Oh, he won't be invited to the social parties now...
FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver poo-pooed the notion that Russian trolls really helped President Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election in a series of tweets on Monday.
It all started when MSNBC host Chris Hayes mocked a meme, allegedly produced by Russians, in which Jesus counsels someone addicted to masturbating. Liberal journalist Ted Ganoways joked that Cambridge Analytica's Facebook data identified a group of likely Republican voters who are “compulsive masturbators” – but Silver didn’t appear amused.
“It's far more likely that the Russians were just throwing a bunch of s--- at the wall and seeing what stuck and that basing it on Cambridge Analytica data wouldn't have been meaningfully more effective than doing it at random,” Silver tweeted in response.
The famed statistician continued: “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I'm not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there's not much evidence that they were effective.”
Silver then pointed to a Washington Post story that “makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller,” but mocked it for being based on only 5,000 tweets, which is “nothing” in the big scheme of things.
“Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day,” Silver wrote. “What fraction of overall social media impressions on the 2016 election were generated by Russian troll farms? 0.1%? I'm not sure what the answer is, but suspect it's low, and it says something that none of the reports that hype up the importance of them address that question.”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nate-silver-dismisses-russian-trolls-influence-on-2016-election
FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver poo-pooed the notion that Russian trolls really helped President Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election in a series of tweets on Monday.
It all started when MSNBC host Chris Hayes mocked a meme, allegedly produced by Russians, in which Jesus counsels someone addicted to masturbating. Liberal journalist Ted Ganoways joked that Cambridge Analytica's Facebook data identified a group of likely Republican voters who are “compulsive masturbators” – but Silver didn’t appear amused.
“It's far more likely that the Russians were just throwing a bunch of s--- at the wall and seeing what stuck and that basing it on Cambridge Analytica data wouldn't have been meaningfully more effective than doing it at random,” Silver tweeted in response.
The famed statistician continued: “If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I'm not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there's not much evidence that they were effective.”
Silver then pointed to a Washington Post story that “makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller,” but mocked it for being based on only 5,000 tweets, which is “nothing” in the big scheme of things.
“Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day,” Silver wrote. “What fraction of overall social media impressions on the 2016 election were generated by Russian troll farms? 0.1%? I'm not sure what the answer is, but suspect it's low, and it says something that none of the reports that hype up the importance of them address that question.”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nate-silver-dismisses-russian-trolls-influence-on-2016-election
