Campaign finance is a big topic, at least for the Democrats. Public financing plus constitutional amendment to overturn Citizen's United was in the party program.

And just because we do shitty things to other countries doesn't mean we should roll over and allow it to happen to us (see also: cyber attacks).

Your point is moot.

Inject 100k on a fake news items like "The pope is a paedofile" for instance and see the whole world talking and reposting it the next day.

Spend a billion promoting something real but boring and you might see almost non-existent tracktion.

By definition disinformation and destabilization campaigns are 1000x more effective, especially if organized by entities specializing on those for decades.

You're mistaken if you think there were not opposition ads against the opposition. Even just looking at the mainstream traditional ads by Hillary, they were very dark ads. Just the other day she was still chiding women for not voting for her, as if she was owed their vote. Who has that much entitlement?

In your example Satan is accused of owning the pope and all other miscreants.

$100k is only what's been proven so far. I highly doubt that's the entirety of the Russian influence campaign...

Then why are the likes of P&G rethinking their digital ads?

You know, even if the amount were $10 million, in the face of over $1 Billion, it's still peanuts.

If it were that easy, we'd be toppling regimes all over the world for pennies on the dollar but we're not because that's dreamland stuff.

Because an ad that makes people angry over a lie is 10 thousand times more effective than "buy our brand next time you shop". Why are we here commenting over a political story instead of about what toothpaste brand is best?

I don't think that captures it.

You're basically arguing the angriest electorate will win. Obama won on Hope.

I think what won the election this time was that people were a bit sick and tired of pols who promised all kinds of things but never delivered. Hillary promised all kinds of things and I would venture she never intended on delivering on many. Personally, I voted third party.

I mean, if we look at her political history, it's always been opportunistic -by that I mean changing political position if it favored her. From the Super predator stuff to opposition to gay marriage to many things in between. I think people were tired of that and thought Trump offered an alternative which even if it didn't match up in all counts, they could at least believe he had the US interest in mind (as opposed to globalists who might have other priorities.)

I think it's interesting that at one time the left campaigned against the mainstream left's globalist interventionist agenda but now they are proponents of globalism and interventionism and open borders. It's an interesting dynamic to witness.

Don't dismiss a (even much) smaller amount; if properly targeted it can be a lot more effective than the crop dusting approach that traditional advertising takes.

That's ridiculous.

There is no way that a crack Russian/Ukranian team understand or have better info on the American public than American "pundits" and campaign professionals.

Why couldn't Bernie buy 200k of highly targeted ads and beat Hillary or why couldn't a very well connected Hillary (who has good connections to Russia as well) not buy highly targeted and effective ads?

I don't buy that narrative. There is no way a rag-tag team with $100k beats a political machine with real connections in DC, Wall Street, etc. which happened to also spend over $1billion. It's a ridiculous assertion.

Why don't we, the US, buy these highly targeted ads in a place like Venezuela and get people to vote against Maduro (or any other gov't we don't like).

It just does not work that way. Or, if it were to, the likes of FB and Google are doomed. Whoever this band of propagandists are they can undercut Madison ave and rake in the money for pennies on the dollar from corporate America.

This argument seems to fly in the face of the startup ethos (which I guessed had some currency at HN). It is precisely a rag-tag team with $100k and _a different way of thinking_ that brings down a $1bn machine. I'm not saying that this is what happened in this case, but it could happen (or have happened), so don't dismiss it just because of the resourcing asymmetry.

But it's likely true that it wasn't all their doing if they do exist. They could handy fall guys for whomever did the real work.

Sure, it's a fake prop to enable tighter political regulations online. The entire thing is a sham that Facebook and Google are gleefully willingly going along with. There is a long, disgusting history of powerful corporations in the US working with politicians to achieve mutually beneficial goals that relate to carving up the economic or political spheres.

The sums are laughably trivial, precisely because anything larger would be too difficult to set the fraud up for (anything that could be considered business significant, millions of dollars, would be too easy to tightly audit; plus the smaller sums play to the angle that it's easy for it to get lost in the overall, so the company doesn't look too extremely negligent; no doubt that was part of the deal Facebook and Google made in helping with the setup).

One of the questions being investigated is how such targeting might have been achieved. There just happened to be a data operation run by Jared Kushner, who is at the center of Mueller's investigation.

I also like to direct people to the following https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great... Also "no way a rag-tag team beats.." is straight from the plot of the movie Moneyball which is what we're talking about here. Also no-one is talking about GDPR which could stop this (please see below).

We're talking several orders of magnitude here. It's not comparable to the moneyball sitch.

The thing is, if that team has a secret sauce to convince people to change their minds, they are in the wrong game and would rake in billions serving corporate America and unseating Google and Facebook at their game.

It's a tempest in a teapot.

I think you're right just wanted to highlight that some seriously impressive tech was applied. Any suggestion that it was a exclusively Russia/Ukrainian team that did everything could be a distraction so that the whole issue can be lumped into the popular dialogue. I'm sure there was a Russian or two on the real team.

Do you really believe this? You really think 100k stands up to 1Billion?

Sure it can. If it can't then startups shouldn't bother, and revolutionaries, insurgents and freedom fighters should just surrender.

I don't know enough about what happened in this case, but you can't dismiss the entire argument purely on the spend amount.

Traditional media buys versus well targeted ads on Facebook. You don't need to sway everyone. That 100k stands up a lot more than one would think just comparing the two numbers.

How do you know? Have you ever worked in online advertising? Most companies easily spend 100k a month. Are you aware you are being manipulated by the media on this story?

Total sum is not less than 100k....