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It's far more likely that the Russians were just throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and seeing what stuck and that basing it on Cambridge Analytica data wouldn't have been meaningfully more effective than doing it at random. twitter.com/TedGenoways/st

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Nate Silver

@NateSilver538

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.

1:08 AM · Dec 18, 2018

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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. washingtonpost.com/amphtml/busine

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Nate Silver

@NateSilver538

Dec 18, 2018

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.

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Same here. I still think people do not grasp how prolific it was. I felt like I was losing my mind watching it happen in real time.

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The scale of the difference between an R and a D vote in key states was quite small. In case you hadn't noticed.

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As far as effectiveness goes, don't send a statistical thinker to do a humanities and psychology job. This was about meaning and cognition and about how messages pass around in paratexts and affect people. You can't measure it using your usual instruments, so don't try.

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But you gotta admit attributing a quote about masturbation to Jesus Christ that advises "we will beat it together" is some next-level comedy. I can't believe the Russians just got that lucky-- someone was meta-trolling. 😂

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Holy shit, Nate Silver breaking ranks with conventional wisdom and the Clinton machine. Better check and make sure my pigs are still on the ground and the geothermal is returning heat.

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The analysis of highly respected nonpartisan Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Center says otherwise, she demonstrates in Cyber War that the Russian attack on our democracy likely affected the outcome of the election.

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And the margin for the electoral college was less than the votes of Jill Stein in each of 3 states who collectively cost HRC the election. All had large AA populations in major urban areas, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.