Did Russian Bots Impact the Election? | Joe Rogan & Renée DiResta

Now, the overwhelming narrative is that the Russians were very much invested in having Trump win, right? And if they were very much invested in having Trump win, was the reason why they focused so heavily on the African American community? Because the African American community traditionally seems to vote Democrat. So they were trying to do something to break that up, or trying to do something to weaken the position of the incumbent, or Hillary Clinton, and maybe put some emphasis on Jill Stein or some alternative candidates. Yeah, so the way that the political campaign, the political aspect of it played out, so they established, they started building these relationships in 2015. And they're doing this tribal thing, we've got our in-group, we're part of this community. And then what you start to see them do is, there was a tiny, tiny cluster in the early primaries where they were supporting Rand Paul. And then they pivoted Trump pretty quickly, and probably Rand Paul just didn't poll well, and they were like, there's no way to get any lift here, but maybe Trump was getting some actual lift in the media. And so you see them move into supporting Trump. And then for the remainder of the data set, from 2015 through the end, which was mid-2017 or so is when this thing ends, it's adamantly pro-Trump on the right. And on the right, you see not only pro-Trump, but you see them really working to erode support for mainstream or traditional Republicans, traditional conservatives. You see a lot of the memes about, are you with the Cuck-servatives or the conservatives? And so the Cuck-servatives, of course, they've got pictures of Lindsey Graham and John McCain, they hate John McCain, John McCain shows up a million times. And Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz. Well, I think that they, one of the theories is, and I believe this is probably true, they really strongly disliked Hillary Clinton because there was concern that she would, things that she was saying about increasing freedoms in Russia were very threatening. They thought the best bet to get sanctions removed was Trump. So they had specific outcomes that they were hoping for. And that was one of, so there's always a political motivation. So there is this narrative around they just want to kind of like screw with American society, create divisions, amplify divisions. When you look at the political content, the clear and sustained support for Trump, and even more than that, the clear disdain for Hillary Clinton, there is not, on Facebook and Instagram, there was not one single pro-Hillary post. There were some anti-Trump posts because if you're running an LGBT page, of course, they're going to say negative things about Trump, you know, and they're saying it. So you should vote for Jill Stein. There was early support on some of the left-leaning pages for Bernie Sanders, but you actually see the support for Bernie Sanders come in more after it becomes clear that he's not going to win because then they're using Bernie Sanders as a way to say this was stolen from him by the evil Clintons or Jill Stein. You know, here's a true, a true independent, real liberal. We should be voting for her if we want to support a woman. Whether these feminism pages, really pushing this narrative of Jill Stein. So you have the left-leaning pages, totally anti-Clinton, and then you have the right-leaning pages, staunchly pro-Trump and also strongly anti-Cruz, anti-Rubio, anti-Lindsay Graham, basically anti every now what's called establishment Republican. And there's this kind of pushing of people to opposite, opposite ends of the political spectrum. That's where you get at the conversation around facilitating polarization. So not just, it wasn't enough to just support Donald Trump. It was also necessary to strongly disparage the kind of traditional conservative moderate center right in the course of amplifying the Trump candidacy. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. I know it's a lot of stuff. Yeah, it is a lot of stuff, but it does make sense. One of the things that was really bizarre to me watching the election, and I was trying to figure out, is this because Trump is so bombastic and he's so outrageous and he's just a different person, that the way I was describing it on stage was that finally the assholes have a king, because they never had a king before. Everyone who was running for president was at least mostly dignified. Basically, it's really difficult to go back in time and find someone who isn't, find someone who, there's no one who insults people like he does. I mean, he insults people's appearances, he calls them losers, he called Stormy Daniels horse face. I mean, he says some outrageous shit. So part of it was me thinking like, wow, maybe he's just ignited and emboldened. I actually had this conversation with my wife today. She was like, it feels like racism is more prevalent. It's more accepted. People feel more emboldened because in their mind they think he is a racist. I can get away with more things, Trump is president. There's actually videos of people saying racist shit and saying, hey, Trump's president now, we can do this. So I was thinking that, well, maybe that's what it was. It's just sort of like some rare flower that only blooms under the right conditions. Poof, it's back. When you think about the influence that these pages have had in establishing communities and this long game that they're playing, like the LGBT pages, even though they're shitting on Trump, they really want to support Jill Stein because they know that'll actually help Trump because it'll take votes away from Hillary Clinton. It seems different. Like political discourse, discussions online, and social media, the way social media reacted, I mean, there was a lot of people that were anti-Obama before either of his elections that he won, but it seemed different. It seemed different to me than this one. This one seemed like we had moved into another level of hostility that I'd never experienced before and another level of division between the right and the left that I had never experienced before. And like a willingness to engage with really harsh, nasty comments and just to dive into it. You would see it all day. I mean, there were certain Twitter followers that I think they're pretty much human beings, but I would follow them and they would just be engaged with people all day long, just shitting on people and criticizing this and insulting that. And it seemed dangerous. It seemed like things had moved into a much more aggressive, much more hostile and confrontational sort of chapter in American history. If this was all done at the same time that this is happening, how much of an influence do you think this IRA agency had on all this stuff? That's the question that we would all like the answer to and I unfortunately can't give it. In your mind though. Yeah, let me kind of caveat that. The thing that we don't have that nobody who looks at this on the outside has is we can't see what people said in response to this stuff. So I've looked at now almost 200,000 of these posts is what I spent most of last year doing was this research. We can see that they have thousands of engagements, thousands