Tweetbots, Random Facebook Comments, Bursts of Traffic. It all reminds me of…
Ars Technica sites a report by Barracuda Labs Research Scientist Jason Ding:
Ding identified more than 11,000 ‘abusers,’ which he defined as those accounts that were followed by the fake Twitter users. On average, each abuser had 48,885 followers. Three-fourths of the abuser accounts included a URL associated with it, compared to 31 percent for random Twitter users. The above-average number suggests abusers “might buy followers for website promotional purposes’ Ding said.
Sounds familiar right?
The only difference here is that date on the report is 2012 and the candidate is Mitt Romney.
I was a Senior Digital Director for the Romney campaign. Although the claims were made again and again that we were purchasing fake followers and paying for fake tweets it was never from our coffers and I found zero evidence of Republican or Romney-related PAC expenses showing anything remotely in that arena.
In short, the tweetbot scene is nothing new. Russians have been trying to influence our election forever — (just like Obama tried to influence elections in France and Israel.)
But let me address a few items.
One thing you learn as a veteran digital campaign operation… timing is everything. Like any other marketing campaign you use the calendar to your advantage. In political campaigns you save your fodder for FEC monthly/quarterly reports and other deadlines — like primaries, debates, events and the general election.
In fact, 75% of all fundraising will occur in the last 25% of the election cycle. I can’t really speak to the novelty of your word analysis until you release it but the timing of of the graphs you note seem to correspond to specific events and bursts of interest.
The “calexit” chart you have denotes another false causation. Calexit happened to be in the news at the time. Here’s your chart:
Here’s a chart from Google trends for the same timeframe on the search term “calexit”.
The dates you site of increased use of the words “calexit” correspond to news items posted on Breitbart on that very subject. Coincidence?
The truth of what happend in election 2016 is this: Democrats have been losing elections for years and the data shows it well:
Here’s a piece I published just today: https://medium.com/@justin_hart/once-again-nottherussians-democrats-have-been-losing-elections-for-years-41623c20ba80
The digest version:
- Obama’s terrible coattails — During his tenure as head of the Democrats, President Obama’s coattails lead to the loss of 1,036 elected seats on the Federal and state level. Presidents always lose seats but this is a record.
2. Republicans Gain Traction — The GOP in turn has been turning counties red in significant ways since 2008.
3. Democrats Losing Battleground States and Blue Strongholds — Looking at the 3 states which primarily impacted the 2016 election the county + or — votes make it clear the Democrats are just not getting it:
3. Hillary Was A Lousy Candidate — Hillary lost. In Pennsylvania, for example, Trump received 2,970,733 and Hillary received 2,926,441 votes. The margin was 44,292 votes. However, looking at the trajectory of elections… Trump received 290,299 more votes that Governor Romney. Hillary received 63,000 fewer votes than President Obama.
4. Losing in 2016 Even BEFORE the Hacks Happened — On November 4th I declared that Trump was going to win the election based on Gallup’s voter registration polls and one other key data set: Pennsylvania party registrations. PA Registrations show significant movement in the GOP’s direction.
5. Influencing the Elections? — All of those fake stories, tweets and comments planted by the Russians must have influenced the election right? No. As one study by an NYU professor put put it: “for fake news to have changed the outcome of the election, a single fake article would need to have had the same persuasive effect as 36 television campaign ads.” One other note. NPR investigated the “fake news” story and found that one of the BIGGEST purveyors of this propaganda lives in L.A. and is a registered Democrat.
In the end… before Russian agents convinced Donna Brazille to leak debate questions to the Clinton campaign; before Kremlin spies posed as underage hotties to take down Anthony Weiner and his laptop of Huma emails; before Russian agents convinced John Podesta to use an abusrdly easy password to hack and months before Vladimir Putin personally disguised himself as a plumber to fix Hillary’s email server and hack into the DNC… Republicans were winning elections and turning the country red.
Update: My response is critical but I love the effort your guys put into this. I can tell we’re on different sides of the political spectrum but I love that you take a data approach to all of this. Let me know if you’re interested in having a Trump-supporter and political veteren give his data-backed take on all of this. :)
