What I would like to know is to what extent did the Russians attack any pro-Clinton posts on Facebook in particular. Could they set their bots to flood any Clinton comment with all of this negative crap?
Even if it was significant, I do believe that the way Facebook started functioning also had other impacts, beyond exacerbating the problem of the Russia attack.
I remember during the primary season a robust social media presence for both Clinton and Sanders campaign. In April I had to go back to Ohio and take care of my father with cancer for a few months. I did not spend a whole lot of time even following the campaign, let alone social media. When I got back to normal life in June/July, after the primary was over, I rarely saw any Clinton posts at all. At all. It was as if the Clinton supporters had disappeared on Facebook.
I later found out that all the groups supporting Clinton went private. I never intentionally used groups on Facebook or went out of my way to “like” them. I probably liked pages like Daily Kos, but I did not do so as a way of seeing the content, I just liked it. Once these groups went private it looked to me like the Clinton campaign went silent on social media.
It struck me as odd given the success Obama had using social media. Again, I was not aware how groups really worked on FB since I never used them intentionally to get my info. Friends that liked groups shared the content I enjoyed so I never needed to bother with looking for content or needing to “like” or join groups to get it. It wasn’t until after the election that I asked friends about it and they told me the groups they were in went private because of the harassment, that pro Hillary stuff was being shared in those groups, but, since I just never used groups I did not realize this, so the pro Clinton stuff went nonexistent for me, save for the stuff sponsored by the campaign that would boost into my feed.
This had to have an impact on the enthusiasm building aspect of the campaign for sure. Only people willing to join a private group ever saw the positive content created in support of Hillary. That is fine, I get it, the harassment was real, and something needed to be done. It does not expand the campaigns reach though. I get why they went private based on my friends explanations of the types of comments they would get on their posts. At the same time that was likely the goal, to drive the pro Hillary FB groups private so the campaign message and supporter generated content did not spread to a wider audience like the Obama stuff did.
Did this Russian operation help create the environment where these pro Clinton groups felt they had to go private?
Beyond the potential Russian impact in this dynamic.
I also think the way Facebook presented content played a role. The sort of thing I am thinking about is how it presented friend shared posts from pages on Facebook, like Daily Kos, and pushed comments from other friends on that post to the person who shared the post. For example, in the January/February time frame of the primary, I made three pro Bernie comments on Daily Kos stories that were pro Bernie and anti Clinton in nature over a few days time. After the third post, I received a private message from a FB friend to desist from posting negative comments about Hillary (my comments were not about Hillary, mostly that I felt Bernie’s take on the economic picture resonated better than Clinton’s rhetoric did) on her shared posts. I had no idea what she was even talking about.
They were Kos stories shared on Facebook. The way Facebook presented it, I thought I was making a comment to the post shared on the Kos Facebook page, but since we were friends and she shared it, it pushed my comments on that post to be viewed by her evidently. We were work “Facebook friends”. As such, I would have never intentionally made political comments on something I thought she posted. But the way Facebook set it up, I either did not notice she was the sharer to what I commented on or she did not notice that I commented on the Kos story thread, not her shared post specifically, but Facebook pushed it out for her to see because we were friends on the platform.
Her desire to curate her own thread as she liked is fine, but after a small back and forth where I apologized and said I thought I was posting on the Kos story and not her share specifically, I no longer saw any content from her. She still shows up as a friend, so I presume it was even at this early stage she just joined a private group to discuss the campaign. I do not know if she viewed my comments as harassment, or if she was getting bombarded by other things as well.
I do think that the way Facebook was presenting comments people meant for certain audiences to their friends created a lot of needless strife too.