Russia’s trolls were barely background static in the 2016 campaign

Jacob Sullum in the NY Post

The New York Times, which last year breathlessly claimed that “Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics,” reports that Donald Trump’s “admirers and detractors” both agree with him that “the Russians intended to sow chaos” and “have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.” A Times editorial assures skeptics that “the Russian subversion effort” was “sophisticated” and “breathtaking” in scope.

That analysis is at odds with the paper’s own reporting, which describes Russian trolls as “sloppy” and “amateurish” bumblers who sounded suspiciously like foreigners while posing as Americans, left a trail that made it easy to catch them, and produced crude propaganda that amounted to a drop in the raging river of online political speech. The only thing breathtaking about this influence campaign is the hyperventilation of the alarmists who talk as if we are just a few angry tweets from the abyss.

As I said here:

What’s totally missing from the indictment is the real reason that the 2016 election has divided the country more than any time since the Civil War. The Russians set off a few damp squibs. Meanwhile our very own Liberal media, with the apparent support of a politicized FBI, CIA and DOJ began lobbing nuclear bombs in the direction of Donald Trump, claiming that his election was illegitimate. The entire Liberal Establishment joined “The Resistance” as if they were French freedom fighters opposing the Nazis. It wasn’t the Russians calling Trump Hitler, Mussolini and worse. It wasn’t the Russians who claimed that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election. It wasn’t the Russians who called Trump insane. It wasn’t the Russians who went on late night TV to tell dirty jokes about Trump fellating Putin. And it wasn’t the Russians who were demanding the end of the Trump administration via impeachment, a White House coup or assassination. That was the hysterics in the Liberal Establishment (along with the #NeverTrump Right).

Sullum again:

Richard Salgado, Google’s senior counsel on law enforcement and information security, testified that the company found 18 YouTube channels offering about 1,100 videos with political content that were “uploaded by individuals who we suspect are associated with this [Russian] effort.” The videos, which totaled 43 hours on a platform where 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute and more than 1 billion hours are watched every day, “mostly had low view counts,” with less than 3 percent attracting more than 5,000 views.

Salgado nevertheless deemed the Russian content “a serious challenge to the integrity of our democracy.” If our democracy cannot survive another 43 hours of political videos on YouTube, it was already doomed.