I'm in no way an expert in social media advertising, but the claims that I've heard are that the ad buys were hyper-targeted to swing districts. Incidentally,

I'm in no way an expert in social media advertising, but the claims that I've heard are that the ad buys were hyper-targeted to swing districts. Incidentally, it's been suggested that this implies that the Russians were in secret coordination with Cambridge Analytica (the data firm that worked with the Trump Campaign). On the other hand, I think it's consistent with the following model: Assume that Putin has a longstanding grudge against Clinton and wants to undermine what he assumes will be her presidency [1]. Let's further assume that the budget for this operation will be low—on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands (plus salary for operatives), compared to the hundreds of millions spent by the campaigns [2]. Any reasonably savvy head of this operation would lean towards a start-up model—i.e. very aggressively targeting swing districts. Thinking up ways to target the most swing-able people for the fewest number of dollars is very much worth your time if your time is relatively inexpensive and you don't have tons and tons of money to spend. Is it possible that they received targeting data from people associated with the campaign? Sure, but I don't think that hypertargeting implies that they did. [1] http://observer.com/2016/06/she-isnt-president-yet-but-russia-already-hates-hillary-clinton/ http://observer.com/2016/06/she-isnt-president-yet-but-russi... [2] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16 https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16