that's very clever, and I'm sure the ~42 people who get to see the entire stream of tweets will be very persuaded by it. And since most of those people work in media, it may even lead to an article which might be read by a few thousand people.
Don't get me wrong: I think online "propaganda" can be effective - just not on Twitter, because of its scale and primary audience.
But because Twitter is more transparent it gets analysed more. I guess you could make the argument that the same people are doing the same things on FB and Whatsapp, but it's difficult to see how those messages propagate so well.
That's the thing, I don't think everyone needs to view the entire stream of tweets from this "person" for this to be effective. You just need one person to latch on to it and start retweeting it. Then this person's friends see it and don't need much convincing...
I’m skeptical that has any material impact on the elections. Why do I think so? Because you can ask someone who holds different opinion than you about those subjects and you’ll know exactly why they vote the way to they do.
You may not agree with it, but I really don’t think you’ll cling to the idea that they’ve been hypnotized by internet trolls.
> content that is far-right, racist, and highly partisan, one has to wonder what effect they’ve had on the EU election conversation space on Twitter over the past few weeks. [...]
I'm not familiar with the reasons of the outcome in France, but this whole election has been dictated by far-right, racist and highly partisan reasons in my country. When you wonder why you got a result from a huge number of people you need to analyse the data, and analysts are noticing that ...
"The League of Matteo Salvini gets a resounding 30.75% of preferences in Riace , the municipality of the Reggio area guided until a few months ago by Domenico Lucano and known throughout the world for the model of reception and integration of migrants that was practiced there."
"Even in the island of Lampedusa , at the center of the migration phenomenon, the League wins. Matteo Salvini's party gets 45.85%, more than twice the Democratic Party that launches Pietro Bartolo, the migrant doctor, among the candidates in Strasbourg."
> Doesn't it depend on how close the election was to begin with? If it's very close, you may not need to move the needle very far to change the outcome.
There are 12 points of distance between the 1st party (extreme right) and the 2nd (pro immigration).
The territorial distribution of votes in favor of the extreme right is aligned with the cases of uncontrolled and non-regular immigration, cases that the population lives in the area and which have little interaction with the (old/new)media.
This doesn't mean that disinformation attempts are not happening, they're. But the outcome was predictable, and it's difficult to argue that there is a correlation with ..Twitter.
You mention 42, then a thousand, and then we're talking real effects. Twitter gets analyzed by professional analysts. It also gets digested without any analysis by its users.
Kind of a fun “internet troll butterfly effect” thought experiment. However, using the same logic any small “flutter” in the other direction would be enough to cancel out the “real effects” and make them moot.
hmm, yes... this is absolutely something you could experiment with.
A thousand people is not enough to influence an election. A single article is not enough to influence an election. Yes, it's possible that something goes viral and gets seen a million times, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Don't get me wrong: I think online "propaganda" can be effective - just not on Twitter, because of its scale and primary audience.
But because Twitter is more transparent it gets analysed more. I guess you could make the argument that the same people are doing the same things on FB and Whatsapp, but it's difficult to see how those messages propagate so well.