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WPost:Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election

J

Joe

Member
https://twitter.com/Susan_Hennessey/status/905524470240210945

screenshot_215.png
 
R

RDreamer

Member
Nazgul_Hunter said:
This might be a bold claim, but I do believe that the Facebook portion of the Fake News campaign is one of the major reasons Russia was successful.

All they needed to do was sway a 70,000 people in MI, PA and WI... and they did. Not hard to believe that gems like "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump," and multiple stories of how Hillary was gonna shed her human skin and reveal she's a lizard would have an effect.

People live on Facebook now.
Click to expand...

And I can attest to the fact that getting 70,000 people on Facebook the ads they need to see day in and day out especially if you have a targeted list is fucking cheap.
 
C

CyclopsRock

Member
Crab said:
A very wealthy American citizen is still more likely to be concerned with the well-being of America than a very wealthy Russian citizen. Not necessarily other Americans per se, but in the continuing existence of the American state and American institutions.
Click to expand...

I guess this is the country where you can't be President if you're not American, even if 250m people want to vote for you. But it's predicated - and the reason why, presumably, any of it is OK - on the idea that convincing someone you're right and thereby swaying their vote isn't actually a problem because you're convincing them that their new decision is the right one. It's not dissimilar to talking someone round over a beer in a pub.

RulkezX said:
I'd have liked to have seen your opinion on this sort of thing during the indy referendum.

Would you have been fine with day Spanish organisations covertly campaigning for remain ?
Click to expand...

Couldn't give a shit. If they can convince people their argument is stronger, then maybe they're doing everyone a favour. This is assuming, of course, that the advert isn't actually a lie, which is a different kettle of fish.
 
N

Nazgul_Hunter

Member
RDreamer said:
And I can attest to the fact that getting 70,000 people on Facebook the ads they need to see day in and day out especially if you have a targeted list is fucking cheap.
Click to expand...

So cheap. Just looking at some of my ads right now, for comparison:

39TM2s9.png


(yes, it cost me < $8000 to show an ad to nearly a million people)
 
N

Nazgul_Hunter

Member
riotous said:
Can't you "target" people when you buy Facebook ads?

I've bought google ads before; and put in keywords like gaming / sports / entertainment because of the site I was buying ads for. Facebook does the targeting for you based on keywords, if they are anything like other ad platforms.
Click to expand...

You can also re-engage people who have seen one of your ads in the past,

or

You can upload an entire email list and target only those people.

or

you can create a "Lookalike" out of people in an audience or customer list you already have. (Meaning, once they know a # of people who they're likely to sway with Fake News, they can easily find tons of other vulnerable people similar to the first group, all within Facebook)

or

keywords and a bunch other stuff I don't have time to mention here.


Facebook Targeting is scary good in the full sense of the word scary.
 
R

RDreamer

Member
Nazgul_Hunter said:
So cheap. Just looking at some of my ads right now, for comparison:

39TM2s9.png


(yes, it cost me < $8000 to show an ad to nearly a million people)
Click to expand...

Video views are especially ridiculous.

My guess is they'd be using link ads for this which are more expensive except with the goal they had in mind they probably didn't actually give a flying fuck about people clicking so they could get away with really cheap impression numbers.

Hard to be really sure what they could pump out if they had an actual list to work from. That's the thing others might not realize, too. If you have a list of people and information you can put that into Facebook and they'll match that to actual people. Then you can serve your ad right to those people. Facebook can also create lookalike target users to those groups, too. So if they wanted to influence ~70,000 people throughout the US and had a list of maybe 300,000 on the bubble people that'd be really simple. Input that entire list, make sure those people are inundated with stuff, and then make a lookalike and serve shit to people who might be just like those ones.

Bottom line is that if your goal is to slowly influence people through inundating them with bullshit on Facebook you can definitely do it for a really cheap price.

Nazgul_Hunter said:
You can upload an entire email list and target only those people.
Click to expand...

To expound on this, if you have just their names and addresses you can also target them. If you have a few pieces of information Facebook can try and match that with their database. So if you have an email address used for political purposes that may have been hacked from the DNC these guys could still target you by using your name and address even if it was a different email from what you signed into Facebook with.
 
N

Nazgul_Hunter

Member
RDreamer said:
Video views are especially ridiculous.

My guess is they'd be using link ads for this which are more expensive except with the goal they had in mind they probably didn't actually give a flying fuck about people clicking so they could get away with really cheap impression numbers.

Hard to be really sure what they could pump out if they had an actual list to work from. That's the thing others might not realize, too. If you have a list of people and information you can put that into Facebook and they'll match that to actual people. Then you can serve your ad right to those people. Facebook can also create lookalike target users to those groups, too. So if they wanted to influence ~70,000 people throughout the US and had a list of maybe 300,000 on the bubble people that'd be really simple. Input that entire list, make sure those people are inundated with stuff, and then make a lookalike and serve shit to people who might be just like those ones.

