$100,000 In Facebook Ads Is More Than Enough To Influence An Election

The excerpts  found below are from a longer piece by Christine Emba for The Washington Post. I think this is a pretty important piece because it shows how easy it is to dispel with the patently ridiculous assertion that $100,000 in Facebook ad spend couldn’t possibly influence an election – a narrative quite a few Right-wing, Russia-focused blogs are currently pushing.

What’s particularly absurd about the folks who contend that $100,000 spent on Facebook wouldn’t have had any effect, is that many of the outlets who argue that rely on social media sharing to generate tens if not hundreds of millions of clicks a month. So they know full well how powerful Facebook is in terms of disseminating misleading information – it’s how those blogs make a living.

Without further ado, here are excerpts from Emba’s piece which you can read in full at the link above…

As if we needed more evidence that Facebook influenced the election.

Last week, the social-media company revealed that during the 2016 presidential campaign it sold more than $100,000 in ads to a Kremlin-linked “troll farm” seeking to influence U.S. voters. An additional $50,000 in ads also appear suspect but were less verifiably linked to the Russian government.

In the grand – at this point, far too grand – scheme of campaign spending, $150,000 doesn’t sound like much. It’s a minor TV ad buy, perhaps, or a wardrobe makeover for one vice-presidential candidate. But in the context of Facebook, it matters quite a bit. Not just for what it might have done to the election but also for what it says about us.

[…]

Because of its millions of users and the site’s focus on sharing, Facebook has a news reach that can transcend that of traditional media such as print or television. And that reach comes oddly cheap. One hundred dollars in Facebook ads could deliver a buyer’s message to thousands of viewers, whose further sharing would allow it to ripple out exponentially.

Now, turn that into $100,000 and inject it with malice. And imagine being able to target this message with minute precision: say, telling black voters in swing counties that Hillary Clinton was an incorrigible racist, or enraging white, male gun lovers with her supposed plans to roll back the Second Amendment. Imagine how quickly such misinformation could spread and metastasize.

[…]

The United States is so caught up in partisanship that we’ve lost our ability to keep a level head, and the whole world knows it – including our adversaries.

Americans can more consistently be relied upon to share wild-eyed rumors than to think critically on social issues. Basic civic debates have become so inflammatory that foreign actors can use them as cattle prods, sending us running mindlessly to whichever side we’re told is safe. We’re easily distracted from real facts and flock to news that confirms our biases. While the echo-chamber effect has been known for some time, the fact that it has become so dependable as a way to divide us is damning.