
On Russia, Facebook Sends a Message It Wishes It Hadn’t - uptown
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russia-facebook-trump.html
======
zaroth
NYT has their head in the sand and is in full on damage control over the
Mueller indictment of a dozen internet trolls. The so-called “troll factory”
is pretty old news, reported widely in Russia last year. [1]

They just keep writing these articles trying to “fact check” or otherwise
disassemble a qualified primary source inside FB which goes against their
narrative.

NYT talks about the “millions of dollars” that Russia spent on the troll
factory (how many millions? I’ve read that would be $2) to “influence the
election”. The majority of which was spent _after_ the election. The great
Russian stolen election comes down to this?

Either the Russians are exponentially better at advertising than the best
minds in the DNC, or maybe the Russian boogeyman story is losing its shine.

The NYT (and MSM media in general) is doing Russia’s job for them, which I
have to assume is more than Moscow could have ever dreamed of. This is why
Trump tweets they are laughing their asses off.

People are desperate to see Trump’s election as illegitimate rather than
confront the much scarier reality of why he won. Personally I rather hope the
DNC figures this out sooner than later, and finds a candidate and a platform
that is electable by 2024.

[1] -
[https://www.rbc.ru/magazine/2017/11/59e0c17d9a79470e05a9e6c1](https://www.rbc.ru/magazine/2017/11/59e0c17d9a79470e05a9e6c1)

~~~
gandhium
> The so-called “troll factory” is pretty old news

Why it's old news if they're still trolling?

> Either the Russians are exponentially better at advertising than the best
> minds in the DNC

No, just their labour is exponentially cheaper.

~~~
zaroth
The Internet, and social media in general, is just a trolls playground. Why do
I care about a few dozen trolls in particular? Spending a few hundred thousand
dollars promoting stories into news feeds. This is like worrying about my camp
fire contributing to global warming.

I can understand the desire to want to blame some great evil force for
corrupting democracy, when it’s so much harder to look in the mirror.
Personally I think the overall vitriol against Trump is the single biggest
reason he won. Telling someone they’re a shitstain for their political beliefs
is the surest-fire way to get them out to vote against you.

~~~
gandhium
Wow. Looks like you're actively try to downplay this fact.

~~~
zaroth
In an election when the two parties combined spent almost $2 billion, I'm not
particularly concerned with an alleged ad buy of "thousands of dollars per
month" [1] The same group, by the way, which was promoting "Not My President"
stories after the election. [2] This is a story of Russia sowing discord, but
since the MSM played directly into their hands in that regard, they don't want
to report it accurately.

Even 538 [3] can't get it right. In their analysis of whether IRA had any
impact on the election ("Who Can Say?") they claim the IRA had a monthly
operating budget the equivalent of $1.25 million USD. In fact what the
indictment actually claims is;

"By in or around September 2016, the ORGANIZATION’s monthly budget for Project
Lakhta submitted to CONCORD exceeded 73 million Russian rubles (over 1,250,000
U.S. dollars), including approximately one million rubles in bonus payments"
[4]

But in the paragraph immediately above;

"CONCORD funded the [IRA] as part of a larger CONCORD-funded interference
operation that it referred to as “Project Lakhta.” Project Lakhta had multiple
components, some involving domestic audiences within the Russian Federation
and others targeting foreign audiences in various countries, including the
United States."

So when 538 writes "The indictment alleges that an organization called the
Internet Research Agency had a monthly budget of approximately $1.25 million
toward interference efforts by September 2016" this is simply false. In a
story attempting to assess the reach and impact of Russian interference in the
election, IMO this is a fatal flaw in their reporting.

Now that the "collusion" narrative is dead, the new buzzword is
"interference". But personally I'm not convinced "thousands of dollars of ad
spend" are convincing evidence of _interference_. No doubt Russia loves sowing
discord in the US and has done so for _decades_. The story simply hasn't lived
up to the narrative, and it's playing into Russia's hand to try to make it
bigger than it really was.

I guess maybe we're just about ready to move on from anger to bargaining.
Really, this has gone on long enough.

