Study: social media a weak vector for influence operations
Especially compared with television!
This one seems to have flown beneath the discourse’s radar, but it’s remarkable: a study published last month in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics has found that influence operations on social media are largely ineffective.
“While consuming some partisan social media channels is correlated with narrative exposure, there is no correlation with narrative agreement,” the authors report.
And these authors hardly match the profile of cynics. Lennart Maschmeyer, for example, is from the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich; Volodymyr Yermolenko is the chief editor of UkraineWorld.org. These are people who’ve spent the past several years studying the problems (real and imagined) of Russian disinformation, and if anything one would expect them to hype the danger of the Kremlin’s online activities. But that’s the opposite of what this paper finds!
“While we do not dismiss the potential effectiveness of social media in spreading disinformation, findings indicate it is important not to overestimate the threat,” they conclude.
The methodology of this paper is simple: they take 15 influence narratives and then use statistical analysis to look for “correlations between media consumption, audience exposure to, and agreement with, narratives, and foreign policy preferences.” What they find is that while both television and social media may expose audiences to these narratives, only television seems effective at persuading the audience into agreement.
“Survey analysis showed a clear and statistically significant correlation between consumption of partisan channels, exposure to, and agreement with, narratives,” they write. “In contrast, social media consumption showed either no statistically significant correlation to agreement, or a negative correlation.”
Though this study focuses on the effects of Russian influence operations in the context of its war against Ukraine, it has enormous implications that touch on political debates in the US as well. In the discourse — at least, among extremely online liberals — it has become exceedingly common to trace just about any political pathology you can think of back to the toxic public influence of Twitter. But if deliberate influence operations can’t leverage social media to persuade the public why would the efforts of the American right — both deliberate and informal — have any more success through Twitter?
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