Persuasive point in the article: Russia’s Facebook ad buy was a tiny fraction of Trump’s own Facebook ad buy.

Unpersuasive point in the article: “the literature” tells us that political ads don’t work. Does “the literature” explain why so many voters believed so many false negative things about Hillary Clinton and, to a lesser extent, false positive things about Donald Trump? If a Facebook ad presented as news — as opposed to a TV commercial — and repeated a false story about Hillary, didn’t this contribute to whatever force caused people to believe the false story? As a Facebook user, I’ve seen my friends circulate absolute crap on Facebook — stories that are already up on Snopes and sound like they should be on Snopes. I’ve seen skewed stories posted from questionable sources. What, then, of damaging stories that are false but sound plausible? Lots of people get their news from Facebook now; some of that is links to legitimate news organizations, but some of it is hearsay and some is fake news. Are users making the distinction? Apparently not.

And while it is true that Trump and his campaign were evidently beyond embarrassment and got away with countless things that individually would have ended prior campaigns, it is still possible that his campaign would be reluctant to do openly certain things, like circulating particular stories, that Russian intelligence acting through fronts would not hesitate to do. Until we compare Russia’s ad content with Trump’s official ad content, we don’t know if Russia’s impact was in fact negligible compared to Trump’s own advertising.