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The Washington Post acknowledged that Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election regarding its social media footprint was not as significant in putting Donald Trump in the White House as the paper previously hyped.
In a report from the paper's "The Cybersecurity 202" newsletter headlined "Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters," the Post cited a new study from the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics that analyzed what sort of impact disinformation and misinformation had on one social media platform, in this case Twitter.
Josh Tucker, one of the study's authors, told the Post, "My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped."
"Now we’re looking back at data and we can see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population, and how the fact that people who were being exposed to these were really, really likely to vote for Trump," Tucker said to the Post. "And then we have this data to show we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes."
While the Post stressed using a bold font that "the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump," the study found that just 1% of Twitter users "accounted for 70 percent of the exposure to accounts that Twitter identified as Russian troll accounts," "highly partisan Republicans were exposed to nine times more posts than non-Republicans," content from politicians and the media "dwarfed" Russian-produced content and "there was no measurable impact on ‘political attitudes, polarization, and vote preferences and behavior’ from the Russian accounts and posts."
The media spent years pushing the narrative that Russian influence on social media helped elect Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
The latest reporting comes in stark contrast of The Washington Post's past coverage of Russia's influence in Trump's historic victory.
Just days after the 2016 election, the Post ran the headline, "Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say."
"The flood of "fake news" this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation," the Post article at the time began. "Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House."
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"There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders," the Post added.
Another headline from the Post in April 2018 seemed more confident with that conclusion, reading "A new study suggests fake news might have won Donald Trump the 2016 election."
The Washington Post ran numerous stories hyping the narrative that Russia was responsible in electing Donald Trump. (Fox News)
"President Trump has said repeatedly that Russian interference didn't matter in the 2016 presidential campaign, and he has suggested — wrongly — that the intelligence and law enforcement communities have said the same. His overriding fear seems to be that Russian interference and the ‘fake news’ it promoted would undermine the legitimacy of his election win. Trump won't like this new study one bit," Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake wrote at the time.
"The study from researchers at Ohio State University finds that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed but which may be the first look at how fake news affected voter choices, suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama's 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories," Blake told readers.
The Washington Post promoted the narrative that Russia had a major role in the election of Donald Trump through its operation on social media. (ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images)
A separate story from December 2018 suggests a report on Russian "disinformation" would show the "scale and sweep" of the Kremlin's operation.
"A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia’s disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters’ interests to help elect President Trump — and worked even harder to support him while in office," the Post wrote.
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"The report offers the latest evidence that Russian agents sought to help Trump win the White House. Democrats and Republicans on the panel previously studied the U.S. intelligence community’s 2017 finding that Moscow aimed to assist Trump, and in July, they said investigators had come to the correct conclusion. Despite their work, some Republicans on Capitol Hill continue to doubt the nature of Russia’s interference in the last presidential election," the Post later added.