Bottom line is that if your goal is to slowly influence people through inundating them with bullshit on Facebook you can definitely do it for a really cheap price.
Click to expand...

+1

Yeah video is ridiculous, but a high performing Link post can also go really far really cheap. Especially with the clickbait garbage they were putting out, it wouldn't surprise me if they were getting $0.02 / $0.01 clicks.
 
J

jellies_two

Member
Fuzzery said:
They got voter data when they hacked the dnc
Click to expand...

Facebook took 100s of millions in ad money from the trump campaign which was driven by Cambridge analytica so much money they embedded their staff inside the campaign offices so they could write custom code to target the buys and help utilize the Facebook data farms.
If American people told the Russians how to target their divisive ads they more easily informed the trump campaign how to do it using data that probably wasn't all legal.
 
K

kirblar

Member
enzo_gt said:
I don't think there was a connection, just together they make the perfect 1-2. Republicans attack, Russians destabilize.
Click to expand...
Yeah, but the Russians need to know who to micro-target. Information that isn't going to be easy to acquire and act on if you're a foreign entity.
 
S

SolarPowered

Member
I wish the US had half the balls Europe does in regards to financial punishments on lawbreaking corporations. Facebook should be hit with fines and penalties so large CEOs across the business spectrum literally convulse at the thought of mistakenly cooperating with Russian election tamperers and shell companies. I guess we'll have to settle for Mark Zuckerberg being tarred and feathered on live television at the Democratic primaries instead.
 
R

riotous

Banned
SolarPowered said:
I wish the US had half the balls Europe does in regards to financial punishments on lawbreaking corporations. Facebook should be hit with fines and penalties so large CEOs across the business spectrum literally convulse at the thought of mistakenly cooperating with Russian election tamperers and shell companies. I guess we'll have to settle for Mark Zuckerberg being tarred and feathered on live television at the Democratic primaries instead.
Click to expand...

The ads weren't illegal as far as I can tell.
 
rokkerkory

rokkerkory

Member
Russia aint doing all this without help of americans. It's a crime of highest order. Get a rope folks.

FB also needs to get some slapping on this shit.
 
F

Foffy

Banned
I can imagine Russia used fake companies for ads.

I would lol hard it was straight up the government of Russia paying for ads straight up, no shell companies or the like.
 
J

jellies_two

Member
riotous said:
The ads weren't illegal as far as I can tell.
Click to expand...
You can't tell.
Facebook has little to any oversight and few rules to worry about, it's highly unregulated and opaque.

99% of people in D.C. Don't even understand the terminology used in ad micro targeting let alone what laws it may run afoul of. It's a Wild West and Facebook and google has a strong interest in keeping it that way.
 
R

riotous

Banned
jellies_two said:
You can't tell.
Click to expand...

I just mean that I tried googling it; as well as read the entire article in the OP which doesn't mention illegality. There are other articles talking about how the ads bought on Facebook were likely a legal loophole around foreign campaigning; and those appear to be the ads discussed here.

Why would micro-targeting be illegal at all in the US either way?

Anyways, point being this should be made illegal so Facebook could be required to vet it's advertisin a bit more.
 
J

Joe

Member
Grain of salt:

A couple of Russian-centric media outlets are reporting that Facebook and Twitter have deleted Russian troll "communities" with millions of members.

Meduza | A source close to Russia's &#8216;troll factory' says Facebook has deleted 80 percent of its groups
Facebook administrators have deleted up to 80 percent of the groups associated with the ”Internet Research Agency," an organization known as Russia's biggest ”troll factory." A source close to the agency told the newsletter The Bell that administrators have shut down 25 Facebook communities with a total subscriber count of more than 3 million accounts, and 32 groups on Instagram with 2 million subscribers. The same source says Twitter also blocked 50 of the Internet Research Agency's accounts with a combined follower count of 600,000 users.
Click to expand...
The source says the Internet Research Agency still maintains a sizable presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, ”in case the networks are needed again."

The Bell says the likelihood that the remaining groups will be blocked is low: most of the users in these communities are real people, not bots, and the only way Facebook could determine that they're owned by Russia's ”troll factory" would be ”through advertising campaigns."
Click to expand...
The Internet Research Agency employs paid writers to spread online comments and posts intended to ”influence" Internet users. The agency has been tied to Evgeny Prigozhin, a billionaire restaurateur known as Vladimir Putin's ”favorite chef."
Click to expand...


