Matt Bivens describes the extent to which Russian Facebook postings swung the 2016 election:

Chest-thumping about how the FBI needs to drive the dastardly foreigners out of our Facebook and Twitter feeds was, of course, not new. It was always eye-rolling to anyone who looked into it.

For example, we’d been told it was a major national security concern that the Russians were using our own Facebook against us — dividing us from within, with devious and manipulative ad purchases! — because they hated our freedoms. But as summarized in the Columbia Journalism Review, at issue was a mere $100,000 in “Russian” Facebook ads over the entire election season, at a time when Facebook’s advertising revenue per day, much of it political in that pre-election moment, was running about $96 million. So the entire alleged months-long Russian propaganda campaign would have amounted to less than 0.1 percent of a single day’s Facebook ads.

(It gets even more ludicrous. The ads were of no actual coherence — they were obviously nothing more than random, revenue-generating clickbait. As cited by solemn U.S. Congress reports, “the Russians” had spent their $100,000 on a bunch of nonsense — ranging from ads for fake hotlines to get help with masturbation addiction, to banners with the words “Born Liberal!” over a peaceful skycape of birds. So this was almost certainly not a devious Kremlin-directed plot, and instead simply the sleazy-lazy business of spam and clickbait.)

For me, the symbolic pinnacle of this insanity was a cartoon supposedly weaponized against us by our Russian adversaries. It was of a muscular, rainbow-colored Bernie Sanders:

Rainbow Buff Bernie ran for a single day in 2016. It was clicked on 54 times. Yet the U.S. House Intelligence Committee addressed this social media posting as part of a formal report into Russian meddling in our affairs. It was a matter of the highest concern. The House report informed us “the Russians” paid the exchange rate equivalent of $1.60 for this. Buzzfeed at the time solemnly reported these “facts” — $1.60, spent to buy 54 clicks — yet instead of mocking Congress and the FBI for this lunacy, they dutifully tracked down the American citizen who originally drew the cartoon for a pro-Bernie Sanders coloring book, so that she could explain herself! (She told them, “I feel pretty violated and very confused!”)

Clearly by 2020 we needed the FBI and the national media working hand-in-hand to police our social media — because Russia! Iran!

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I’m switching over to expand on the statistics offered by the Columbia Journalism Review. Here are two paragraphs that many of my left-leaning friends desperately need to read slowly:

To begin with, the breathlessly repeated numbers on fake news are not as large as they have been made to seem when compared to the volume of information to which online users are exposed. For example, a New York Times story reported that Facebook identified more than 3,000 ads purchased by fake accounts traced to Russian sources, which generated over $100,000 in advertising revenue. But Facebook’s advertising revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 was $8.8 billion, or $96 million per day. All together, the fake ads accounted for roughly 0.1 percent of Facebook’s daily advertising revenue. The 2016 BuzzFeed report that received so much attention claimed that the top 20 fake news stories on Facebook “generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments” between August 1 and Election Day. Again, this sounds like a large number until it’s put into perspective: Facebook had well over 1.5 billion active monthly users in 2016. If each user took only a single action per day on average (likely an underestimate), then throughout those 100 days prior to the election, the 20 stories in BuzzFeed’s study would have accounted for only 0.006 percent of user actions.

Even recent claims that the “real” numbers were much higher than initially reported do not change the basic imbalance. For example, an October 3 New York Times story reported that “Russian agents…disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million users on Facebook, published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google’s YouTube service.” Big numbers indeed, but several paragraphs later the authors concede that over the same period Facebook users were exposed to 11 trillion posts—roughly 87,000 for every fake exposure—while on Twitter the Russian-linked election tweets represented less than 0.75 percent of all election-related tweets. On YouTube, meanwhile, the total number of views of fake Russian videos was around 309,000—compared to the five billion YouTube videos that are watched every day.

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The same CJU article offered another set of stunning numbers reflecting on the sorry state of “journalism”:

In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.