It is not the mental health of Twitter addicts that most concerns me, though; it is the well-being of the nation they collectively rule. To decision makers who spend most of their days ensconced in an elite bubble, Twitter can seem like a way out, a clear window into pure public opinion. In reality, it’s an extreme distortion.

Each week seems to throw up another example of organizations capitulating to outrage mobs on social media, whether they originate on the left or the right. In the past year, CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for controversial remarks about Israel and Disney dismissed (and then rehired) James Gunn over offensive jokes he tweeted a decade ago—in both cases due in part to anger on Twitter.

But while the best-known cases of social media influencing large institutions involve famous celebrities losing their jobs, the sway is just as strong in shaping the implicit assumptions and priorities of the country’s political class. The vast gulf between the great importance pundits ascribed to the Mueller investigation and the apparent disinterest with which most Americans have greeted its findings is Exhibit A.

Judging by the conventional wisdom on Twitter, the publication of the Mueller report should have been the defining event of the Trump presidency. If Mueller found Donald Trump guilty of obstruction of justice, the president’s approval ratings would tank. Conversely, if Mueller exonerated Trump, there would be a broad backlash against Democrats; Trump would then be well on his way to reelection in 2020.

Instead, the most anticipated news event of the year has barely left a trace in public opinion. According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, the government shutdown, which affected the lives of millions of Americans, had a clear and immediate impact on Trump’s popularity; the Mueller report did not. In fact, 42 percent of people approved of Trump at the beginning of March, before Mueller delivered his report to Attorney General William Barr, and 42 percent approved of Trump at the beginning of April, after Barr released a summary of the report that seemed to exonerate Trump. Now that much of the report is public, the number stands at, yes, 42 percent.

According to just about every study that has been conducted on the question, Twitter is not representative in the slightest. The Pew Research Center, for example, has found that less than a quarter of Americans log on to Twitter with any regularity. And as The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal points out, those regular users differ from the wider population: “In the United States, Twitter users are statistically younger, wealthier, and more politically liberal than the general population.”

Politics Twitter is a bubble in itself. Among the minority of Americans who regularly use Twitter, a majority never tweet about politics. According to a 2016 study, fewer than one in five active Twitter users—which is to say about one in 20 Americans—report posting about politics “some” or “a lot” of the time.