Doctor Mike

And I wrote what I think to this day is a very dry and boring report analyzing this massive data set that the platforms identified and turned over to the Senate of evidence of the Russian Internet Research Agency creating propaganda and pretending to be Americans on their platforms from 2015 to mid-2017 or so.

So the election happened to be in that time, but the operation was bigger than that.

And so I did your basic sort of statistical analyses, descriptive analyses, like here's what happened.

The report was released to the public, and then the Senate used it to inform their very, very large reports, which intersected with Mueller's investigations and a bunch of other things.

So I was not asked to look at, did it swing the election?

I didn't have data that equipped me to do that.

It was really, and I don't think it did for the record, but that was just the work that I was asked to do.

So I talked about the report on Sam Harris and then Joe reached out and he said, you know, will you come on?

And, you know, I was a little bit wary because.

I wanted to reach his audience, though, because like it had become so partisan by that point because there was the collusion investigation.

Nothing I did had anything to do with the collusion investigation, because, again, we should be able to hold two ideas in our heads at once, which is the interference happened.

It is real.

It is a thing that we should want to understand, right?

Foreign propagandists interfering in the American discourse is a thing that will continue to happen forever.

And is it the most serious thing?

It is not the most serious thing.

Is it serious?

Yes.

If we don't treat it seriously, they're only going to get better at it.

So why wouldn't we want to understand what it is, how it works, how to be aware and how to disrupt it?