If you look at the indictments of the Russians who were involved in this influence campaign
these very clever Russian operatives had been infiltrating social media in the United States
in an effort to set people against each other and also to elect Donald Trump.
But when you look at what they actually did, you will start to see that is a big exaggeration
that's the thesis!
Information warfare against the United States.
Whatever platform you look at, the amount of material that the Russians generated
was just a tiny tiny fraction of what was out there.
According to the indictment the Russians spent thousands of dollars on social media ads each month.
Well that's about a millionth of the ad revenue that Facebook alone receives each month.
It's the same story if you look at YouTube,
the Russians were responsible for producing 43 hours of political content.
Which may seem like a lot until you realize
that 400 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
Most of them have low view counts, less than 3% had more than 5000 views.
So clearly this did not amount to much in the context of advertising online
and the context of online speech.
Information warfare against the United States.
Supposedly these Russian trolls were very sophisticated about the American political system,
they knew exactly what they were doing, they knew how to manipulate American voters.
But if you look at what they actually did, they look not so professional.
A lot of these posts sound like they are written by people whose native language is not English.
And you would expect sophisticated operatives to speak better English
so they could pass themselves off as American.
They created some very crude propaganda that they seemed to think would be effective.
For example, there's an ad on Facebook that showed Jesus arm wrestling with Satan.
Now you may say to yourself 'that seems ridiculous.'
But perhaps people will fall for that.
In fact, it generated very little interest, very few clicks, very few viewings.
Information warfare against the United States.
The indictment makes much of pro Trump and anti Clinton rallies
that were instigated by Russians.
But it doesn't tell us how many people actually participated in these rallies
or whether they came off at all.
There's one example of a rally in Texas that was organized to oppose Sharia law
and according to the New York Times it attracted a dozen people.
There was a counter protest that according to the New York Times
was also organized by the Russians
and attracted a much larger crowd, that could be two dozen or three dozen people for all we know.
We know that some people in the real world responded to the agitation for rallies.
But we don't know whether this really amounted to a significant percentage of voters.
Information warfare against the United States.
Nor do we know any of this advertising,
even the ad that got more attention than the one with Jesus arm wrestling Satan,
whether they actually changed anybody's mind, or energized them in any way,
or got them to behave in any way different from how they would have behaved otherwise.
You know, pro Trump people might turn out for a pro Trump rally.
Anti Clinton people might come out for an anti Clinton rally.
But the fact that they show up does not necessarily change the outcome of the election
or make the United States a more acrimonious, you know, society let alone sow chaos.
Information warfare against the United States.
And the reason that this sort of hysterical response is rather alarming
is that at bottom we're talking about speech.
If you look at the actual content of these ads, these tweets,
it's not qualitatively different from all the, you know, home grown-
all the home grown crap you can routinely see online.
this is essentially the same, I mean, doesn't mean it's good, doesn't mean it's substantive,
doesn't even mean it's accurate.
Some of the arguments might have held some water, some of them were completely ridiculous.
That's true of American political discourse in general.
It's simply the fact that these people were born in another country
that somehow makes this more alarming than it would otherwise be.
I mean if there is a problem with American democracy
in the sense that people are easily swayed by emotion,
this is not a problem that the Russians created,
this is a problem that is much broader than that.
And to try and blame, you know, divisions within the American political culture on the Russians
seems completely absurd to me.
It's much easier, you know, to blame foreign invaders for these problems
but the truth is that if voters are making decisions for stupid reasons
that is not the Russians' fault.