profits are on the line). The names of people exposed to more or less hard news can be compared with the lists of people who actually voted (which are public) only if facebook is forced to cease to protect their privacy (which really means to protect Facebook from proof that they let the Russians trick Americans into electing Trump).
I don’t think the researchers will ever get access to “adequate data” but I do think it is worth fighting for such access.
update: this might not have been clear in the original post. The idea is to use which of the 2 algorithms was used as an instrument for exposure to Russian propaganda. So it is engagement with known russian propaganda regressed on the algorithm used to check the association of (engagement with known Russian propaganda)(demographic characteristics typical of Democrats) and turnout (in particular of African .
To be crude (and explicit) the idea is that African Americans with the hard news algorithm interacted less with Russian propaganda and were more likely to vote. Or not (good experiments are ones where one doesn’t know the result before analysing the data).
“One underpublicized A/B test run by Facebook during the 2012 U.S. presidential election caused users to be exposed to more ‘hard news’ from established sources…”
In other words, more garbage propaganda from mainstream media sources who never saw a war the didn’t want America to launch or a CIA torturer or Wall Street banker they didn’t want protected from prosecution for their crimes.
I think people who voted for Trump, or Bernie supporters who voted for Stein or not at all might find your assessment that they were “tricked” by the Russians to be outrageous and offensive–I know I do. And I’ll bet it will make them more likely to double down in 2020, especially since the Dumbocratic Party is now rapidly supplanting the Republicans as the party of war and Wall Street.
your assertion “mainstream media sources who never saw a war the didn’t want ” is false. The New York Times is very mainstream and they opposed the invasion of Iraq.
You demonstrate your contempt for facts
You also demonstrate your inability to understand that there is any difference at all between reporting facts and expressing opinions. You will notice that I do not assert that the opinions of reporters and editors don’t affect the news as reported.
The claim that “dumbocrats” are the party of Wall Street is based on your incapacity to remember or accept certain plain facts. One is that Trump handed economic policy over to the bankers Cohn and Mnuchin. Another is that the GOP slashed taxes on corporate income. A third is that the only other major bill passed by the GOP controlled house and senate was a banking deregulation bill.
Your grasp of facts is somewhere between childish and psychotic. I don’t know if you are not up to grasping the complexity of the world or hallucinating, but you don’t know what happened recently.
Robert:
It is pretty clear something took place to influence the vote.
Three states which vote majority Dem in national elections and had done so since 1990 or earlier suddenly did not (Ballotpedia). Michigan votes Dem nationally since 1990 at 53 or so percent. In 2016 Dems were 47.5% of the vote and Repubs were 47.7% of the vote (Ballotpedia). A record low turnout for the state (Ballotpedia).
There was a record high vote for the Communist and Libertarian parties. Again over a long period of time (Ballotpedia). To sum it up:
– Low voter turnout
– Less than 50% turnout vote by Dems
– Historical high vote for Communist and Libertarian parties.
This occurred in Michigan and highly confident in Wisconsin. I have not looked at Pennsylvania for the break down. You have basically put your finger on what caused this to occur.
Robert,
Kudos for your response to KK.