A new study says Russian trolls didn’t sway the 2016 election. Was the threat overhyped?

The Russian trolls were overhyped.

That’s the implication from a new study in Nature Communications, written by a team of six academics who tried to assess whether the Russian government’s Twitter propaganda effort during the 2016 campaign actually changed users’ minds. “We find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior,” the authors wrote.

This isn’t a surprise to me — I’ve long believed the Russian troll farms had little impact. But with the afterlife of the Trump-Russia scandal remaining fiercely contested — with many on the right and some “heterodox” leftists continuing to question whether Russia did anything at all of significance — it’s worth looking back and taking stock of what the Russian government did do that year. Because it wasn’t nothing.

Basically, the Russian government tried to intervene in the 2016 election, and it did so in two main ways...