the articles they posted had lots of explanations of how the writer of said articles thought things work, perhaps they (the poster) thinks that these things work as laid out in the articles and thus are not required to explain in extra detail how they think these things work.

In relation to percentages, lots of the articles had numbers, you could also do the work of deriving percentages from the numbers if you were so inclined.

>did you even notice you didn't answer the question,

the way English and Internet communication work if you quote a question and then give a bunch of links it is reasonable to assume that is the way they are answering the question - in short they believe that the links they provide are a good faith explanation of 'what degree "they" "influence" an election in our "reality"'.

>and please explicitly acknowledge opinions as such.

You seem to want them to do an awful lot of work to answer your short one paragraph question!

> the articles they posted had lots of explanations of how the writer of said articles thought things work, perhaps they (the poster) thinks that these things work as laid out in the articles and thus are not required to explain in extra detail how they think these things work.

My question was whether the poster realized propaganda/misinformation ran on stories, since that (and only that) is what he was posting (with no accompanying assertion, a genuinely impressive technique, if intentional (no accusation, just sayin')).

> In relation to percentages, lots of the articles had numbers, you could also do the work of deriving percentages from the numbers if you were so inclined.

You could also get some percentages with a random number generator. Are you asserting that reasonably accurate quantitative (percentage) truth can be derived from these articles? If so, I'd like to see you explain how, and also how you would determine your theory is correct in fact.

> the way English and Internet communication work if you quote a question and then give a bunch of links it is reasonable to assume....

Oh, I am aware. Heck, the "quote a question and then give a bunch of links" isn't even required, since what "is reasonable" varies widely depending on the topic.

> ...that is the way they are answering the question...

But they didn't even try to answer the question that was asked. This is the beauty of just posting links: no claim of them being an answer is made, readers can assume for themselves that they have answers the question, and confirmed the meme.

> ...in short they believe that the links they provide are a good faith explanation of 'what degree "they" "influence" an election in our "reality"'.

People are welcome to believe whatever they like, but I am under the impression that what is being discussed here is at least an attempt at the truth. Could I be mistaken?

I will ask you point blank: do you care what the truth of the matter is here?

>You could also get some percentages with a random number generator. Are you asserting that reasonably accurate quantitative (percentage) truth can be derived from these articles? If so, I'd like to see you explain how, and also how you would determine your theory is correct in fact.

Ok there's a lot to unpack in what you said here but let's try .-

>Are you asserting that reasonably accurate quantitative (percentage) truth can be derived from these articles?

why would I? I didn't post the articles but anyway I think we are once again back to something you seem to like to do which is to demand quite a lot more work from other people than you seem to be willing to put in.

You made a short one paragraph statement that there was no proof of these things, the post then followed with a lot of links that I suppose the person who made the post had to gather in some way (perhaps they had it in their bookmarks tagged "election-manipulation" or something so it was relatively easy.

Then you claimed that was not good enough and that they didn't answer the question and then demanded they post things "In percentage terms please, and please explicitly acknowledge opinions as such." which is a lot more work than you put into that demand.

Then when you say >If so, I'd like to see you explain how

Again it seems that you want me to read through all of that posters stories, provide you with statistics pulled from the stories (which will involve doing the actual work of putting the numbers in various stories into a stastical format) and an argument as to how they apply.

That is quite a lot of work to answer someone who posted a couple sentences, my advice is, if you want to disprove this person's assertions - do your own work.

>and also how you would determine your theory is correct in fact.

Well I probably wouldn't have any particular way of determining if my theory is correct because it would take time and time is a limited thing therefore you are probably required in life to accept some information you take in as true until such a time as you need to confirm, I don't have much to do with the Russia, or American Elections or any of that so I would probably just take in things that seemed reasonably argued as being truthful.

This means I might accept as true things that are false, and vice versa, because time is limited and I cannot fact check everything.

That said one way I might check if my theory was true is if people I disagreed with on the internet provided rebuttal arguments in the way of other links with numbers in them, because that would seem to me to be a good way of making an argument.

>People are welcome to believe whatever they like, but I am under the impression that what is being discussed here is at least an attempt at the truth.

Frankly it does not seem to me that you are making an attempt at telling the truth, it seems you are making an attempt at saying that something is false without providing any data as to why it is false. Maybe because gathering data is time intensive.

>do you care what the truth of the matter is here

Not really, I care that argumentation is clear enough that people can perhaps approximate the truth of whatever is being discussed through following that argumentation.