Thursday, February 01, 2018
Did Russian Twitter bots really jump on #ReleaseTheMemo
The claim, widely repeated in the media (e.g., here), is that “Russian bots” increased the use of the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo by 233,000 percent! First, without knowing the numbers (from what to what), percent increases are meaningless. An increase from 1 to 2 is a 100% increase. Any low starting number (like 0, before the subject was even raised) can generate huge percentage increases. Nowhere I can see are the actual numbers reported.
But more importantly, the Hamilton 68 website (run by these people) that tracks these things does not track Russian “bots”, it tracks its alleged “pro-Russian influence network”, which consists of unknown people (could be me or you!), and even at that Hamilton 68 says “It should be reiterated that the presence of a hashtag on the Hamilton 68 dashboard does not necessarily suggest that the success of a hashtag is the result of Russian influence operations, nor does it mean that hashtag originated with the Russian-linked influence operation network we monitor.” None of these qualifiers are being reflected in the media coverage of this "story".
