Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's only been ~1yr since the election. You have to be patient for big cases like this. Until then we have to trust the US intelligence community. Their messaging has been consistent that their arch-enemy they've been competing with for decades pulled a fast one on them and was unexpectedly effective at influencing an election. Government sources have been leaking a bunch of stuff to the press in the meantime. This w…
It's odd that people keep saying to trust the intel agencies, since much of the best research on the propaganda side is done in academia, and the data is out there. Here's a Tableau of the influence of just 6 of the ~200 recently banned Russian-run groups on Facebook: https://public.tableau.com/profile/d1gi#!/vizhome/FB4/TotalR... Here's the raw data: https://data.world/d1gi/missing-fb-posts-w-share-stats Here's some…
That said, the breathlessly covered "tens of millions of ad impressions" isn't that much on Facebook. From my experience getting 0.1% of viewers to care would be a significant number.
Being familiar with online marketing makes a lot of this sound less scary.
What I'd love to see is the Russian ad spending in the great context of the entire campaign. Considering both sides spent $1 billion on their combined campaigns it's entirely possible that the ~200 PR stories and 10M ad impressions are a minor blip in the wider scale.
What's interesting is how many people voluntarily shared these posts because it struck a chord with them (although it's equally as easy to buy fake likes/shares). And the fact they were focusing on critical swing states that Hillary's massive campaign failed to hit, basically non-english foreigners outperforming the most expensive American consultants...
The leaked data is another story and Wikileaks will never be proven, which means 50% of the leaked data is very likely via Russia.
For each of these, there were plenty of moving pieces out of Russia's control (the FBI and media's handling of pretty insignificant stuff, the highly receptive audience sharing the propaganda, etc) that all worked in their favour. Even if their contributions were minor, the US political environment played a huge role in amplifying it into something far bigger than they could ever do themselves.
Outside of some future smoking gun connection with the Trump campaign (which seems highly unlikely so far) it's going to be very difficult to measure exactly how much meaningful influence Russia really had on the elections. But it's an interesting lesson for the future regardless and the vagueness will offer plenty of leeway for the Clinton's campaign to sidestep responsibility for both running a bad campaign and for being a generally unlikable person (which matters more in these popularity contests than capability).
And if you didn't notice my entire original comment was satirizing mainstream discourse. I don't think you need or should trust intel agencies nor the media's uncritical interpretation here. I left it purposefully vague for those smart enough to see through the popular narratives.