1 newyorker.com/magazine/2018/… I think @JaneMayerNYer has this wrong. NB - this is not the Kavanaugh story. It is her piece summarizing a new book by Kathleen Hall Jamieson which claims that Russian influence operations etc probably won the election for Trump.
2. I haven't read the book (it's embargoed) - perhaps the full text is more convincing than the Mayer summary. But it sounds as though Jamieson is at odds with other social scientists. There are reasons why other political scientists have not made these kinds of arguments.
3. As @BrendanNyhan - who is briefly mentioned in the article discusses - here -nytimes.com/2018/02/13/ups… - there is strong reason to believe that it's really, really hard to use messaging, targeted or otherwise, to change people's minds on politics.
4. The article also notes Sides, Tesler and Vavreck's forthcoming book on 2016, acknowledging that they present a different account, but suggesting that their emphasis on Trump taking advantage of existing divisions and fissures in the US election is "compatible" with Jamieson.
5. because it might be these issues that the Russians successfully polarized and inflamed. Sides, Tesler and Vavreck' book argues that the Russian operations most likely had limited or no measurable impact, while accepting that the answer is inevitably uncertain.
6. Mayer does not discuss the other important new forthcoming book on this, which takes a data/information science rather than political science approach - Benkler, Faris and Roberts (discussed at newyorker.com/news/daily-com… by @JeffreyToobin )
7. Chapter Eight provides an extensive account of the operations, based on new data, which is markedly skeptical of claims that the Russian efforts had influence. Russian efforts to split Sanders supporters from Clinton "seem to have failed."
8. Russian efforts to push the "election is rigged" theme were swamped by similar claims that Trump had already made. Benkler, Faris and Roberts repeatedly emphasize that the work is being done by the American media ecosystem - not by Russian hackers.
9. This doesn't mean that Jamieson is necessarily wrong. Again, perhaps there is better material in the book than in the precis. There may also be other effects that the research literature doesn't catch. As Benkler, Faris and Roberts note, it would be easy to tell whether
10. efforts to suppress turnout had worked, if we had proper access to Facebook's internal data. But it is fair to say that Jamieson's research, as Mayer describes it, does not reflect a consensus in political science, and goes directly against other work grounded in the data.
11. This emphasis has political consequences. First - if it's the US media ecosystem rather than Russian intervention that is at fault, then the remedies involve confronting what e.g. Fox News has become rather than blaming Putin for everything.
12. (this does not rule out retaliation against Putin - but implies that even if Russian interference disappeared miraculously overnight, US democracy would still be in the same trouble it is). In other words, Mayer on Koch may be more helpful than Mayer on Russian influence
13. Second, as Benkler, Faris and Roberts mention (and as I argue at greater length here - foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/17/ame… ), if you do take influence operations seriously, overly grandiose claims about their consequences worsen the problem rather than contributing to the solution.
14. The fantastic work of @mollyeroberts and others on "flooding" in authoritarian regimes as well as the journalism of @AdrianChen and @peterpomeranzev highlights how general sense of chaos, 'nothing is true' etc can reinforce power of authoritarian leaders. See also @emptywheel
on how sketchy data is leading to a lot of confusion about what Russian influence operations are, or are not doing - emptywheel.net/2018/01/24/the…
15. @schneierblog and I have a new paper on common knowledge attacks which highlights how this can be weaponized against democracy. One of the implications is that panic attacks about influence operations amplifies them, so that weak attacks can have major second order effects.
16. This implies two problems. First - that overly exaggerated stories about Russian influence distract from the real problems of American democracy. Second, that they actually amplify that influence, by creating strong second order consequences out of weak first order attacks.
17. Perhaps the Jamieson book is really strong and will put paid to these worries. Perhaps alternatively, Mayer should have written a piece that better reflected the disagreements of social scientists around this question, rather than highlighting one person's alarming sounding
18. claims and treating other, less sexy and more skeptical accounts in a relatively perfunctory and dismissive way. I suppose we'll see when the book becomes available. Finis.
