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Comment by grizzlyPinocch | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem I have with arguments like this is that it seems to take the extent of Russian influence out of context. In the Mueller report, it mentions that the IRA purchased ~$100,000 worth of ads on Facebook (pg. 25). In comparison, the Russian government has spend ~$40m lobbying the US government through legal channels.

We shouldn't be comfortable with Russian influence, but we shouldn't allow our political opinions to be so dramatically warped by something that seems so proportionately small. As far as the Russians go, I think characterizing Thiel as being part of some "dark-money" republican machine that supports "Russian propaganda" is not accurate (or to the extent to which it is accurate, it doesn't matter). Not defending his position on other things, though.

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The dollar amounts don't reflect the impacts of what the Russians purchased. Conventional lobbying is to get specific bills passed. Social media propaganda can get a few high profile candidates elected, sway general attitudes to justice, liberal democracy, objective truth, etc. It just so happens that it's very cheap to sway some voters. If Russia could get a particular energy bill passed with $10k of Facebook propaganda, it would do that. That's not to say that the shiny new foreign policy tool of social media influence doesn't receive out-sized attention.

So you're saying a billion dollars spent by the Hillary campaign couldn't compete with Russia's $100,000 in targeted ads?

Russia spent money on democrat positions too. Their intent was to sow discord in the US populace and increase polarization.

>It just so happens that it's very cheap to sway some voters.

You say this very matter-of-factly. Do you have any evidence to back that up? Could you isolate that audience? As someone that has run a lot of political and consumer ads over the last 10 years, I'd really like to figure out who those people I can get for 100k that I can't get for 81 million are.

Propaganda does work. Russian propaganda does not work nearly as well as Madison Avenue propaganda, and that's been shown for decades. I'll give the edge to the Madison Ave guys spending tens of millions, here, over the Russian troll farm and 100k.

>If Russia could get a particular energy bill passed with $10k of Facebook propaganda, it would do that

Sure. I don't believe it can, though, and nobody has provided evidence to the contrary. Attempts, sure, but no real success.

It is my belief that the US FBI had much more to do with swaying the 2016 election than Russia's $100k Facebook ad spend.

There was something in the neighborhood of one billion dollars spent on the 2016 election cycle. If Russia managed to significantly influence it by spending $100,000, they're far more effective than either the Democrat or Republican campaign machines.

Measuring influence by spend might be misleading. The leverage they discovered on social media could have surprised even them.

I saw a lot of nonsense get spewed on Facebook- things that could be quite simply fact-checked, and people completely bought into them. Also, contradictory emotional appeals were spread (without, of course, the responders recognizing the contradictions). Finally, I was on a forum when someone gave stupid numbers concerning Obamacare, that I quickly checked and challenged (he left and never came back).

Having discovered that people by and large won't think critically about what you're saying, and using the viral nature of emotional appeals to create a general sentiment (which will later be rationalized) payed off for somebody. I don't know if it was the Russians or not.

The very nature that Facebook sold micro-targeted ads for pennies just because they were "only" for the smallest audiences, but yet these audiences were most likely to reshare the content virally, effectively whitewashing the "sponsored content" tag off it into a larger population of feeds, effectively created a scenario where ad spend on Facebook at the time must have been absolutely misleading.

I'm not sure what you mean -- generally, the smaller the audience size, the higher the CPM.

He is saying that if an 'ad' hits the right person in the right way, that person will share it withing a large group. So you may pay more to reach the first, but after that the target audience does the work for you by sharing.

-> I sponsor an ad targeting a certain audience

-> Byron Shifflett comments on the sponsored content in a way that makes it clear I reached him

-> Under another account, I reply to his comment

-> I send a friend request

-> He accepts

-> Now I can reach him just by posting my nonsense on my second account

-> He shares. That's what I like about him.

None of that is the case. Microtargeting isn't cost effective and doesn't scale well, and it's usually more expensive, not less.

In 2013, I remember people were building Facebook audiences by ripping Facebook ID's from relevant open groups - that was insanely targeted audience, and while it wasn't general practice, it's definitely something advertisers were using. None of what comes from that is unexpected results. Your argument appears to be that Russian authorities with a $100k budget were 1000x better at manipulating Facebook's audience targeting tools than the people that had been paid to do just that for years - is that true?

I do not like Facebook, personally, and I don't like Trump. But this appears an unlikely scenario.

Exactly. The use of ad spend to talk about Russian influence in 2016 is negligent in focusing on a metric of convenience. I suspect the real channels through which they exert influence don't lend themselves to easy quantification.

Indeed, the fake news being parroted on the most watched TV channels, and the most listened to talk shows has far, far more reach (like orders of magnitude).

These guys didn't have the clout they have now when broadcasters and content-owners were not allowed to monopolize the market.

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