This comment is highly understating the power of social media micro-targeting by dubbing it as buying a few ads on FB and running twitterbots. I would request you to check out the Ted talk by Zeynep Tufekci (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI) to get a sense of how effective social media campaigns can be.
Well that would explain why they were so effective in the Ukaine campaign, right?
Or you're saying Americans are so much more deceived and gullible?
The Kochs and the Soroses pump so much more money into manipulating elections what the Russians did was peanuts. People would hardly be complaining if they had instead been on Team Bernie. But since the candidate who could not possibly lose lost a Sure shot, people want and need a ready made answer, enter twitterbots and FB ads.
Anyway, the agreeing narrative phenomenon is most clearly evident in the Assange issue. When he was exposing America's behavior in Europe and the middle east and it also aligned with left ideology, he was a hero, Swedish accusations be damned. Now that his leaks hurt the left, he's a tool of the Russians, of course.
> The Kochs and the Soroses pump so much more money into manipulating elections what the Russians did was peanuts. People would hardly be complaining if they had instead been on Team Bernie. But since the candidate who could not possibly lose lost a Sure shot, people want and need a ready made answer, enter twitterbots and FB ads.
The Kochs (etc) are Americans manipulating the system with their wealth and probably within the law. I resent them for it, but that’s very different from a foreign government attempting to influence the results of a US election. I don’t pretend to know the actual pervasiveness of Russian influence; I’m only saying that your comparison falls flat.
I have to wonder if you might realize this yourself, but choose to ignore it in order to justify your own agenda.
Also, I would be angry with any outcome that was shown to be the result of election tampering. That goes for any candidate, even if I voted for them myself.
Would anyone even care about the Facebook ad spend and meetings with campaign officials if it were Israelis or Saudis instead of Russians? I think if you do this mental exercise a lot of the "Russiagate" stories start to look weird.
This gets tricky. So does that mean suddenly it's meddling when Saudi Arabia makes political FB ad buys, or Egypt, or Japan, or whomever wants favor from Americans?
Can a Russian, Israeli or Saudi or Mexican citizen in their respective country buy political ads targeting Americans and favoring or disfavoring a particular American candidate for office?
What if they are on vacation in the US?
What if they have jobs in the US, are not citizens, but live here and have an interest in politics?
What if they are here illegally and buy ads favoring or disfavoring a candidate for office?
What if in some cases it was their own money, what if in other cases they were hired by people in their home countries to buy ads?
What if they work in DC and act as foreign agents and pay for lobbying?
> Can a Russian, Israeli or Saudi or Mexican citizen in their respective country buy political ads targeting American and favoring or disfavoring a particular American candidate for office?
Yes, lawfully [1]. This is a complicated area of law, which is why foreigners and foreign governments seeking to properly lobby in America hire proper counsel.
So Twitter found some $100k spent on ads from Russia during the campaign. Are you really suggesting that someone spending $100k could decide the outcome of an election as big as the U.S. one?
It's time to stop this "Russia hacked the Election" non-sense and just accept the fact that Hillary lost in a fair election.
> Are you really suggesting that someone spending $100k could decide the outcome of an election as big as the U.S. one?
You are very conveniently omitting recent disclosures from facebook that over 126 million Americans may have seen Russia based political posts over a two-year period leading to the election.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-socialme...
This isn't about a particular candidate winning or losing the election. The case would be equally horrifying if Hillary had won the election with the help of a foreign-state-sponsored social media campaign.
And I would implore you to check out the Ted talk I have posted above. It is not about supporting any particular candidate - it simply talks about how powerful these micro-targeted campaigns can be, and we ignore their potential and their effects on democracy at our own peril.
I feel that if some Facebook posts are able to affect the elections to a large degree, we as a people have failed and it doesn't matter what the outcome is since it's just a symptom of a larger problem.
Just like it didn't matter what the exact process by which GW won the contested election. The very fact that the counts were so close means we might as well have tossed a coin.
The last election showed that you only need to target a small amount of people in a few key states. $100k, coupled with some convenient gerrymandering, could easily reach that many people.
