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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.
I am beyond sick and tired of Slashdot trying to push the "Russians influenced the election!" BS that the left has been pushing. It's fake. It never happened.
Who cares if they bought ads on Facebook? Does it matter? Does anyone seriously think people voted for Trump because they saw ads from Russians?!
The thing that caused Hillary to lose more than anything else is likely her shady dealings involving her email server and the FBI "investigation" into it. An investigation that could still be restarted as it's becoming more and more clear that one campaign did, in fact, have dealings with Russia: the Democrat's.
My virgin eyes!!!! Why Facebook why didn't you protect me from the interwebs. I so was going to vote for Hillary until those adds showed me that Trump was a kind hearted, attractive, beautiful haired, honest, intelligent, and amazing guy. I was duped.
The real question is how many unique views were served for each ad and how many ads there were total. 126 million people seeing one silly racist political meme one random afternoon is nothing to panic about, and certainly they'll try to spin this revelation as nothing more than that. But 126 million people being immersed daily into an advertising environment that's completely saturated with unregulated foreign propaganda, rubber-stamped with approval by an ostensibly loyal, United States citizen-owned publicly traded corporation... now that my friends, that right there is how you sew destruction throughout the minds of an entire population. That is how you fundamentally pervert the perception of reality of an entire social class. That is how you sever friendships and turn families against each other. That is how you topple a government. That is how you start a civil war. That is something worth panicking about.
First, they tried to say the advertisements promoted Potus Trump, now "Divisive" ads. Divisive is code for Hillary and Bernie.
And if we are only talking Divisive advertisements, what about ShareBlue or Correct the record? How many millions did these companies pay to change social media, 50 Million? 100 Million? How much did the DNC and related political pacs pay, 500 Million?
And 80k from Russians is a big issue vs a billion?
Wag the dog indeed. If you are still blaming Russia for Trumps win, you still haven't learned. Nobody liked Hillary and Bernie only ran as a Democrat to get on the stage.
This two party system is a problem with all the money is funneled into 2 people. WTF, All that money into 2 parties. When vary widely on so many issues, 2 parties don't cover everyone. I have no idea how, but wish we had a multiparty system to stop this "us vs them" tribal cultural war. We got Democrats voting Republican for financial issues, and Republicans voting democrat for social issues. Libertarians, Socialist, Communists, etc, its a clusterfuck.
That's how you sell bubble gum. Nobody changed their mind on who to vote for based on a facebook ad. If you think someone did, prove it.
Those pesky russians are smart! They can change an election outcome with just an ad! I wonder why US politicians did not think about doing the same.
Or do we just have to take their word that they've fortuitously found exactly what they set out to look for, from people who are supposedly foreign operatives but apparently are too dumb to cover their tracks?
Disclosure rules? WTF? The filter should be on the receiving end. The Russians have their agenda (and it's more about trolling us than overpowering us), and the media has their agenda (which is more about indoctrinating us than educating us). F them all, it's not like any are trustworthy anymore. It's the info that matters, not the source.
Anyone who gets their information from the Bookface, or sucking at the media's (left or right) teat, deserves what they get. People need to take personal responsibility for educating themselves with diverse viewpoints, and using that to create a worldview based on knowledge and belief informed by root principles. If you can't filter disinformation from your inputs, you're doing it wrong.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So folks could pour money into it with impunity.
Indeed. If we let people go around speaking with impunity, we will lose our freedom.
It either shows how incompetent and her campaign was or how horrible of a message she actually had. Either way, she had no place being elected as President. A decent candidate with a coherent message would have wiped the floor with Trump.
This is FB advertising the cost effectiveness of placing inexpensive ads on their service. And they're doing it "for free" by "revealing" the information to a willing press.
"SEE HOW MANY IMPRESSIONS RUSSIA GOT FOR ONLY $[insert current estimate here]. YOUR AD COULD DO AS WELL!"
These ads are getting more play now than they got before, most likely.
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
Whatever you do, don't blame the (heinously unpopular for years & years before the election) losing candidate for losing the election. Blame Canada instead!
