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They spent over $100,000 on ads during the 2016 campaign. You can't deny that the voters were manipulated! /s

acdha 8y ago
Plus hundreds of people working full-time with a budget of at least $1.25M/month (which goes further in a country where the average income is around a sixth of the US). https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4380504/The-Special-Counsel-s-Indictment-of-the-Internet.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4380504/The-Speci... The big boost, of course, was the email hacking and successful use of their media outlets like RT & Wikileaks to successfully spin nothing into the impression of a scandal, which people are still credulously recirculating. You can still argue that this was not significant compared to campaign spending or the larger PAC/media battle, but you don’t need to be donating your PR services to a foreign intelligence operation.
fossuser 8y ago
The scale of people affected went beyond ads - there was a lot of group creation and stirring controversy. They also got Americans to organize protests, I think the full reach was around 126 million people. "When Facebook first acknowledged last year the Russian intrusion on its platform, it seemed modest in scale. The $100,000 spent on ads was a trivial sum compared with the tens of millions spent on Facebook by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns. But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/r...
- masonic 8y ago
  the full reach was around 126 million Wow, controlling 1,260 people per dollar spent is quite the ROI.

Plus hundreds of people working full-time with a budget of at least $1.25M/month (which goes further in a country where the average income is around a sixth of the US). https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4380504/The-Special-Counsel-s-Indictment-of-the-Internet.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4380504/The-Speci... The big boost, of course, was the email hacking and successful use of their media outlets like RT & Wikileaks to successfully spin nothing into the impression of a scandal, which people are still credulously recirculating. You can still argue that this was not significant compared to campaign spending or the larger PAC/media battle, but you don’t need to be donating your PR services to a foreign intelligence operation.

fossuser 8y ago

The scale of people affected went beyond ads - there was a lot of group creation and stirring controversy. They also got Americans to organize protests, I think the full reach was around 126 million people. "When Facebook first acknowledged last year the Russian intrusion on its platform, it seemed modest in scale. The $100,000 spent on ads was a trivial sum compared with the tens of millions spent on Facebook by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns. But it quickly became clear that the Russians had used a different model for their influence campaign: posting inflammatory messages and relying on free, viral spread. Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone. That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential election." https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/r...

masonic 8y ago
the full reach was around 126 million Wow, controlling 1,260 people per dollar spent is quite the ROI.