Re:Twitter Is Crawling with Bots and Lacks Incentive to Expe...
by zaroth on Friday October 13, 2017 @01:56PM
(#15467865)
Keep in mind - total spent on the 2016 election according to CBS was $6.8 Billion [1].
In that context, how could $100,000 of FB ads (0.001%) possibly be relevant?
Speculating that it might possibly be relevant if we hypothetically were to discover it was 100x bigger than we currently know, to me that defeats the whole argument.
"Big if true!" is the rallying cry of the whole Russiagate fiasco. "Big if Bigger!" is just the next contortion.
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016s-price-tag-6-8-bi...
Those numbers aren't ads/posts, they're dollars. In September, Facebook confirmed that Russian operatives spent $100,000 on psyops advertising.
Keep in mind that (1) $100,000 is 15-25 million impressions reaching millions of highly-targeted people (Cambridge Analytica is now under investigation by the HPSCI), all amplified by the targets' engagement, and that (2) FB is sharing only 100% confirmed activity discovered during very early, self-investigated findings.