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.

Comments

I'm starting to think...

[gatfirls]

...maybe there was something untoward going on in this last election cycle. Can't put my finger on it though.

The alleged "spending spree" was two years long.

[Nutria]

I don't think BeauHD (or CNet, or both) know what a "spree" is.

Just Plain Disgusting

[mschwanke97402]

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.

Re:Just Plain Disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

The Russia narrative you've been fed is a lie.

It's just the butt hurt elite lashing out at Trump because they didn't get their way. The same response you see from children when they lose a game and refuse to accept it. Always someone else's fault.

Not irony at all. Standard PR propaganda.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Re:Process of elimination

[K. S. Kyosuke]

North Korea? Maybe...

Headline is alarmist

[Solandri]

at best, designed to deliberately mislead you to a desired conclusion at worst. From the blog post:

• The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn't specifically reference the US presidential election, voting or a particular candidate.
• Rather, the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum -- touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.
• About one-quarter of these ads were geographically targeted, and of those, more ran in 2015 than 2016.
• The behavior displayed by these accounts to amplify divisive messages was consistent with the techniques mentioned in the white paper we released in April about information operations.

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.

Re:$100k ? is that a lot?

[hyades1]

What are you missing? Among other things, this:

One hundred thousand dollars in ad spending might not sound like a lot of money, but it is a big deal for at least five reasons.

First, it confirms that Facebook was one of the pathways by which Russian operatives sought to influence the U.S. election.

Second, it raises the question of how those Russian operatives knew which U.S. voters to target, and whether the Trump campaign might have played any role.

Third, it casts a new light on Facebook's "fake news" problem, which looks more sinister if some of the misinformation spread on the platform in the run-up to the U.S. election was fueled by Russian-funded ad dollars or troll networks.

Fourth, it suggests that Facebook may have a more widespread oversight problem in its ad sales. As the Post's story notes, it is illegal for foreign nationals or governments to buy ads or spend money aimed at influencing a U.S. election. It now seems clear they have been using Facebook to do just that.

Finally, while $100,000 amounts to a miniscule fraction of U.S. election spending, it could go a long way in amplifying posts among a targeted audience. Facebook said only about 25 percent of the ads were geographically targeted. But it's worth remembering that the company has a history of not being forthcoming when it comes to the scale and mechanisms of misinformation on its platform. It's possible that the activities the company has uncovered and disclosed so far represent only a small part of a larger problem.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/09/06/why_russian_operatives_buying_american_political_ads_on_facebook_is_such.html