[1] - [https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4380504/The-
Speci...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4380504/The-Special-
Counsel-s-Indictment-of-the-Internet.pdf) \-- Paragraph #35 on Pg 14

[2] - Indictment, Paragraph #57

[3] - [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-
in...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-interference-
affect-the-2016-election/)

[4] - Indictment, Paragraph #11(b)

~~~
gandhium
> So when 538 writes "The indictment alleges that an organization called the
> Internet Research Agency had a monthly budget of approximately $1.25 million
> toward interference efforts by September 2016" this is simply false

Why? You're basically confirmed their assessment.

Besides, why did you said "only $2 millions" before, if there was $1.5
millions _monthly_?

~~~
zaroth
Read carefully... The indictment claims that _Project Lakhta_ had a monthly
budget of $1.25m USD.

"Project Lakhta had multiple components, some involving domestic audiences
within the Russian Federation and others targeting foreign audiences in
various countries, including the United States."

One _component_ of Project Jakhta was the Internet Research Agency - the troll
factory. Even IRA itself has a purview much larger than just sowing discord in
the US around the election -- see, e.g. the Wikipedia article. [1]

The $2m (total, not monthly) figure was reported last year.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency)

~~~
gandhium
So, what's the difference with "the ORGANIZATION’s monthly budget for Project
Lakhta submitted to CONCORD exceeded 73 million Russian rubles (over 1,250,000
U.S. dollars)" ?

Why is that statement false?

------
mzs
also NYT, basically saying Rob Goldman's (ads VP) tweets defending FB were
bupkis

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/facebook-
execu...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/facebook-executive-
russia-tweets-fact-check.html)

~~~
makomk
Marcy Wheeler, who's been doing a lot of good writing on Trump, Russia and
Mueller lately, wrote a rather scathing - and in my view fairly convincing -
article criticising this claimed fact check:
[https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/02/19/in-two-so-called-
fact-...](https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/02/19/in-two-so-called-fact-checks-
of-facebook-nyt-forgets-everything-it-knows-about-indictments/) (Not that it
matters. The New York Times can convince the world that black is white and
white is black, and everyone will believe them. Won't be the first time.)

------
supercanuck
>According to figures published by Facebook last October, 44 percent of the
Russian-bought ads were displayed before the 2016 election, while 56 percent
were shown afterward.

Why would they increase their investment on a failed ad campaign?

------
vthallam
He indirectly said the media is running a biased campaign. Even if he
personally means so, alienating all mainstream media who is already mad about
facebook for various reasons at best could be termed as not clever.

Also, there's a ongoing investigation and some indictments which say Russia
ran a campaign, commenting about that, I don't know what he was thinking. I am
thinking this will only add more focus to "FB as a tool to influence
elections" narrative.

------
imhelpingu
> "Why is educating citizens about digital literacy the solution to
> misinformation, as Mr. Goldman suggested, rather than fixing the tech
> platforms that make misinformation hard to distinguish from truth?"

 _Literally,_ "why educate people when you can just restrict speech?"

------
nostromo
"Facebook accidentally tells the truth, even though it's not helpful for
Facebook politically. Facebook regrets the error."

~~~
loorinm
Did you even read the article? The tweets are egregiously misleading and bring
absolutely zero to facebook’s case for playing the victim.

~~~
nostromo
From the article:

> Some of Mr. Goldman’s claims may have been narrowly true, but they were a
> prime example of misdirection

> Why should it reassure us that most of Russia’s Facebook advertising was
> purchased after the election, rather than telling us that Facebook continued
> to drop the ball even after it knew it had a Russia problem?

The Times is admitting the tweets weren't wrong. The Times is criticizing
Facebook's actions because they disrupted their preferred narrative of the
election.

------
mtgx
> He continued: “The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the
> election. We shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because
> it doesn’t align with the main media narrative of Tump [sic] and the
> election.”

Not a fan of Facebook, but that I can believe.

~~~
asabjorn
This seems like a very relevant piece of information. Why should anyone wish
he didn’t say this if it is true? This seems to indicate that the election
wasn’t compromised to the degree we thought.

~~~
learc83
Or it indicates that after better than expected results the Russian government
drastically increased the budget for Facebook ads.

There is no conspiracy to keep this information hidden, it's just a story that
can be framed 2 ways.

"Russia spent the majority of money on Facebook ads after the election."

"Russia spent money on social media to influence the election. Then after
analyzing the performance of their ad buys, they decided to ramp up spending
on Facebook ads."

~~~
asabjorn
I would agree with you if the conversation topic wasn’t specifically how
Russia meddled with the pre election result. People discredit the vote of half
of the US people in the belief they were partially fooled by Russia, and if
that is not true then discrediting their voice in such a way makes it hard for
us to listen to each other’s different values and problems through discourse.

