Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election

There are many tentacles to the US octopus, for starters you can look at an organization created by and funded by the US congress, the soi disant National Endowment for Democracy. They have a conference opening next week containing some of the people the US has been using to interfere in Russian elections ( https://www.ned.org/events/prospects-for-russias-democratic-... ).

Am I missing this somewhere?

A Reddit user who "was working at the other end of this pipeline that is selling digital adspace to consulting firms" (according to his post) also posted some very detailed insights as to how funds might have been laundered into clean political donations via small agencies and PACs in the US via digital media buys.

Here's his follow-up post from three months ago which has more info and links to his original post--really worth reading all of it, his original post, the subsequent threads, etc.: https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/6alzm0/fbi_confirm...

So the issue is less about ads purchased directly from Russia or by illegitimate companies with Russian IPs or anything of the sort as FB addressed in this statement. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the dollar amounts that might have been spent as part of the rest of the Trump media buys. The bigger story may actually be more about Russian (and other funds) funneled through small legit digital agencies and PACs (or through Parscale) in the US who then did ad buys driving for Trump donations which he was then able to legally use as campaign funds (or for enriching himself as the Reddit user hypothesizes).

There are likely FB sales reps and others there who have some insight into the ad campaign objectives, targeting details, and the source of that targeting data. The last bit is interesting there because it is still not fully understood how Cambridge Analytica plugged into all of this, and how they obtained their detailed targeting data. Mercer and Bannon both have direct Cambridge Analytica ties[2].

All of this is to say that I don't think the full story is being unearthed with these data points that FB shared. And I'd be willing to bet that FB sales reps who dealt with these accounts during the election know quite a bit more about what actually went on. However we may never know how deep the rabbit hole really goes, how dirty such funds might actually be, or how much FB, Google and Twitter really profited from the election (and ongoing campaigns).

I want to conclude this by stating that I am just posting my own personal thoughts based on a variety of articles and Reddit posts, and I don't purport to have any inside insight into these companies operations beyond my fairly deep experience in the online advertising space and my understanding of how that operates, so this is largely speculation and you should come to your own conclusions. That said, it is hardly outside the realm of possibility at this point to imagine how this sort of scheme could work, and how all of the players involved might have had strong financial incentives to not rock the boat.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/trump-russia-data-parscale-faceb...

[2] http://www.newsweek.com/did-russians-target-dem-voters-kushn...

And, second, they were channelled through false-flag accounts and pages, which violates Facebook's policies regarding authenticity.