I see Fox and Russians have converged on "blame Hillary Clinton" as the deflection
Wait. How is identifying the fact that she was a terrible candidate who lost the election a "deflection?" The people trying to deflect are the ones implying that it was the RUSSIANS that made her call half the country deplorable people. That it was the RUSSIANS who somehow made her forget to even set foot in states like Wisconsin even once. That it was the RUSSIANS who somehow made her look her supporters in the eye and lie to them for a year straight about her conduct as Secretary of State. You're confusing "deflection" with "pointing out the facts." The Democrats have been trying to deflect reality ever since the night of the election, and their hilarious Russian Collusion narrative is just part of that, and another stellar example of just how dumb they think everyone is. And that misunderstanding of all the people the Dems hold in such contempt is exactly why they've lost nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships, both houses of congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, and the good will of millions of two-time Obama voters who turned away from She Who Shall Be Queen in disgust.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
An interesting movie to have seen is Generation P(2011) because to what degree the average (young) Russian can be familiar with US culture far outpaces any reciprocity. Not because of any superiority, but because western advances in terms of technology and modernity have had a primacy since WWII. Someone had to come first. Which produces ironies, such as Dan Ackroyd's (Zalinsky) line from Tommy Boy(1995): What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public. Such precedence is realized and actualized by markets and most often expressed in terms of consumer goods. But their design and production will not forever remain America's providence, nor should they, and this is understandably frightening to many and exploited by some for many reasons.
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
Maybe you've never heard how effective propaganda can be.
Here is a hint. If it didn't work, no one would waste their time doing it...
Oh Nos! All those Special Snowflakes who can't make their own decisions saw Bad Things! We must Reeducate them! Get the accounts list from Faceplant and start up the trucks! Seriously? If you're the kind of person who votes based on political ads, would you please STOP VOTING!? Democracy needs a well educated, involved voter base to work. It's a given that neither side WANTS a well-educated voter base, but surely adults (that want to) can find out things for themselves? Even biased news, once the amount and direction of the lean can be determined, can be informative. But, hey...obviously cat videos and get rich quick schemes have a higher priority over figuring out who to vote for. Scotty, beam me up. There's no intelligent life here.
If you don't think fake news changed the outcome of the election, it's because you're inside the bubble.
The outcome of the election was the result of two opposing forces: the repulsion for Trump that made a lot of people vote Hillary, even if they didn't like her, and the repulsion for Hillary that made a lot of people not vote her, even if they do not like Trump. Eventually the second force prevailed, and that was thanks to all the media that endorsed Hillary: the media fanfare made alot of people think that Hillary's victory was obvious and so they voted libertarian or something else and that was fatal in swing states.
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.
Wtf?
First of all, who said the point of the ads is to get people to change their mind? This is what the Trump team itself was doing with ads/targeting before the elections:
All you need to dö is get enough people in the key demographic of your opponent to stay home in key areas.
Second of all: many people don't recognize sponsored content/ads in social media, or elsewhere. You'll see a news article or a blog post that has above it something like '[Your friend name here] also liked [our site]' and that's in fact a paid ad targeted to you because someone you know has liked the page and they've targeted their promotion that way, but really people generally don't think of these as ads but just another part of their newsfeed which actually makes them more effective.
Third of all: ads (both direct and sponsored content) do affect people's decisions. That's why they exist and why companies are pouring money into them but you obviously will have a hard time finding anyone who says they bought any opinion/product/service because it was advertised to them, partly because people don't often recognize the impact ads have on them. Chances are high advertising has affected your behavior during your lifetime without you being directly aware of it. You see ads and at some later point when you're making the decision of what to buy, the ads play into your preconceptions and decision making process at a subconscious level. Hardly no-one is at the store like 'I'm going to buy this product because I saw that ad last week" but there is still is an increase in sales following a successful marketing campaign.
So no, if you poll people and ask them 'did you see any paid for articles in your news feed about either candidate and if so did they effect your decision on whether to vote or not and for which candidate?' you're likely going to get a 'no' on all 3 of those from most people but that doesn't mean there was no effect, it just means most people can't recognize well placed ads as ads anymore and that like always, people think they're immune to the psychological effects of ads/sponsored content when they provably are not.
Human beings on average are much more easy to influence than we tend to admit, and the marketing industry has been honing their skills for way over half a century at this point becoming more and more successful at it.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Only if your citizens have had their critical thinking skills neutered via reduced education, constant advertising, organized religion and leaders that scream "Think of the children!"
Are you saying ads don't work? You could earn billions by selling your idea to companies on how to cut their advertising budget.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.
Also extremely biased.
So 100,000 dollars nets you 120 million influnces. Facebook is going to sell a lot more ads in the near future. I didn't see the ads as I dumped Facebook during the primaries due to what I perceived as inherent bias on the part of Facebook itself.
I had no likes, entered no work or education history, rarely followed anyone but tech pages, and I was being inundated with pro Hillary and anti-Trump rhetoric.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.