
Fake Russian Facebook Accounts Bought $100,000 in Political Ads - a13n
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russian-political-ads.html
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seabird
The hysteria over these unnamed, unproven Kremlin hackers reaches a new high
just about every day.

$100,000 is absolutely _nothing_. Zilch. Nada. You can probably count the
number of people that changed their vote because of that expenditure on one
hand. It's just a number that you're able to trot out and your average lower-
middle class American will say "that's a lot!" and lose their shit over
Russian interference of tenuous consequence. If this was "on direct orders
from President Vladimir V. Putin" you can be sure that he had a lot more than
$100,000 dollars to dedicate to Facebook ads.

So far, we know this about Russian interference:

1.) Two unfathomably sophisticated threats successfully stole information from
the DNC. 2.) We can reasonably assume that Russia made an attempt to
interfere. They've probably been trying this halfheartedly for decades.

Now, we can get in to the wild, unproven conjecture that makes up the basis of
much of this panic:

1.) Putin supposedly directly and personally ordered this operation. This
assertion is based on pretty much nothing other than him being a "pretty
powerful dude" (to paraphrase). 2.) We have supposedly identified that the
aforementioned unfathomably sophisticated threats (responsible for the DNC
incident) mentioned above are actually a specific part of the Russian
government. This assertion is based on the attack having come from Eastern
Europe, and having used tools that originated from Eastern Europe. Killer
evidence, right? 3.) A few million dollars worth of advertisements and hired
trolls supposedly meme'd a president into office. This is despite the
absolutely horrid efficacy of online advertising, but apparently Russian witch
magic turned the normal 0.5% advertisement engagement rate into a political
wrecking ball.

I'm as interested in foreign interference as the next guy, but that's not what
this is about. This is people refusing to believe that people disagree with
them, and that disagreement led to their candidate and her poorly targeted
campaign losing, for better or for worse.

------
mkempe
Would that be less than about 1/20,000 of what the candidates and their
publicly-supporting groups spent? [1] Does the NYT care to discuss how much
the needle was and could be moved?

[1]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...](https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidential-
campaign-fundraising/)

