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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

Dec 18, 2018

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.

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Nate Silver

@NateSilver538

Dec 18, 2018

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

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.

2:08 AM · Dec 18, 2018

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research shows that the affect on undecided voters of social media ads/prompts, even if not clicked, could (and I stress could) be extremely large - see research of

for example...

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and here you thought I wasn’t listening to your talk :-)

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I couldn't agree more. Isn't it time for Nate to start predicting probabilities for the Golden Globes or something?

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Ding ding ding. The problem with allowing everyone to vote is that everyone gets to vote. Educated and informed or not. There’s also no law that says a citizen can’t use information from outside the country to make their decision.

LauraWalkerKC@counter.social

@LauraWalkerKC

Dec 18, 2018

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@NateSilver538

You might be discounting the fact that Trump promoted the same ideas, and so the actual engagement/RTs of the Russian accounts might not tell the whole story - the engagement/promotion of the Trump echos are likely astronomical.

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And how many were read? How many that were read were read by people who voted? And how many of those CHANGED their vote because of a tweet? We're talking tiny numbers. And it's all the "stupid" people, right? All these geniuses commenting were too smart to be influenced

@FJforAll

Dec 18, 2018

Replying to

@NateSilver538

In the three states that swing the electoral map, what percentage does that represent? How does that compare to 0.1%? It seems questionable to say that the Russian trolls won the election, but it seems like a pretty tiny percent of the electorate actually decided the election?

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**swung**