of comments, thousands of shares. We have no idea what happened afterwards and that's the problem. Once the stuff comes down, it's really hard to go back and piece it together. So I can see that there are some of the per your point, the really, really just fucking horrible troll accounts that they ran. They didn't necessarily have a lot of followers, but you see them in there like adding people. At and then the name of a reporter, at the name of a prominent person and so they're in there kind of like draft on the popularity of famous people basically. They're just saying like horrible shit. The tone is so spot on and one thing that was interesting with a couple of them is like if you go and you look at their profile information, which was also made public, they would have a GAB account in their profile. It was a remarkable piece of kind of the culture in which you see that they're actually sitting on GAB too. They can also go and they can draw on there and Reddit. There's 900 or something troll accounts were found on Reddit. They're on Tumblr. They're just picking the most divisive content and they're pushing it out into communities. At the same time, we can see that they're doing it, but we can't see what people do in return. Basically, did they just block? Did they have the fight back? Was there a huge, when this happens on a Facebook page and they're doing something like telling black people not to vote as black people, we shouldn't vote. What do people say in response? That's the piece that we don't have. When we talk about impact, a lot of the impact conversation is really focused on did this swing the election? We don't have, nothing that I've seen has the answer to that question. The second question, when I think about impact, I think you and I agree on this, it also matters how does this change how people relate to each other. We have no real evidence of, no information on that either. This is the kind of thing that lives in some, Facebook has it, the rest of us haven't seen it. Now, are most of these people, is this mostly Facebook? Is it mostly Twitter? How does it break down? There were, here are my little stats here because I don't want to give you the wrong data. There were 10.5 million tweets of which about 6 million were original content created by about 3,800 accounts. There were about 133, let me just read it, 133 Instagram accounts with about 116,000 posts and then 81 Facebook pages and 17 YouTube channels with about 1,100 videos. They got about 200 million engagements on Instagram and about another 75 million or so on Facebook. Engagements are like like shares, comments, reactions. It's hard to contextualize what we think happened. You can go and you can try to look at how well did this content perform relative to other real authentic media targeting these communities. What you see with the black community in particular is their Instagram game was really good. On their Instagram accounts, the top five, three of them targeted the black community and got tens to 100 millions of engagements. I would have to pull up the exact number. Is it mostly me? It's off my head. Yeah, on Instagram it's all memes. We have the memes and then we have the text. On Instagram you can't really share. It's amazing that they got the kind of engagement that they did even without the sharing function. One of the things you can do is if you know the names of the accounts and a lot of them are out there publicly now, you can actually see them in regram apps. People were regramming the content. Facebook says about 20 million people engaged with the Instagram content. What isn't included in that is all of the regrams of the content that were shared by other accounts. The spread and the dispersion of this, it's an interesting thing to try to quantify because we have engagement data, but we don't know did it change hearts and minds. We don't know if it influenced people to go follow other accounts. We don't know if it influenced people to not vote. There's just so much more I think still to understand about how these operations work. We can assume that it had some impact. As you were saying earlier, when a new person enters into a conversation, it changes the tone of it. How much of what they did was their own original post and how much of it was commenting on other people's posts? I thought you were actually going to ask a different thing there. No, please, we'll look at things else. How much of it was them repurposing our own posts, repurposing real American content? Did they do that as well? Yeah, tons of times. They created a lot of their own stuff, particularly in the early days. You can actually read the dataset. One of the things, when we started finding these posts, I was struck by how sometimes it read like ESL and then sometimes it read like perfect, flawless, professional English. Then other times it read like normal English, vernacular, just the way that we would talk to each other. I started digging into what that was. When it was vernacular English, when it read like fluent American English, it was usually cribbed from somewhere else. They would go and they would find a local news story from some obscure local paper. They would crib and then they would paste that. The Facebook post would be that cribbed sentence from that article and then their meme. Maybe they would add a sentence underneath it to give it some kind of context or angle. When they would write their own stuff, you would see the sloppiness. That's where you could see subject verb agreements, not quite there. The ways in which like Russian possessives are different than American possessives, the slips there. The other thing was the really funny stuff which was a post that's supposedly written by a Texas secessionist. You can probably have an image of a Texas secessionist in your mind as I say this. It would be things like Hillary Clinton is a terrible individual. As a terrible individual, it's completely impossible for us to back her and her candidacy for the American presidency furthermore. I'm going to say furthermore, ergo. It is clear that. It reads like remember you're in English in college or something and you've got to write a formal essay. I was like, okay, come on. You bullshitting your way through it. Nobody actually talks like this, especially not your stereotypical Texas secessionist. It was funny seeing these incongruities. That's unfortunately one of the best ways to tell what you're dealing with is actually to look for those incongruities now and see as you read communications online, can you know, does this read like an American? Does this read like a communication? What we started to see was one way to not get caught for your lousy English or your cultural lack of native abilities is to just repurpose other people's stuff. That's where you would see memes getting shared from on both the right and the left. You'd see a lot of these turning point USA memes that they were repurposing and pushing out or you would see occupied Democrats or the other 98%. Memes from real American pages, real American culture and they would just sometimes slap a new logo on and just repost it as if it was theirs. It does in those instances read just like authentic American content. In many ways it is authentic American content.