In the campaign exit interview, Warren explained that due to online bullying from the left she could not endorse Sanders saying, “We are responsible for the people who claim to be our supporters and do really dangerous, threatening things to other candidates.”
The podcast — as well as Sanders’ national press secretary at the time Briahna Gray who also wrote The Intercept, — repeatedly attacked Warren online, making Sanders’ request for his supporters to tone down their attacks seem disingenuous.
Examining who falls for online political manipulation, Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference collected datasets with over 43 million election-related posts on Twitter in the span of Sept. 16 to Nov. 9, 2016 which included accounts the US Congress associated with Russian trolls.
While the differences between spreaders and non-spreaders showed spreaders to have a more conservative political ideology in 2016, the study concluded that some spreaders fell for online manipulation campaigns and that identifying victims was the first step in containing the spread of online manipulation campaigns.
No one is immune to misinformation on social media as it is the level of trust in democracy and the kind of information spread on social media platforms that can make it easy to create victims of online manipulation.
