Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections
To answer the question at the end of the post: probably none.<p>As others have said, it&#x27;s incredibly unlikely that a tweet is going to change your mind about anything.<p>Having worked both in and out of the journalism industry, I know that journalists get a lot more worked up about what people say online than everyone else does. They think it matters a lot more than it does (probably why they got into the job of saying things online in the first place). Twitter is completely irrelevant to most people. They&#x27;re vaguely aware it exists, but it really doesn&#x27;t matter.<p>In TFA, you can see each tweet getting a few hundred to a few thousand likes&#x2F;retweets, and most of those identified by the analysts as bots. So each tweet is maybe reaching an audience of a couple hundred humans, at best (and it&#x27;ll be the same few hundred humans for all such tweets). How many of those humans are going to change their vote because of that tweet?<p>It&#x27;s irrelevant.<p>But it is dangerous. Politicians get very nervous about elections. If the politicians are persuaded that any of this matters, then they&#x27;ll be more inclined to stop it mattering. And that means laws that curb free speech online, monitor communication, prevent encryption, and all the rest of the shitstorm we&#x27;re facing.