Donald and the Russian bots
Anyone who has used Twitter in the past couple years, especially in the months leading up to the 2016 election, is well aware of the “Twitter bots” who share fake news and attempt to generate dissonance between individuals. As Palmer Report has stated multiple times, Donald Trump’s election win was neither legitimate nor legal. For the moment, let’s ignore all of the treasonous conspiracies against America that took place between the Trump campaign and Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, et al. Let’s also momentarily ignore the illegal hacking of the DNC and subsequent leaking through WikiLeaks. Let’s also ignore the Trump campaign’s illegal utilization of Cambridge Analyitica to target Americans with pinpoint accuracy. For just a moment, let’s only concentrate on Twitter bots, or automated Twitter accounts created by the Russian Internet Research Agency with the sole purpose of changing the outcome of the election.
It’s important to recall that the stolen election came down to a total of 77,744 votes in three key swing states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Broken down by percentage points in each state, it comes to 0.7, 0.7, and 0.2, respectively. With such tiny margins, and again ignoring all of the illegal methods used, as well as Green Party candidate Jill Stein winning more than those margins in each state, a recent study of Twitter bots proves that they alone could have swung the election.
The study, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, states “Our results suggest that, given narrow margins of victories in each vote, bots’ effect was likely marginal but possibly large enough to affect the outcomes.” While the margins of victory in those critical swing states were all less than one point, the authors of the study state that the bots could have increased the votes in Trump’s favor by 3.23 points.
While we know Trump cheated in multiple nefarious ways in order to steal the election, we now know that just one of the many deceitful actions against America could have resulted in the tragic result we’re now living with. The one positive to this ongoing predicament is that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is months ahead of all of these stories, meaning we’re getting closer to resetting the mistakes and maintaining democracy and justice every day.
I’m a ceramic engineer living in Central New York, avid sports fan but find myself more interested in politics lately.