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Facebook Sold Ads To Russian-Linked Accounts During Election (cnet.com)
Facebook announced on Wednesday that it sold $100,000 worth of ads to inauthentic accounts likely linked to Russia during the election. The ad spending spree took place between June of 2015 and May of 2017, and was associated with roughly 3,000 ads. CNET reports: "Our analysis suggests these accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia," Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief security officer, wrote in a blog post. Facebook said it's continuing to investigate the issue and reported its findings to U.S. authorities.
Most of the ads and accounts didn't have to explicitly do with the election or either of the then-candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Instead, they were focused on divisive political topics, including LGBT issues, immigration and gun rights.
Most of the ads and accounts didn't have to explicitly do with the election or either of the then-candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Instead, they were focused on divisive political topics, including LGBT issues, immigration and gun rights.
...maybe there was something untoward going on in this last election cycle. Can't put my finger on it though.
I'm outraged (because apparently that's trendy) that some persons who may have been linked to some *Russians* bought advertising from there world's largest social network. This definitely proves that someone somewhere is doing something and there's a chance it's got something to do with someone who has some links to someone in Trump's cabinet.
Traitors. Our countrymen have fought and died for this country you now desecrate.
All for the Red party.
I don't think BeauHD (or CNet, or both) know what a "spree" is.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
.. attacking Trump.
I traced down a couple of the websites that had trending stories on Facebook to a PR company in Washington.
One of the fake sites was Heatstreet.com. I can't recall the other.
Using DNS transfer records, the internet archive and other sources available on the internet I traced these sites to a PR company in Washington (they had tried to anonymize the domain transfers but through the transfer history you could determine what was going on).
These fake news sites, that were purchased just a few months prior to the election (heat street was originally a driveway heating site), which were converted to clickbait farms with RSS fed content, somehow managed to get enough readership to trend in Facebook with their fake news stories about Trump.
And now we have Slashdot running this story?
Did slashdot suddenly become "Fake news for nerds"?
How few people give a crap about a foreign power invading our country by stealth. Sowing dissension, stealing sensitive political and commercial data, and yes, doing their damnedest to influence an election, if not to alter the outcome then to cause as much suspicion as to undermine the results. So many of you making snarky or pithy comments, oh how smart you sound to everyone. +1s for the lot of you. Russia and China are not our friends. They have said as much many times. They have bragged about how cheap and easy it is for them to hack our open society compared to the billions we spend. From some of the comments I read here, mission accomplished for our enemies.
The irony being that the Democratic party has the least Democratic primary process because of Super Delegates.
It's not irony at all. It's standard, in Public Relations, to claim to be the opposite of whatever unpopular things you are, in order to confuse the general public.
Just like it's standard to preemptively accuse the opponents of doing whatever bad stuff it is that they do, so if somebody calls them on it it looks like a playground-argument: "You're a FOO!"
"No, YOU'RE a FOO!"
Want to know what the Democrats are? Just go down the list of everything bad they've ever accused the Republicans of being.
It's not symmetric. The Rs attract a DIFFERENT KIND of psychopath - the rule-bound, compensated sort, rather than the narcissistic, pathological liar, anything goes types. Working with Rs is like working with dynamite: Everything is fine until you do something that makes them think you're a bad guy, then BANG! Working with Ds is like working with nitroglycerine: BANG! at any moment for no apparent reason.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Pretty meaningless if they don't give any other information. How many other foreign countries buy ads on facebook?
How many others buy ads that are political in nature?
They're just singling out Russia because red scare 2.0 and they know it will get clicks. Boring.
Considering the U.S. has elections every 2 years, if running ads a year before the election counts as attempting to influence the election, then every ad run at any time is attempting to influence the upcoming election.