Have you Heard Nate Silver's Thoughts about Russiagate? He's not a Believer. It's a Math Thing.

If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I'm not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there's not much evidence that they were effective.

Did Russia meddle?  Yes.  Did that meddling make much of a difference?  According to Nate, the answer is no.

“The scale was quite small and there's not much evidence that [Russian social media memes] were effective.”

For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on... 5,000 tweets? That's **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day.https://t.co/LI8wt6tua8pic.twitter.com/I2XOIf0rdy

5,000 might sound like a big number, but compared to the 500,000,000 tweets that are served up each and every day by Twitter shows that 5,000 is actually a very teensy number.  It’s a matter of scale.  As Nate puts it:

“5,000 tweets? That's **nothing**”

What fraction of overall social media impressions on the 2016 election were generated by Russian troll farms? 0.1%? I'm not sure what the answer is, but suspect it's low, and it says something that none of the reports that hype up the importance of them address that question.

Blaming Hillary’s loss in 2016 on interference by Russians is like assigning responsibility for an earthquake to a child throwing a pebble in a lake.  Yes, it happened, there is evidence that it happened, just as there is evidence that America often meddles in foreign elections. How much of an impact could 0.1% of all social media impressions actually make?  THAT is a tremendously important question, and it is typically not included in breathless media reports reporting the words of anonymous officials in the intelligence community.  And HOW exactly did these “posts” sway the minds of innocent Americans?

Has anyone here actually seen the democracy-destroying meme’s that the Russians were putting out in 2016?  Here is one, courtesy of Chris Hayes:

This is an actual meme from the Russian troll farm, in which Jesus counsels someone addicted to masturbation: “Reach out to me and we will beat it together.”🤔 pic.twitter.com/jCaximcQHk

Seriously folks, I’d like to understand how viewing this tweet would make a Democratic leaning voter stay home and thus enable Trump to win in 2016.   Because I don’t see the nefariousness of it.

The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205.

Our job as Americans and as Republicans is to dislodge the traitors from every place where they've been sent to do their traitorous work.