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I think foreign influence on elections is probably much less impactful than many would think. Campaigns spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars for a si

I think foreign influence on elections is probably much less impactful than many would think. Campaigns spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars for a single election. There was some fear mongering article an election or two ago about Russian spending $100k on influencing tactics and everyone was like “omg they’re swaying the election! My candidate lost because of $100k!” Which to me seems like one of two options are true: Russia knows how to spend money a thousand times more effectively than any presidential campaign we’ve ever seen, and understands how to influence voters better than any American Or The $100k did absolutely nothing and we should go touch some grass

jfengel 2y ago
I'm also skeptical about the magnitude of their effect, but I wouldn't entirely discount it, either. The actual campaigns are limited in what they can do. They can buy a lot of advertising that insinuates terrible things about their opponent, but they can only lie so much before they are subject to defamation charges. They can't get away with paying operatives to pretend to be the other side, "concerned" about something the candidate did or said. I don't know how effective such tactics really are. It's entirely possible that they lay a groundwork of negativity: "Sure, that troll on the Internet might have been lying, but maybe that just means that this less-unbelievable thing is actually true." It's impossible to measure. But in an election that's close, it doesn't take much, especially with the Electoral College. Elections swing on a few thousand votes -- a microscopic fraction of the ~150,000,000 votes that are cast. So I concur that the effect is probably small. But I'm not so sure that the small effect is unimportant. It gets to shift things in ways that the campaigns, and even the supposedly non-aligned SuperPACs, can't do.

jfengel 2y ago

I'm also skeptical about the magnitude of their effect, but I wouldn't entirely discount it, either. The actual campaigns are limited in what they can do. They can buy a lot of advertising that insinuates terrible things about their opponent, but they can only lie so much before they are subject to defamation charges. They can't get away with paying operatives to pretend to be the other side, "concerned" about something the candidate did or said. I don't know how effective such tactics really are. It's entirely possible that they lay a groundwork of negativity: "Sure, that troll on the Internet might have been lying, but maybe that just means that this less-unbelievable thing is actually true." It's impossible to measure. But in an election that's close, it doesn't take much, especially with the Electoral College. Elections swing on a few thousand votes -- a microscopic fraction of the ~150,000,000 votes that are cast. So I concur that the effect is probably small. But I'm not so sure that the small effect is unimportant. It gets to shift things in ways that the campaigns, and even the supposedly non-aligned SuperPACs, can't do.