This is Dahlia Lithwick. I'm host of this, the Amicus podcast, and co-host with Rick Hassan of our very special election meltdown series, which we've just wrapped. If you enjoyed this series, I want to let you know that there's more of it. We did extended and bonus interviews with Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project,

Professor of Government at Dartmouth, Brendan Nyen, Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap,

and Michigan Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson.

I think they really give the fullest scope of all the issues that we have covered in this series,

and all of them are available right now

if you sign up for Slate Plus.

It's only $35 for the first year, and you'll be helping support the work we do here at Amicus

and at Slate.

So head over to slate.com slash amicusplus to sign up now.

You don't want to miss out on these bonus episodes. And And in fact, we have a preview of one of those conversations right here where Brendan Nayan explains why he's more concerned about disinformation that originates within the United States than online influence campaigns coming from overseas.

The 2016 election was notable in a number of respects.

One was the unprecedented volume of misinformation and the role played by social media.

So I want to break that down.

The Russian interference effort was unprecedented in how brazen and open it was and seemed to have succeeded at gaining widespread distribution via Facebook and Twitter to many Americans.

So the Russian bots and trolls and all the different ways that the Russian

government effort tried to reach Americans was successful in the sense that millions of Americans

had at least some contact with content that was produced by the Russian government or people associated with it.

And the goal typically was to divide Americans.

In some cases, they promoted miss and disinformation.

But in other cases, they simply highlighted real stories or real issues that divided Americans or that they thought might

polarize us against each other. The question, though, is what effect that effort had?

To answer that question, it's necessary to think about all the different kinds of information

...