Facebook Says 10 Million US Users Saw Russia-linked Ads (reuters.com)

Some 10 million people in the United States saw politically divisive ads on Facebook that the company said were purchased in Russia in the months before and after last year's U.S. presidential election, Facebook said on Monday. From a report: Facebook, which had not previously given such an estimate, said in a statement that it used modeling to estimate how many people saw at least one of the 3,000 ads. It also said that 44 percent of the ads were seen before the November 2016 election and 56 percent were seen afterward. The ads have sparked anger toward Facebook and, within the United States, toward Russia since the world's largest social network disclosed their existence last month. Moscow has denied involvement with the ads.

Comments

FFS

[Neo-Rio-101]

Anybody can post politically divisive content on Facebook.
That's the whole point!

Re:FFS

[Anonymous Coward]

>Anybody can post politically divisive content on Facebook.
>That's the whole point!

Not really - the whole point of Facebook is ads. Company pages are ads. People's pages are ads for the people. Facebook services are mostly for specifically targeting ads. The games are ads, the fake accounts are ads, even the settings exist to make you more receptive to the ads.

Anyway - in this particular case, Russia's proxies purchased ads during the compaign season, in highly targeted ways, to affect the outcome of the election. 10 million is like 1/35 people in the US, and a much larger portion of the voting public, and an even larger portion of the key battleground voting public.

This is akin to Russia buying 1000-foot-tall billboards above every voting place in battleground states, and using it to tell the most vicious, manipulative lies they cared to tell, to sew chaos and hatred into the public.

It's something more than normal provocateur work.

Non issue. Will be blown up out of proportion.

[Guillermito]

The total cost of a presidential campaign is estimated to be around $2.65 billion. So now we are supposed to believe that the $100K spent on Facebook ads by Russia (56% of which were only seen *after* the election) were a key factor that determined the outcome? This is a total non issue but it will be hammered non stop for months by the traditional media simply because they are dying and will seek any opportunity to make the government regulate Facebook, Google and the other digital companies that are killing them.

Re: Hillary spent $1.2 billion...

[king neckbeard]

Better yet, you can get the opposition to run a candidate that half the country already has endless legitimate and bullshit reasons to hate, have that candidate insult half the voters for the opposition, spend the primaries bashing popular policies, and not step foot in several states that were within the margin of error.

Trump didn't win. Clinton lost. And considering she was running against the least popular candidate in US electoral history, the vast majority of the focus should be on how much Clinton and the DNC failed. They probably would have done better nominating a ham sandwich.