https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump
«Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackersâwhom she terms âdiscourse saboteursââand on five decadesâ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesnât require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that âyou can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.â She continued, âIâm not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. Iâm arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.â
The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In two hundred and twenty-four pages of extremely dry prose, with four appendixes of charts and graphs and fifty-four pages of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, âRussian mastermindsâ pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media âinadvertently helped them achieve their goals.â»