Russian-backed messages in the 2016 election cycle had outsize reach, ad buyers say, because of the way Facebook rewards content that gets a reaction
.. On Facebook, a little ad spending goes a long way—and the more contentious the ads are, the farther they may go.Facebook Inc. disclosed last week that Russian entities spent some $150,000 for ads about “divisive” topics during a two-year period that included the U.S. presidential race.
.. the Russian-backed messages may have had outsize reach, ad buyers say, because Facebook favors ads that grab users’ attention and make them click, whether the content is political or otherwise, sensational or not.
.. In all, the Russians’ ads could have reached 3 million to 20 million or more people on the social network
.. Facebook has said little about the approximately 5,200 ads, which mostly centered on hot-button social and political issues like immigration and race relations.
.. In Facebook’s internal ad-auction system, ads compete in billions of auctions a day for slots in users’ news feeds. The system tends to reward ads that spark engagement—by getting users to click, share or otherwise spend time viewing—and sometimes it picks such ads over less-engaging ads that have a higher bid, advertisers say.
.. “When you put out an ad and Facebook sees that relative to other ads this is one is getting a lot of shares, that really seems to drive the cost down,” said Anthony Astolfi, creative director at IVC Media, who led digital advertising for Gary Johnson’s presidential campaign.
.. The day before the campaign, 32,500 Facebook users had engaged with the client’s ads. The client spent only a fraction of a penny, or 0.024 cent, for each user its ads were intended to reach. After the video launched, 55,000 users engaged, and the cost of reaching a single user dropped 30% to 0.017 cent, he said.
The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election
The Russian information attack on the election did not stop with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails or the fire hose of stories, true, false and in between, that battered Mrs. Clinton on Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik. Far less splashy, and far more difficult to trace, was Russia’s experimentation on Facebook and Twitter
.. On Wednesday, Facebook officials disclosed that they had shut down several hundred accounts that they believe were created by a Russian company linked to the Kremlin and used to buy $100,000 in ads pushing divisive issues during and after the American election campaign.
.. On Twitter, as on Facebook, Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages. Many were automated Twitter accounts, called bots, that sometimes fired off identical messages seconds apart — and in the exact alphabetical order of their made-up names, according to the FireEye researchers. On Election Day, for instance, they found that one group of Twitter bots sent out the hashtag #WarAgainstDemocrats more than 1,700 times.
.. understanding the Russian efforts will be crucial in preventing or blunting similar, or more sophisticated, attacks in the 2018 congressional races and the 2020 presidential election.
James Comey Is Maxwell Smart
How Comey’s botched mission to safeguard a Hillary presidency elected Trump.
It’s far more likely that Mr. Comey conceived of his intervention as a counterintelligence operation. Hillary would win. Russia’s fake email about Ms. Lynch conspiring to prevent a Hillary indictment would become public and be used by Trump partisans and America’s adversaries to discredit her victory. Therefore he would neutralize this Russian threat by clearing Mrs. Clinton himself. In doing so, it now appears he accidentally secured Mr. Trump’s win.
Free yourself from any hindsight bias. All actors at the time were convinced Hillary would win; for U.S. officials, the urgency was to protect Mrs. Clinton’s inevitable presidency from Russian dirty tricks.
.. Mr. McAuliffe, in last month’s podcast, opined flatly that Russia also expected Mrs. Clinton to win and wanted to destabilize her presidency.
Mr. Comey himself, in public testimony, gave mumbly assent to the “intelligence community’s” now-claim that Russia wasn’t just trying to weaken Mrs. Clinton but elect Donald Trump, arguing that in a two-person race, hurting one necessarily helps the other.
Such sophistries aside, this is implausible. Against all polling, Russia would not have thought trying to elect Mr. Trump a good investment. In effect, this claim about Russian motives is another counterintelligence operation by our own intelligence community to distract from its botched counterintelligence operation that elected Mr. Trump.
To be clear, we’re not talking about a conspiracy exactly, but about intelligence leaders adjusting their statements and emphases on the fly to pretty up an embarrassing picture.
.. Hillary and her surrogates tirelessly flogged an apparent Trump-Putin affinity to her advantage. Mrs. Clinton’s mistake was devoting too many of her resources to the wrong states.
.. It’s useful to recall that what the FBI handed over to Special Counsel Robert Mueller was a “counterintelligence investigation”—an inquiry into the facts of Russia’s meddling, not a criminal investigation seeking something, anything to pin on Donald Trump.
If Mr. Mueller does not see the importance of coming clean on the Comey intervention (whether or not he wants to acknowledge that the Comey intervention may have elected Mr. Trump), then Mr. Mueller is part of the stonewall.
The Voter Purges Are Coming
The Trump administration’s election-integrity commission will have its first meeting on Wednesday to map out how the president will strip the right to vote from millions of Americans.
.. the Justice Department’s civil rights division. It forced 44 states to provide extensive information on how they keep their voter rolls up-to-date. It cited the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, known as the Motor-Voter law, which mandates that states help voters register through motor vehicle departments.
The letter doesn’t ask whether states are complying with the parts of the law that expand opportunities to register. Instead it focuses on the sections related to maintaining the lists. That’s a prelude to voter purging.
.. Here’s how the government will use voters’ data. It will create a national database to try to find things like double-voters. But the commission won’t be able to tell two people with the same name and birthday apart. Such errors will hit communities of color the hardest. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of the 100 most common last names.
.. Purging voters is part of a larger malicious pattern that states have employed across the country. Georgia and Ohio are being sued for carrying out early versions of what we can expect from the Trump administration.
.. Mr. Kobach has been at the vanguard of a crusade against Motor-Voter and has been sued at least three times for making it harder for Kansans to vote. Before the 2016 election, he illegally blocked tens of thousands of voters from registering. Mr. Blackwell rejected registration forms because they were printed on paper he thought was too thin. Mr. von Spakovsky has led numerous unsuccessful legal efforts to diminish voter participation and to fight voting rights. Mr. Adams published personal information about people whom he wrongly accused of committing multiple felonies in a flawed hunt for fraud... my biggest fear is that the government will issue a report with “findings” of unsupported claims of illegal voting, focused on communities of color... These wild claims won’t be just hot air. Members of Congress will seize on them to turn back protections in federal law. States will enact new barriers to the ballot box. Courts will point to the commission’s work to justify their decisions... The irony is that there are serious threats to our voting systems,
- from cyberattacks to aging machines to
- Russian interference to
- discriminatory voter ID laws at the state level.
Those are the real problems, but that’s not what the commission was created to address.