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Facebook Says 126 Million Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts (reuters.com)
Facebook said on Monday that Russia-based operatives published about 80,000 posts on the social network over a two-year period in an effort to sway U.S. politics and that about 126 million Americans may have seen the posts during that time. Reuters reports: Facebook's latest data on the Russia-linked posts - possibly reaching around half of the U.S. population of voting age - far exceeds the company's previous disclosures. It was included in written testimony provided to U.S. lawmakers, and seen by Reuters, ahead of key hearings with social media and technology companies about Russian meddling in elections on Capitol Hill this week. Twitter separately has found 2,752 accounts linked to Russian operatives, a source familiar with the company's written testimony said. That estimate is up from a tally of 201 accounts that Twitter reported in September. Google, owned by Alphabet, said in a statement on Monday it had found $4,700 in Russia-linked ad spending during the 2016 U.S. election cycle, and that it would build a database of election ads. Facebook's general counsel, Colin Stretch, said in the written testimony that the 80,000 posts from Russia's Internet Research Agency were a tiny fraction of content on Facebook, equal to one out of 23,000 posts.
Maybe they are not that smart. How do they know the ads were effective? For all we know they poured $100K into a campaign that didn't change a single vote.
Yes sometimes we're able to figure out who they are.
There's no "we" here, which was my whole point. The article is about Facebook, a private corporation with accountability to no one, chock full of employees who live for stuff like this to be true, and who as far as I can tell is just asking us to take its word that it is true.
That's fine for topics like the percentage of subscribers who post cat videos in a typical month. That's not at all fine for a topic like this.
The problem is it's being framed as a partisan issue, because the Democrats desperately want to find something or someone to blame for Trump winning besides themselves. Russian interference in US elections is a problem, and that's something everyone should agree on, red or blue. It should be looked into, and it should be stopped.
Did it have anything to do with Hillary losing the election? Almost certainly not. 80,000 posts sounds like a lot, but over a two year period on a site like Facebook? It's tiny. Facebook probably had well over 80 billion posts over that timeframe (and it may be even closer to a trillion, if Facebook's daily active users are to be believed), many of them political from both sides. The whole thing is being cast as a red herring to distract from the real reason Hillary lost, which was Hillary.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
So did the Russians do better by spending $50K on Facebook, or getting their cut on the $12M that Hillary and the DNC spent on the Trumped-up Dossier?
If 53,667 person would have voted differently the outcome of the election would have been different.
A few bucks is indeed sufficient to turn the election.
Couple that with gerrymandering, fraudulent voter deregistration and whatever else that has been proven and it paints a pretty clear picture.
Well, it's a basic assumption of both liberalism and democracy that people are "wise and good" enough to run their own affairs, decide who to vote for, and to make their own decisions about the truth of other people's speech. Unfortunately, large parts of the American left don't believe this to be true.
It’s not known how many people saw the Instagram ads, though Facebook has confirmed that the collection of 3,000 ads might have been seen by as many as 10 million people. The ads promoted both sides of sensitive political and social issues like gun control and Black Lives Matter in an effort to create political discord.
This seems to have worked on influencing liberals the most, as they are the ones up in arms and trying to make it out to be one sided.
https://www.recode.net/2017/10/6/16439368/instagram-russia-ads-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-election-donald-trump