Fourteen ads and the metadata that Facebook provided about them have now passed into the public domain. An analysis of that metadata shows that the ads racked up very few impressions, but that the click-through rate on the ads was very, very, very high. According to a couple dozen digital-marketing people whom I’ve been in touch with, as well as my own direct previous experience, this is about the maximum possible performance one could get.

3.3 million Americans directly followed one of the Russian Facebook pages.

As a result of the ad campaign and the evident audience-building skill of the Russian trolls, approximately 3.3 million Americans ended up following a Russian page, based on Facebook’s data, according to Senator Warner. That’s a lot of people. So far, Facebook has not committed to notifying any of them or us.

Despite that, with the evidence on hand, it would be impossible to say that the campaign swung the election.

Even given the skill and reach of the Russian disinformation campaign, based on what we know, it is highly unlikely that the ads—or the campaign as a whole—swung the election. The amount of Russian content on Facebook was a tiny sliver of the overall content (or political discussion) on the platform.

To swing the election, the campaign would have had to be highly targeted in the states that decided the election: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Senator Burr, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, opened the hearing with some important numerical context. The ad spends in those states were tiny. The total amount spent targeting Wisconsin was a mere $1,979; all but $54 was spent prior to the completion of the primary, and none of the ads even mentioned Trump. The spending in Michigan and Pennsylvania was even smaller. The organic reach in these states was undoubtedly larger, but based on everything we’ve seen or been told by Congress, and given the tremendous resources at play in the U.S. presidential election, the known aspects of the Russian disinformation campaign could not have played a major role even in the states that were decided by very few votes.

All of this is premised on the idea that this is all there is to the disinformation campaign. That could turn out to be wrong, but this is all that Congress has managed to extract from the companies, and (presumably) all that the companies have managed to extract from themselves.

Neither Facebook nor Twitter has seen evidence that Russian pages used voter data to target ads or posts.

There had been some speculation that the most effective way to swing the election would be to target small numbers of voters in the three key northern states. That may very well be true, but Facebook and Twitter both said they had seen no evidence of the voter file being used to build specific audiences.