This article reads like it was written before details about the ads were leaked. The "vast majority" of "Russian ads" did not mention the election, voting, or a

This article reads like it was written before details about the ads were leaked. The "vast majority" of "Russian ads" did not mention the election, voting, or any particular candidate. That effectively means that any ad, purchased by a poorly defined "Russian" individual, that discussed LGBT issues was counted as a hit. If that same standard of "meddling" were applied to all countries in the world, I suspect that $100k of spend from Russian users would be the butt of a joke. And I say Russian "users" because there were "more than 3,000" ads spending a total of "at least $100,000". That's an average of $33 per ad. The ads also supported both sides of the issues mentioned, some were expressing support of groups like Black Lives Matter. I see no justifiable reason, given the present evidence, to frame this as some giant Russian conspiracy. Washington Post discussion of the leaks framing this information, nonetheless, in favor of a Russian conspiracy: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-operatives-used-facebook-ads-to-exploit-divisions-over-black-political-activism-and-muslims/2017/09/25/4a011242-a21b-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o... Something related to that article as well is this one is that I think people for whom these stories confirm their biases (e.g. the Russian conspiracy is true) should try to read only the facts. There are indeed lots of facts within these articles, but they're constantly buried within extremely suggestive and extremely unsupported rhetoric. For instance in Washington Post article, they state that "$100,000 worth of Facebook ads could have been viewed hundreds of millions of times." Let's think about that for a minute. In the election both parties spent about $6 billion on advertising and of course most all of it targeting the US. Going on with that figure from the Washingon Post that $6 billion could have resulted in tens of trillions of views. To put that another way, that would be each and every man, woman, and child in America seeing 30,000 ads at the minimum. And that minimum is multiplicative as I assumed "hundreds of millions of views" = exactly 100 million views. That is clearly in no way a reasonable suggestion, yet that's the sort of thinking it takes to support the views implicitly expressed within this article.