What's your point? People got there because they have trouble interpreting information, not because the information in mainstream media was particularly ambiguous.
What people believed 2 years later is not at all a meaningful survey of what the media was saying at the time!
"Russia hacked voting systems in 39 states before the 2016 Presidential election"
They would stick in a disclaimer like this:
> So, despite assurances from the Obama administration that the election’s integrity was not compromised, there was still a very large-scale Russian effort to mess with it. That means future elections, including ones next year, run the risk of being tainted.
But then proceed with an article like this:
> Apparently, the cyber intruders aimed to delete or alter voter data they got a hold of.
Last line of the article:
> But in the meantime, collusion with Trump or not, we now know that Russia has struck deeper into the heart of America’s democracy: its elections.
The whole thing is structured in the form of "nobody proved they did it but they sure tried so maybe they did/will" and leaves the reader to infer the result based on their political leanings. The polling after two years of that sort of coverage measures the extent to which those insinuations misled the public.
Like I said, people are bad at processing information, the article there isn't ambiguous, it talks about voter data and never about votes. It's sensationalized, but it's not hard to understand what it actually says either.
Voter rolls and campaign contributions aren't even maintained as sensitive information, the latter is published by the FEC, and most states more or less publish voter rolls. The Bloomberg article makes it sound like they tried to access/control the underlying storage, which would actually be problematic...
It's not ambiguous if you read it carefully, but you're essentially arguing "technically correct, the best kind of correct" for sensationalized reporting where it's known that many people won't even read past the headline.
You:
> The phrase 'Russia "hacked" the elections, making Trump win' implies tampering with the voting and vote counting.
Title of that article:
> Russia hacked voting systems in 39 states before the 2016 Presidential election
It's crafted to survive a mechanistic fact check while targeting the fact that people are bad at processing information.
No, it's just over estimating people, it's a matter of fact description of the contents of the article.
If Russia accesses the backend systems storing voter data, what are they supposed to report to ensure that they do not mislead people? (I say backend there because there's actual directly published voter data all over the place that is intended to be accessed by whoever).
It's really actually problematic and news that a foreign power is fiddling around with those backend systems, but apparently if you report that they did it, there will be years of controversy about how you reported that they hacked the election.
