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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.
They didn't want Trump. They didn't want Clinton. They wanted discord and wow did they ever get it.
More importantly, they were sure (just like the Democrats, all of the media, most of the pollsters, and pretty much every foreign government) that Clinton was going to win. Their modest pot-stirring prior to the election was simply meant to chip away at any wider national support behind her when she took office, making it harder for the US to act cohesively against Russian shenanigans elsewhere in the world. When she lost, the troll operation simply realigned itself towards trying to stir up liberal haters against the incoming Trump administration.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Here's the thing about 2016 -- it was a very close thing. Just 1/2 of 1% of the turnout in three states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) would have flipped those states. That's 78,000 strategically based voters -- not even 1/10 of 1% of the total US votes cast -- and the Electoral College would have gone the other way.
The flaw in nearly every 2016 postmortem analysis I've seen is that they all look for the explanation. It's a situation tailor made for advancing pet theories: an idea that has any truth at all in it can quite plausibly be claimed to have flipped the results.
So you can't rule out Russian meddling by citing Clinton's (unquestioned) weaknesses as a candidate. They could *both* have been decisive.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
According to the most recent public intelligence, this assertion is technically true as far as it goes. The goal was to call the election's legitimacy into question and undermine the Hillary presidency that basically everyone thought was inevitable. The Russians got half their wish: they did indeed call the legitimacy of the election into question. The Trump victory was an accident: unanticipated, unintended, and frankly undesired (because they spent all this effort to delegitimize an enemy, but wound up delegitimizing an asset instead).
And if you think about it, Trump's collusion with the Russians makes more sense in this light. It is a very poorly kept secret that Trump didn't want to win: he got into the election for the lulz, but didn't want the responsibility. He had no reason to collude with people who wanted him to win, because that wasn't his goal. But undermining a seemingly inevitable Hillary presidency? That's something Trump would be 100% on board for. This brings the goals of Trump and the Russians into alignment, and then collusion makes sense again.
It has another effect, too. If we look at the goals in this way, Trump wasn't a mere colluder, giving aid and comfort to someone who might or might not qualify as an "enemy" depending on legal definitions. These circumstances would make him an active participant in the operations: a centerpiece of the psyops that went along with the hacking and fake news. That means he personally committed acts of war against the US, which is treason whether or not the people helping you count as an "enemy" for legal purposes.
In other words, sure; the fake news and meddling wasn't architected to help Trump win. This is actually worse for Trump than if they had been, because it leads to a more solid argument for a treason charge: one that doesn't let him hide behind technicalities.