Russian Interference in US Election

There is quite a bit of coverage of a report given to the Senate Intelligence Committee by a company called New Knowledge.  Their report , which is really a white paper, does not highlight the data most often quoted i.e. this one small part:

"None of the platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet) appears to have turned over complete sets of related data to SSCI. Some of what was turned over was in PDF form; other data sets contained extensive duplicates. Each lacked core components that would have provided a fuller and more actionable picture. For example:

-The platforms didn’t include methodology for identifying the accounts; we are assuming the provenance and attribution is sound for the purposes of this analysis.

-They didn’t include anonymized user comments, eliminating a key path to gauge impact.

-They didn’t include any conversion pathway data to elucidate how individuals came to follow the accounts, eliminating another key path to gauge impact.

-There was minimal metadata."

This is not exactly news, since it has been around for over a year, and may be the reason New Knowledge did not emphasize it more.  What is different is the breadth and depth of the new information.  New Knowledge had access to other relevant data from other than the main social media platforms (e.g. Tumblr and others) that showed the wide swath of areas the Russians were influencing and the numbers of messages and images they managed to disseminate.  It is a bigger story than what the social media may have withheld.

I have said all along that the social media giants were under reporting and misreporting the Russian effort by looking for accounts paid for in rubles or with IPs in Russia.  Anybody who knows this kind of work would know that was not going to disclose the scope of the effort.