And you continue:
- Marketing, propaganda, etc., they only can "reinforce" and not change minds.
I suppose the billions upon billions of dollars spent on marketing and propaganda only serve to woo new buyers, never to pull someone from a competitor?
You seem to imply there is not a significant number of voters who hold off on judgement until nearing voting time...are their minds being changed, or shaped? Influenced?
And it goes both ways...their fake news that harms opposition, as well as fake news that helps their candidate.
I cannot understand how people can be this willfully misguided.
And that is entirely independent of the question of "What effect did Russian propaganda have on the 2016 election". Which is a decent question, but ultimately it's impossible to answer with certainty.
I mean, we have a scientific consensus on climate change, refused by 30-40% of the population.
What will the acceptance for a study that's purely based on modeling/statistics be that has no consensus and decades of study and published works to back it?
I would like to see it modeled, sure. But the idea that it would change the people's minds on this who need to be changed, is just not plausible. But if marketing works, maybe they will...