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- [00:02]
A
Hello and welcome to More Or Less and the first instalment of our numbers of the year. We've contacted our fellow stat seekers from across the globe to tell us which figures made waves in 2018. First up this week, one country in particular has dominated headlines across the globe for less than positive reasons. Russia has been accused of carrying out a botched assassination attempt in Britain, cyber attacks around the world and meddling in international politics. With all that in mind, let's hear our first number.
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B
My number of the year is 9,041,308.
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A
We like em big.
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B
That's the total number of tweets that we know the Russian Troll farm posted between 2014 and June of this year.
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A
Ben Nimmo is Information Defence Fellow at Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. He analysed data released this year by the biggest social media platforms.
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B
The Russian Troll Farm is an organization sometimes known as the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, which is a group of several hundred people paid by an oligarch very close to the Kremlin, who basically spent 12 hours a day online masquerading as citizens of various Western countries and posting all kinds of political and inflammatory comment, particularly about the US election. According to leaks from the troll farm, it's running well over a thousand accounts and it's got an audience of well over a million people. Over the 9 million plus tweets, slightly more than half were in Russian. They were saying that the Russian opposition and its leaders are in the pay of the CIA or in the pay of any particular Western government you would care to name. And it's always worth bearing in mind that the Russian troll operation started off as a way for the government to attack its own critics domestically.
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A
Ben told us that just under half of the output was in English. With those tweets focusing on the United
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B
States in 2016, they were very heavily engaged in attacking Hillary Clinton. And you would have Russian troll accounts masquerading as liberals and masquerading as Black Lives Matter activists masquerading as Democrat supporters. And they would all be posting hostile content about Clinton. And at the same time, you had a separate batch of accounts who were masquerading as far right Americans, white supremacists, Donald Trump supporters, and they were posting favorable comment about Donald Trump.
- [02:23]
A
The tweets didn't stop with the election. Trolls shifted their focus to polarising public opinion on issues like gun control.
- [02:29]
B
Some of them were very, very influential. You had accounts out there with over 100,000 followers. Some of the Facebook pages had two or three hundred thousand. One of the accounts on the day of the election in 2016 tweeted that there was evidence that the voting machines had been rigged in favor of Clinton, and it had 25,000 retweets in the space of a couple of hours. Trolls have always been known to boast about how effective they are, so you need to be very skeptical about the exact numbers, but all the indications are that the troll farm is still operating and it's still posting divisive content.
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A
Ben Nimmo and the Russian Trolls. Trolls masquerading as members of the public is one thing, but what happens when you can't even trust your leaders not to spread disinformation? Our American counterparts have been having a fruitful two years of disproving claim after claim. Heather Long, the economics correspondent for the Washington Post, spoke to us about her colleague's quest to separate fact from fiction.
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C
My number of the year is two.
- [03:32]
A
That's a bit more manageable than our first number. Or is it?
- [03:36]
C
I chose that because President Trump has made more than double the amount of false claims this year in 2018 than he did in his first year in office in 2017. 2017.
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A
Over the last two years, the team have been closely following the President's tweets, statements and speeches.
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C
In 2017, the team recorded just shy of 2,000 falsehoods that the President made this year. We're still obviously tallying the final numbers, but it looks like it's going to hit around 4,500. So again, more than double the amount. Last year he was doing about five inaccurate claims per day. This year he bumped that to 30 a day over 100 times. This year he's talked about passing the biggest tax cut in history. That is not true in the US context, nor in the global context. The tax cut that passed under the president was the biggest corporate tax cut in history, but not for families and households. Another one. He said around 70 sometimes that his border wall is already being built between the United States. While there has been some funding devoted to prototyping a wall or building some basic fencing down along that border between the US And Mexico, there certainly is no huge Trump wall down there. What really made double the number of false claims was what he was doing in the seven weeks leading up to the election. In particular, he would do these campaign like speeches. He would travel the country. He usually speaks for about an hour in front of the crowd. He loves it, he thrives on it. You can tell he's enjoying himself. But that's when we would start to see these 30 incorrect claims a day. So while he does still tweet some inaccurate things, I think the real driving force are those campaign like speeches, politicians bending the truth.
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A
Who ever heard of such a thing?
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C
What you would see with past presidents, whether it was George W. Bush or Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, you would see these sort of half truths. They would take a fact and spin it a little bit, you know, obviously to make themselves look better. Whereas President Trump will just flat out say things that are totally wrong. We expect 2019 is going to be even higher. Ahead of that 2020 reelection campaign.
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A
Have a long fighting real fake news. Next up we head to Nigeria and a number that shows how we take some basic necessities for granted.
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D
My number of the year is 90.8. That's the percentage of Nigerians who lack access to safe drinking water. Drinking water in Nigeria should be free of E. Coli. E. Coli is a type of bacteria that is essentially found in human intestines and so when you have E. Coli contamination, it is a sort of an indication that probably the water has been contaminated by feces of human or animals.
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A
Allwell Okpi is a journalist, researcher and community manager for fact checking organization AfricaCheck. They were asked to check a claim that 80% of Nigerian households did not have access to safe drinking water. After analyzing a large scale survey, Orwell discovered the claim was actually an underestimate.
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D
Of the 13,000 households surveyed, less than 10% drank water that was free of E. Coli. And then that's how we arrived at the number 90.8%. It does range from state to state, region to region. Generally, we noted that it's worse in the north compared to the south. Most of the states in the north has larger percentages in terms of households that couldn't get access to potable water compared to most of the states in the south. The survey also looked at it in terms of the source of the water and also tested the water at home.
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A
They found that the water for over 77% of households was contaminated at the source, in other words, from wherever the water originated.
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D
When they then checked at home, the number went up to 90.8%, meaning that obviously there was some form of extra contamination happening with transporting this water to the homes.
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A
Of all the piped water sources examined, only 34% were free from E. Coli and of the Open well surveyed, only 2% were free from contamination, meaning that
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D
about 98% of water from such sources were unsafe.
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A
Africa Czechs AllWell OkPi thanks to all our contributors for their numbers of the year. Do listen out for next week's edition where there'll be more numbers from around the world. Until next week, Bonano, Forres, Noyc Yard and a happy numerical New Year.