Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook

"Correct the record" should go down in infamy but I'm afraid it will instead become the norm. Where you simply cannot hold a meaningful political conversation over public channels in the lead-up to a presidential election.

It's not a specific problem as it is--aside from propaganda in general. But if the ads purchased by Russians are linked to a direct promise of aid to the Trump campaign then that is solid evidence in court of collusion.

I agree that the $100,000 is very small for election ad spend. However, I think Cambridge Analytica's alleged ability to target voters should not be discounted: it's possible that they've optimized for specific enough characteristics that effectively make Facebook's ad cost algorithm(s) think that certain campaigns are not as valuable as Cambridge Analytica does.

I'm linking a few general things about Cambridge Analytica here, but nothing specific to my hypothesis: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica [1] https://cambridgeanalytica.org/ [2] https://twitter.com/CamAnalytica [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/cambridge-ana... [4] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/cambridge-analytica-the-... [5] https://holidata.cambridgeanalytica.org/

I don't think that one ad campaign on Facebook swung the election, but I also know that there is a difference between dumb money and smart money in a lot of domains, and ads could just very well be one of those things.

> What I haven't heard is a reasonable argument on whether this mattered in the slightest.

Read the linked article. If you have some specific arguments to address, that's helpful. Blanket, aggressive denials are just a way to raise unsubstantiated doubts.

> Washington Post reports [4] that actually this was basically port scanning.

Not at all. First, the article says that not much is known. Second, here is an excerpt about what is known:

Illinois:

a contractor who works two or three days a week at the state board of elections detected unauthorized data leaving the network, according to Ken Menzel, general counsel for the Illinois board of elections. The hackers had gained access to the state's voter database, which contained information such as names, dates of birth, genders, driver's licenses and partial Social Security numbers on 15 million people, half of whom were active voters. As many as 90,000 records were ultimately compromised.

Finally, while many state election officials insist their security stopped the attacks, the truth of security is that they don't know what they are missing, especially with highly resourced attackers attacking poorly resourced, generally insecure systems. Could the Russians bypass the security of the state of Ohio's election systems? I don't have much doubt ...

EDIT: A bit more on Russia's influence campaign:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o...