joining us now former undersecretary of state is rick stengel and msnbc contributor clint watts and professor of management at mit sinan aral, the author of the hype machine, how social media disrupts our world. he s co-author of a new article for science magazine to understand when foreign interference affects our elections. professor aral, you have a whole blueprint for trying to assess mow social media is being impacted by foreign influences and what to do about it. what we know so far, russian misinformation reached 126 million people on facebook, 20 million on instagram, 10 million tweets on twitter. we know that 27% of americans saw misinformation in the final
intelligence committee found that russian influence efforts reached up to 126 million americans through facebook. their propaganda posts received nearly 77 million engagements. that includes reactions, shares, or comments. the report points out that a significant push was also taken on instagram which is owned by facebook where disinformation and propaganda reached at least 20 million people and gained 187 million engagements. on twitter nearly 1.5 million people were reached. more than 10 million individual tweets. more than a thousand videos were uploaded to youtube, which is a google platform. one report found that these videos were primarily geared toward after can americans, a significant number of targets by the russian disinformation group internet research agency. the goal according to these studies was to discourage black americans from voting in the
which may have had an impact on our election is likely to happen again. and there s a lot of learning there. the clip you ran is that any campaign that is approached by a foreign power should not welcome it, should not set up meetings to see what dirt you can get. they should in fact report those contacts to the fbi because it s quite likely to be a deliberate effort. the other thing that is more important and i wish he had spent more time on this, is that the attack was successful because russia manipulated our sentiment. 126 million facebook impressions, twitter ads that were designed to sort of stoke racial issues and other issues in this country. the american people really need to understand that what we see on social media, even if it sort of makes them feel good because it reinforced political opinions that they have, it may be somebody like russia or china or iran trying to manipulate our political process. so there s the question of whether yesterday moved the needle at all i
that you talk about the internet research agency. and how tens of millions of u.s. persons became engaged with the posts that they made, there were some 80,000 posts on facebook that facebook itself admitted 126 million people have probably seen the posts that were put up by the internet research agency. they had 3800 twitter accounts. and had designed more than 75,000 tweets that reached 1.4 million people. the internet research agency was spending about $1.25 million a month on all of this social media in the united states in what i would call an invasion in our country. would you agree that it was not a hoax?
demail were time to max neuroscience the impact on the regulation? i will refer to the report on that question. to release the document design in time to interfere with the 2016 u.s. presidential election. mr. mueller, which candidate was russia s hacking and dumping operations design to benefit hillary clinton or donald trump? mr. trump. is it possible that the sweeping and systematic efforts by russia had an effect on the outcome of the election? those issues had been investigated by other entities. 126 million facebook impressions and fake rallies and attacks on hillary clinton held would you rule out that it may have some effect on the russians? i am not going to speculate.