The impact of propaganda is notoriously hard to assess, but there is no evidence available to the public that identifying targets to bombard with anti-extremist messages on Twitter and Facebook – what's been called "digital frisking" – deters vulnerable people from being talked into taking the road to Syria or violent extremism at home.
"We have been working for three years to inform very diverse people about why they should consider this problem, how they can reduce the impact of propaganda, and what are the possible ways of countering propaganda as a phenomenon," Yurkova said.
A Twitter spokesman declined to comment directly on the research but the company has previously sought to challenge external researchers' attempts to quantify how information is diffused and amplified on its platform by arguing they do not have the full picture of how Twitter users are exposed to tweets and thus aren't well positioned to quantify the impact of propaganda-spreading bots.
The Ottoman army became increasingly discontented under the impact of Ṣafavid propaganda among the already heterodox Janissaries.
They allowed the movement - and indeed British intelligence - to gauge opinion in France and also to judge the impact of their propaganda effort conducted via the BBC.
With Brexit, both Facebook and Twitter have yet to release this sort of 'full reach' analysis — so it's still not possible to quantify the potential impact of Kremlin propaganda on the EU referendum vote.
Regardless of the impact of the propaganda campaigns, the Catholic immigrants helped to strengthen Diem's support base.
The impact of fake news, propaganda and misinformation has been widely scrutinized since the US election.
It could (and did) freely set up ranks of bot accounts on their platforms to tweet and share content created by RT, for example — frequently skewed towards promoting the Leave campaign, according to multiple third party studies — amplifying the reach and impact of its digital propaganda without having to send the tech firms any more checks.
And, indeed, the social media firms themselves, whose platforms have been the unwitting conduits for lots of this stuff, shaping the data they release about it — in what can look suspiciously like an attempt to downplay the significance and impact of malicious digital propaganda, because, well, that spin serves their interests.
In fact, the September 11th attacks were themselves intended to draw in disparate jihadist groups that had resisted Mr bin Laden's attempts to unify the movement both through the huge propaganda impact of the deed itself, and also in reaction to America's anticipated military response.
