Don't Blame Russia: The Entire Point of the Two-Party System is to "Divide the Country"

FiveThirtyEight is all in when it comes to Russiagate. The latest is this morning's "Why We’re Sharing 3 Million Russian Troll Tweets," by Oliver Roeder, which invites readers to peruse a database of tweets allegedly produced by the infamous Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg:

FiveThirtyEight has obtained nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. To our knowledge, it’s the fullest empirical record to date of Russian trolls’ actions on social media, showing a relentless and systematic onslaught. In concert with the researchers who first pulled the tweets, FiveThirtyEight is uploading them to Github so that others can explore the data for themselves.

The data set is the work of two professors at Clemson University: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren. Using advanced social media tracking software, they pulled the tweets from thousands of accounts that Twitter has acknowledged as being associated with the IRA. The professors shared their data with FiveThirtyEight in the hope that other researchers, and the broader public, will explore it and share what they find. “So far it’s only had two brains looking at it,” Linvill said of their trove of tweets. “More brains might find God-knows-what.”

The data set published here includes 2,973,371 tweets from 2,848 Twitter handles. It includes every tweet’s author, text and date; the author’s follower count and the number of accounts the author followed; and an indication of whether the tweet was a retweet. The entire corpus of tweets published here dates from February 2012 to May 2018, with the vast majority from 2015 to 2017.

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“Russia’s attempts to distract, divide, and demoralize has been called a form of political war,” the authors conclude in their paper. “This analysis has given insight into the methods the IRA used to engage in this war.”

This war may or may not have had an effect on the 2016 election, but it certainly wreaked havoc. The man who would be named national security adviser followed and pushed the message of Russian troll accounts, according to the Daily Beast, and Trump’s eldest son, campaign manager and digital director each retweeted a Russian troll in the month before the election. Twitter itself informed 1.4 million people that they’d interacted with Russian trolls.

But the researchers emphasized that the Russian disinformation and discord campaign on Twitter extends well beyond even that.

“There were more tweets in the year after the election than there were in the year before the election,” Warren said. “I want to shout this from the rooftops. This is not just an election thing. It’s a continuing intervention in the political conversation in America.”

“They are trying to divide our country,” Linvill added.

No, they're trying to make money. Nothing refutes Moon of Alabama's analysis from when Mueller's indictment was made back in February: The Internet Research Agency is a run-of-the-mill marketing firm engaged in the type of commercial activity common in the online world. You would think that FiveThirtyEight would reference the story from earlier this month of Twitter closing millions of fake accounts, which primarily didn't have to do with Russia but normal business activity of boosting commercial products and personalities.

Does a foreign power really need to expend any effort to divide the United States? That's the entire point of the two-party system.