~~~
learc83
None of what you're saying is a logical argument against any part of my
comment.

I showed how this comment "The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER
the election." doesn't say anything about the extent Russia was interfering
_before_ the election. The only thing that statement supports is that they
were interfering even more after the election.

You never refuted that.

>People discredit the vote of half of the US people in the belief they were
partially fooled by Russia, and if that is not true

Again a completely invalid counter argument. I said that it likely is true. A
valid counterargument would involve "no it's not true because...", not " _if_
it's not true then I'm right".

~~~
asabjorn
I think you are missing the point of my comment; the burden of proof is on the
entity claiming election meddling, and this indicated that core parts of the
evidence need closer scrutiny and that the case is not as straightforward as
NYT etal has claimed.

I am saying this as a libertarian that was upset about the election result. I
personally thought something smelled fishy earlier given how the evidence was
presented and believed what I read in NYT etal.

~~~
learc83
No you're failing to engage in a discussion.

"the burden of proof is on the entity claiming election meddling"

How does that have anything to do with my assertion that this "The majority of
the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election." doesn't make it _any_ less
likely that Russia interfered in the election?

You still haven't showed why "The majority of the Russian ad spend happened
AFTER the election." decreases the likelihood that Russia successfully
interfered in the election.

You don't seem to be actually reading what I'm writing.

If you want to continue debating please respond with why Russia spending even
more money after a successful ad campaign is evidence that they didn't impact
the election. If you'd rather not then good day.

~~~
asabjorn
You never made a real connection as to why post ad spend means pre-election
subterfuge, so your fact is not a fact.

What you are stating is a theory you haven't proven at all, and all your
subsequent arguments and defenses don't hold or mean anything. You have no
evidence to your claim.

All you have done is make a theory and expect the rest of us to accept it as
fact. If you come back with actual proof instead of just a theory maybe we can
consider further discourse.

~~~
learc83
>You never made a real connection as to why post ad spend means pre-election
subterfuge, so your fact is not a fact

This shows me that you aren't actually reading what I'm writing.

>You have no evidence to your claim.

What is my claim? Based on the above you don't seem to have any idea.

~~~
asabjorn
> This shows me that you aren't actually reading what I'm writing.

> What is my claim? Based on the above you don't seem to have any idea.

After your comment on me not engaging in discussion and not understanding what
you said I actually sent this thread to someone that is professionally trained
in debating to gain better understanding. There is no point in being right on
the internet, and a learning opportunity is always worthwhile.

The professional debater I sent this thread to got the same impression as me
on what your line of argument was and suggested I respond in the way I did. If
you mean something else then I am therefore not the only one at a loss, and
like me I suggest that you introspect so that you can improve. Show this
thread to someone you trust to be good at discourse and get feedback. We are
all fumbling when formulating our thoughts and that is ok. What is not ok is
to act rudely.

~~~
learc83
I've been debating on internet forums since the late mid 90s, and I'm going to
be completely honest with you--this takes the cake for the most absurdly petty
debate tactic I have ever seen. This isn't sarcasm I am actually pretty
shocked by this.

Seriously? You're right because an unseen "professional debater" agrees with
you?

~~~
asabjorn
I give up. How did you get that from what I said?

What I am talking about is process to bridge the problem of you saying your
viewpoint is not getting across and how I’ve engaged in the same process. I am
not saying I am right or you are wrong, I was making a constrictive suggestion
on how to further the debate after I had exhausted my options for
understanding what you mean by your claims being misunderstood. However, I
believe the arguments I thought you made to be entirely unsupported by the
facts provided although I have to trust you that your viewpoint is not getting
across so commenting on that is irrelevant.

As part of showing you how far I’ve gone to introspect I explained to you the
lengths to which I’ve gone. I think it’s unconstructive to take offense to
someone telling you how they’ve tried to show empathy and respect your
feedback.

Good luck with other debates and peace out.

~~~
learc83
>I think it’s unconstructive to take offense to someone telling you how
they’ve tried to show empathy and respect your feedback.

I'll offer you some feedback. Your previous post came across as incredibly
condescending at best and as a completely bonkers debate tactic at worst. If
that was a sincere attempt at displaying empathy and respect, I would work on
your communication skills--maybe with someone who isn't a "professional
debater".

