SULLUM

showing Satan arm wrestling Jesus while proclaiming, "If I win, Clinton wins." It generated 71 impressions and 14 clicks.

The indictment makes much of the rallies instigated by IRA operatives but never says how many people participated in them. In 2016, the Times reports, "a dozen people" attended an IRA-orchestrated "Stop the Islamization of Texas" rally in Houston, while a simultaneous counterprotest, also organized by the Russians, attracted "a far larger crowd." Two dozen?

The indictment says the IRA spent "thousands of U.S. dollars every month" on social media ads. That's roughly one-millionth of the ad revenue that Facebook alone receives each month.

According to Facebook, ads bought by the IRA, most of which weighed in on contentious social issues rather than endorsing or opposing candidates, represented "fourthousandths of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed." Twitter Acting General Counsel Sean Edgett testified in October that "the 1.4 million election-related Tweets that we identified through our retrospective review as generated by Russianlinked, automated accounts constituted less than three-quarters of a percent (0.74%) of the overall election-related Tweets on Twitter at the time."

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.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @ jacobsullum. To find out more about Jacob Sullum and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.