(National Sentinel) Groan Alert: More than two years after the 2016 election and more than a year after its House counterpart released its own report on alleged Russian “interference,” the Senate Intelligence Committee released its own analysis of ‘what happened’ and, of course, the Deep State’s lapdog media is hyping it as some new indictment of the Trump campaign.
The Washington Post reported:
A report prepared for the Senate that provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia’s disinformation campaign around the 2016 election found the operation used every major social media platform to deliver words, images and videos tailored to voters’ interests to help elect President Trump — and worked even harder to support him while in office.
The report, obtained by The Washington Post before its official release Monday, is the first to study the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), its chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), its ranking Democrat. The bipartisan panel also released a second independent report studying the 2016 election Monday. Lawmakers said the findings “do not necessarily represent the views” of the panel or its members.
The first report — by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm — offers new details of how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for interfering in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for targeted messaging. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found.
Wow — a blockbuster, huh?
Not so much, and not because we have WaPo hate, but because of what’s already been reported regarding Russian ‘influence’ and ‘interference’ in the 2016 election.
For instance, we know that Russia spent a minuscule amount of money on social media. Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified that a Russian troll farm spent a whopping $4,700 on ‘influence’ ads. That’s not exactly big money.
Trump 2020 Campaign spokesman Brad Parscale said in November that Moscow-linked troll farms only spent about $6K in the run-up to the 2016 election.
“You know, six thousand dollars is what they spent over the last six weeks. I was spending that per half second or per millisecond probably. So if you take that over six weeks they were spending .00001 cent per second. So I could get how maybe it would fly under the radar,” he told PBS’ “Frontline.”
Last year Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released a list of ads that were found to have been placed by Russian troll farms — and again, they were small in number. A USA Today analysis found that only about 100 of roughly 3,500 Facebook ads were pro-Trump or anti-Hillary. A hundred.
But this new Senate report aims to try to convince us — again — that “Russia helped Trump steal the election from Hillary,” though that clearly did not happen.
No wonder Congress’ approval rating is virtually non-existent.
It’s not that we don’t believe Moscow attempted to ‘influence’ our electoral process to some degree. It’s just that we don’t buy the lie that it made a difference in the outcome simply because there wasn’t that much influence to begin with.
Never miss a story! Sign up for our daily email newsletter — Click here!