UH OH! Nate Silver noticed what 'none of the reports' about Russia and 2016 detail (the Resistance WON'T want to hear it)

Doug P. | 10:34 PM on December 17, 2018

Hillary Clinton is among Democrats loudly insinuating that a Russian “disinformation campaign” online contributed to her 2016 election defeat (and with memes like this who knows).

Pollster Nate Silver, who isn’t always exactly seen as being helpful to Donald Trump, is likely to be accused of anti-Hillary bias for making these points about Russia’s online activities:

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. https://t.co/6NZkf5s1Ww

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 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.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 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.https://t.co/LI8wt6tua8 pic.twitter.com/I2XOIf0rdy

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 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.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 18, 2018