Was there Russian influence in the 2016 US election and if so, how much?
Researchers from Munich, among others, got to the bottom of the matter.
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Munich/Washington – Did Russia influence the 2016 US presidential election?
Former President Donald Trump did not let go of this accusation during his term of office.
But actually the influence of the Russian demagogues - called trolls - was small.
Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Trinity College Dublin and the University of Copenhagen found this out by evaluating the social media accounts of 1,500 US citizens.
US Election 2016: Influential Twitter campaign aimed primarily at Republicans
As a basis, the researchers determined how many users were reached by the tweets from the accounts that can be assigned to the Internet Research Agency.
Previous research had shown that the organization was closely linked to the Russian government in the Moscow Kremlin.
The target group of the opinion makers is surprisingly small: 70 percent of the registered tweets were aimed at one percent of the users, namely those who can be assigned to the republican, i.e. the conservative camp.
Republican supporters have been reached by trolls nine times as often as Democrats and independents.
Just recently, "Putin cook" Yevgeny Prigozhin spoke about Russian interference in the 2016 US election campaign:
US election 2016 manipulated by Russia?
Political stance of Trump supporters examined
But even with this small target group, the researchers could not find any change in political attitudes: even widespread distribution does not necessarily mean that such tweets effectively change the attitude or voting behavior of citizens, explains Jan Zilinsky, researcher at the Chair of Digital Governance at TUM.
Nevertheless, Gregory Eady from the University of Copenhagen is certain: "It would be a mistake to assume that other parts of the Russian campaign had no influence on the election result or the trust in the integrity of the election".
Meanwhile, more and more secret documents are appearing in Joe Biden's private rooms.
Has the US President committed a crime?
