
Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook - sandmansandine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-tried-to-give-zuckerberg-a-wake-up-call-over-fake-news-on-facebook/2017/09/24/15d19b12-ddac-4ad5-ac6e-ef909e1c1284_story.html
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zaroth
I've heard the number $100,000 thrown around [1] as possibly Russian ad-spend
on Facebook for "political" ads. I've read a story about a pretty corny
Facebook group [2] promoting Texas succession and possibly also links to CA
succession rallies as well.

What I haven't heard is a reasonable argument on whether this mattered in the
slightest. This is an election where over a billion dollars was spent by the
major parties. The amount of hand-wringing over some astroturf seems over the
top.

Both campaigns spent heavily to influence social media. I remember reading
specifically about Clinton PAC Correct the Record spending $1 million [3] to
basically troll for her on social media.

There is absolutely no reason, absent extraordinary evidence, to believe any
of this influenced the election. It's not enough to just not want to believe
people freely voted the way they did because the "wrong" candidate won.

Take for example the "hacking" of 21 states election systems. Washington Post
reports [4] that actually this was basically port scanning. Some states said
the attack amounted to about one minute of scanning in an environment where
they are being probed millions of times per day. It just seems rather
breathless to me to single out "Russia" (actually Russian IPs) when scans are
coming from IPs all over the world.

[1] - [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2017/09/07/a-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2017/09/07/a-russian-firm-spent-100000-on-facebook-ads-trump-
spent-0-on-tv-ads-for-the-first-202-days-of-his-
campaign/?utm_term=.22100591c7c4)

[2] - [http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-facebook-group-ads-
tex...](http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-facebook-group-ads-texas-
secession-secede-trump-clinton-2017-9)

[3] -
[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct-
the-record-online-trolls/484847/)

[4] - [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2017/09/23/wh...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2017/09/23/what-we-know-about-the-21-states-targeted-by-russian-
hackers/?utm_term=.a1e94e959783)

~~~
thesmallestcat
"Correct the record" should go down in infamy but I'm afraid it will instead
become the norm. Where you simply cannot hold a meaningful political
conversation over public channels in the lead-up to a presidential election.

~~~
panarky
_> I've heard the number $100,000 thrown around ..._

The truth is that we don't know the total spend.

FTFA:

 _Congressional investigators say the disclosure only scratches the surface.
One called Facebook’s discoveries thus far "the tip of the iceberg."_

If the $100k really is the "tip of the iceberg", and 90% of icebergs are under
water, it could be $1M paid ads for Facebook.

And that doesn't count the well documented fake news campaign for organic
social sharing, which could easily be a multiple of this in spend and impact.

Since the election was decided by less than 100,000 votes, it seems plausible
that this could have flipped it.

~~~
thesmallestcat
I think you replied to the wrong comment.

------
forapurpose
The title (which is the Post's title) is terrible. This article is about much
more than Obama's warning; it's an extensive history of how Facebook learned
of the threat and what they tried to do.

------
NN88
Facebook is so screwed.

FYI, apparently in 2009, they were so broke that they couldn't find funding
and relied heavily on a few Russian oligarchs to help fund their growth.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/technology/internet/27face...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/technology/internet/27facebook.html)

Zuckerberg even met with the Russian president Medvedev too around the time of
the IPO:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-
usmanov/facebook...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-
usmanov/facebook-bet-pays-off-for-russias-usmanov-idUSBRE84G1BM20120517)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjN_1IydBIA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjN_1IydBIA)

