Ok, so how many times have we said it? How many times have we said that anyone who tells you that Russia’s Facebook activities couldn’t have possibly swayed the election is either i) lying to you, or ii) doesn’t understand how social media works?
Let us save you some thinking: we’ve said it a lot. More times than we care to remember.
Here’s an excerpt from a previous post that pretty much sums it up:
Ok, we’re just going to come right out and say this: if you don’t think it is at least possible that Russia’s activity on Facebook had an impact on the election, then you don’t understand much about social media.
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 sites make a living.
Earlier this month, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s Vice President of Policy and Communications, released some of the facts surrounding what information the company turned over to Congress.
As it turns out, some 10 million people in the U.S. saw at least one of the Russia-linked ads. 44% of those views were before the election, 56% after the election was over (so at least Trump’s defenders have that latter stat going for them).
Well on Monday evening we learn something new. Namely this, via NBC:
An estimated 126 million Americans, roughly one-third of the nation’s population, received Russian-backed content on Facebook during the 2016 campaign, according to prepared testimony the company submitted Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee and obtained by NBC News.
Underscoring how widely content on the social media platform can spread, Facebook says in the testimony that while some 29 million Americans directly received material from 80,000 posts by 120 fake Russian-backed pages in their own news feeds, those posts were “shared, liked and followed by people on Facebook, and, as a result, three times more people may have been exposed to a story that originated from the Russian operation.”
Imagine that, right? Facebook is a platform designed to amplify a message and as it turns out, their platform is pretty fucking good at doing just that which makes all kinds of sense because as we’ve been pounding the table on for about six months, that’s what social media is designed to do.
And here’s the kicker: these new numbers apparently don’t even include the ads.
Worse, Facebook now admits that “the shared content which reached 126 million Americans was likely hard, if not impossible, for users of the social media platform to identify as originating from Russia.”
Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, does note in the same prepared remarks that this makes up only a small percentage of the total content served in users’ news feeds – specifically, about 1 out of every 23,000 pieces of content.
But that’s hardly the point. And from what I can tell by reading the NBC story, Stretch is fully aware of that.
After all, it’s not like anyone is arguing that the majority of the content on Facebook originates from evil Russians. That would be absurd simply by virtue of the sheer amount of content that gets passed around on Facebook. There aren’t enough Russians on the planet Earth to make Facebook all about Russia.
Rather, the point is simply that one-third of the U.S. population was shown Russian-backed content without having any way of knowing who created it.
So now lets see how the alt-Right blogosphere tries to explain away that rather inconvenient statistic.
This is just so unfair – the US electorate (or any electorate) isn’t smart enough to protect itself against other people’s propaganda….hence Trump’s victory
Yaaaawn!!… but good for them!!
What goes around comes around. US has proactively interfered FAR worse and even violently for decades with other elections and governments around the world. US also staged many bloody coups killing hundreds of thousands to install unpopular US puppets. For example in Iran, now the mortal enemy of US.
Thus, yaaawn to a few Russia-assisted FB ads. Fortunate that nobody has even tried to forcefully overthrow the US government (yet). Or rather I should say, unfortunately, as overthrowing the US government of the previous eight years could have actually been an improvement as Obama’s govt was was just so awful.
In another much more damning example of direct interference in a democratic process, never forget that Obama traveled to London immediately prior to the critical Brexit vote in an attempt to sway its outcome. Obama, being the slimey lowlife worm that he is, even publicly lied to the great British people by threatening the Brits with US-UK trade retaliation if UK voted for Brexit; in fact the truth was the opposite, as we now see UK-US trade discussions being fast-tracked, as it’s no longer held back by the bureaucracy of the EU.
Hillary got payback from Putin and deserved it; get educated on their past history. Good on Putin. I salute you, sir! Putin is admired here in the far East…. Obama and Hillary: despised and mocked. Like Duterte’s blunt proclamation a year ago, “Fuck you Obama, we now have our friend China. America has lost now.”
Fortunately, Trump helped repair that relationship and will be visiting the Philippines in a week so we’ll see.
http://www.scmp.com/week-asia/article/2098544/what-now-dutertes-china-pivot-marawi-cements-us-importance-philippines
Obama and Hillary undid decades of improving US-Russian relations and made enemies of Russia, chasing Russia into the welcoming arms of China – about the biggest geopolitical blunder so far in the 21st century; other big blunders like Syria, Saudi and losing the petrodollar also part of Obama’s legacy of failure.
Also the Obama admin totally pissed-off Modi and India, likely to become a key power this century.
Also, the Obama admin totally pissed-off Modi and India, likely to become a key power this century.
I don’t use FB and I closed my IG account before the “election” after repeatedly receiving and marking a certain genre of posts in my feed as undesirable: I’d had enough racist, pro-nazi, pro-tRump posts. Marking them undesirable increased their frequency. I figured Zuckerberg and his minions were behind it. I’ve not gone back. FB and Twitter, now saying, “Oh my!”, are disingenuous at best.
Irb, are you a Russian bot?
I think he’s just a boor.
Yeah right I’m a Russian bot . First, I’m a SHE not a “he” and second I’m of Asian descent, not russian.
I gotchya, Irb, you are a female Russian bot of Asian descent, which clarifies everything.