If you were Russia and you wanted to influence the American election, where would you target your efforts? Swing states, of course. Even Vladimir Putin knows that.
And apparently that’s exactly what they did. Denise Clifton reports:
Millions of tweets were flying furiously in the final days leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. And in closely fought battleground states that would prove key to Donald Trump’s victory, they were more likely than elsewhere in America to be spreading links to fake news and hyper-politicized content from Russian sources and WikiLeaks, according to new research published Thursday by Oxford University.
Nationwide during this period, one polarizing story was typically shared on average for every one story produced by a professional news organization. However, fake news from Twitter reached higher concentrations than the national average in 27 states, 12 of which were swing states—including Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan, where Trump won by slim margins.
About a fifth of this traffic was generated by bots. As we used to say back in the day, read the whole thing.
