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Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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