askchapo

Facebook ads. Not joking, thats pretty much it

When libs bring it up I usually engage in some 'whataboutism' and pivot to saying if they think that's an assault on democracy, what about CambridgeAnalytica, or worse, what about the fact that the US funnels EXORBITANT amounts of money into global media manipulation to destroy entire countries.

Who would win?

• Several billion a year for decades, to fund Voice of America, as an international propaganda media project

• $16,000 in Facebook ads two weeks before a general election.

So the "Russia-gate" stuff?

An internet marketing/data collection company, based out of Russia, had a bunch of marketing/bot accounts on Twitter/Facebook. During the election with Clinton/Trump, because it was all in the news and shit, the marketing/bot accounts were tapping into the USA political zeitgeist of the moment and would have posts with memes or references to the candidates, the USA in general, etc in an attempt to drive up engagement with those accounts.

I've lost track of the second wave of articles that had a huge list of the tweets that you could scroll through and the third wave of articles that had an analysis of the tweets themselves. I spent a day skimming the tweets and didn't find anything that looked like a serious attempt at anything other that "jumping on the bandwagon" for likes and follows. What I can vaguely remember of the later "analysis" articles were things like, "The cost of the paid marketing/bot accounts was ridiculously small compared to the amount of money moving through the Twitter/Facebook", "The total volume of daily posts from this 'Russian' source was an incredibly tiny fraction of all the posts per day", "The 'messaging' of the posts was not consistent in any way. There'd be pro Hillary posts, and pro Bernie posts, and pro Trump posts, both pro and con gun posts, generic "America! Fuck yeah!" posts. The posts being in line with the targeted audience, i.e. a pro gun post would have been targeted at a accounts that the algorithm viewed as paying attention to gun things."

Oh... I just remembered one thing that might actually, possibly, be considered an effect. One of the marketing accounts said there was going to be a Trump event (or a pro-Trump rally?) at someplace and bunch of anti-Trump protesters showed up at the location. It turned out that there was no Trump event, though.

My takeaway from all of it was that, the "interference" was just that a company outside the USA paid for some targeted marketing stuff. There was never any evidence that the Internet Research Agency had any effect on voter turnout or disposition. This year, if/when Biden loses, we'll probably be reading articles for a year or two about TikTok and China "interfering" in the election between Trump and Biden.

Nobody actually knows what the deal with Cambridge Analytica was. It is like a cudgel to illustrate "facebook bad" which is an idea that everyone (me included) agrees with for various reasons, so nobody actually cares about the semantic content of what actually happened.

The common thread between the CA/russiagate stuff is that foreign agents are just so much more effective at microtargeting voters through ad targeting capabilities exposed by social media sites that they were able to subvert the election with a relatively small amount of "misinformation". It is basically unfalsifiable.