You don’t need to flip the voters, just get them to not show up, and get more republicans to show up. This isn’t about politics, this is about buisiness interests, and professional reputation.
Hillary Clinton had a $1.2 billion campaign budget, along with the vast majority of active social media users, the whole of Silicon Valley, and most of the press on her side. If Democrats didn’t show up to vote for her, the root cause wasn’t less than $1 million worth of ads for fake news stories.
That’s the thing though, it wasn’t just these ads: a sizable contingent of Silicon Valley was bitter over the Bernie thing, stoked by emails from hacked Russians for example. Not saying the campaign didn’t screw it up, it’s still an achievement to fumble with all those advantages, but also this was one part of a much larger effort than a particular rash of $1 million dollar ad spends.
In any case, CA thinks they are influencing elections, and are selling as much to clients. It’s like arguing over whether or not someone is helping a drug kingpin because they don’t actually sell a lot of drugs.
The current investigation into the Russian meddling of the U.S. presidential election is still underway. It's still too soon to assume that the interference was "less than $1 million worth of ads".
For example, the Russians have been funnelling money to Trump's family for a decade. Trump sold a FL mansion for 240% of it's value ($100M) to a Russian oligarch:
Those ads read like parodies of a Russian attempting to write English. Nearly every one has a grammatical error or a factual inaccuracy that is obvious after 2 seconds of thought. I particularly like "dynastic succession of the Clinton family in American politics breaches the core democratic principles laid out by our founding fathers", especially given that the son of one of our presidential founding fathers himself became president, and the presidencies of George HW Bush / George W Bush occurred during the lifetime of nearly everyone eligible to vote.
If those ads truly had any influence whatsoever, it suggests that the problem of democracy is far deeper than Russian interference.
Does propaganda work or doesn't it? The idea being pushed that since it does, only approved propaganda should be let through. Trump winning is proof that there's a need for regulation of propaganda.
Propaganda works, which is why we have laws that require the source of messages in other mediums be identified, and why we regulate it in a variety of other ways.
IANAL but these ads are not covered by the regulation because they were not written in the internet era, and the law likely needs a refresh or at least some case law examples to figure out how to apply it.
Some examples of ads using this technique:
http://amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2016/11/03/text-vote-hillary-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...