The Bell | Facebook acknowledged that its services were used by the Russian "troll factory". We learned the details (Translated from Russian)
  • Facebook is struggling with Russian groups quite effectively - a source close to the leadership of the "troll factory", told The Bell that the social network closed "up to 80% of the groups" that she led.
  • In total, 25 groups of "factories" in Facebook (more than 3 million subscribers) and 32 groups in Instagram (2 million) were closed, the source said. Twitter also closed about 50 accounts, which had approximately 600,000 followers.
  • Most of the blocked communities were devoted to the conservative party and problems with the blacks. The Bell checked the bands, whose connections with the Petersburg "factory" were written by RBC magazine - Secured Borders in Facebook and Tea Party News on Twitter: both of them are closed.
  • Groups in social networks were created under the pre-election campaign. What are the remaining 20% &#8203;&#8203;doing now and what are their goals? No special tasks were postponed after the elections, the source of The Bell states. Now the "factory" continues to support the audience of the remaining groups until they are needed again. The likelihood that they will be blocked is also low: most of the users of the groups are not real, but real people, and they can only belong to the "troll factory" via advertising campaigns, he says.
  • Get a comment by Mikhail Burchik, whom the media call the head of the "troll factory", The Bell failed.
  • What do I do with this?
  • According to the interlocutor of The Bell, the fight between social networks and groups of the "troll factory" is limited to the American segment Facebook, Instagram and Twitter: the Russian segment is not interested in them.
  • There are no calculations of the activity of the "factory" in Russian social networks. But the scale of his work can be estimated on the media segment of the holding Evgeny Prigogine, which includes little-known sites with huge traffic.
  • In April, the aggregate audience of the holding's resources was 36 million unique users per month, now, according to The Bell, based on Liveinternet data, 53.5 million. This is almost twice as much as that of RIA Novosti (29.9 million people).
Click to expand...


---


About Meduza:
https://meduza.io/en/pages/about
Every day we bring you the most important news and feature stories from hundreds of sources in Russia and across the former Soviet Union. Our team includes some of Russia's top professionals in news and reporting. We value our independence and strive to be a reliable, trusted outlet for objective, verified, and unbiased information about Russia and the former Soviet Union, as well as a source for sharp insights about one of the world's most enigmatic regions.
Click to expand...

About The Bell
http://thebell.io/english/about/
Before starting this project, I have spent 10 years as editor in chief at major Russian business media, including RBC, Forbes Russia and Vedomosti, joint venture of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.
The Bell is a media startup. It was born while I was a fellow at Stanford in 2016-2017.All the time, my former teammates and I were trying to figure out, what should a successful business media in Russian look like nowadays? Despite all the current troubles in our industry, and specifically the situation with media in Russia, we believe we have found a solution. We look up to rapidly growing media startups in the US, such as Axios, The Information, Finimize and The Skimm.
Our goal is to be helpful to people in business, by saving their time with only essential information. We have started with a daily email newsletter. In a 5 minutes read, we deliver all the information, that a person working to achieve, needs to get to keep an eye on most important trends. We deliver our newsletter twice a day: 10 AM at 8.30 PM (all Moscow time).
Click to expand...
 
J

jellies_two

Member
Pixieking said:
Russia’s Facebook Fake News Could Have Reached 70 Million Americans
Click to expand...


This article
Is a must read for anyone dealing with some internet advertising expert who sniffs at what 100k can buy in terms of viral spread.

If you make a Facebook ad for toothpaste that doesn't lie and isn't funny you have to pay for every inch of every eyeball.

But if you make fake news that says stunning info on Killary has been located by the FBI then a few dollars Boosts it into the stratosphere thanks to facebooks algorithms.
Now consider that Russians spent what they spent A:B testing outright lies to see which flew, and boosting likes and memberships of shonky Facebook groups and pages.
Then consider trump spent almost his entire budget on probably softer (but still exaggerated) meme type ads all on Facebook that incorporated subtle versions of the most successful Russian originated lies.

It's unbelievable but sort of obvious that zuckerberg built a machine that managed to spread disinformation for cash and also hid it largely from view. Unlike static public websites, bill boards and tv ads, Facebook feeds are mostly visible only to the mark, to the victim, it's almost the perfect political crime machine.
 
K

KernelPanic

Member
Small update. It wasn't just ads but organized events as well.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/exclus...to-organize-anti-immigrant-rallies-on-us-soil

Russian operatives hiding behind false identities used Facebook’s event management tool to remotely organize and promote political protests in the U.S., including an August 2016 anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally in Idaho, The Daily Beast has learned.
A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Beast that the social-media giant “shut down several promoted events as part of the takedown we described last week.” The company declined to elaborate, except to confirm that the events were promoted with paid ads. (This is the first time the social media giant has publicly acknowledged the existence of such events.)
The Facebook events—one of which echoed Islamophobic conspiracy theories pushed by pro-Trump media outlets—are the first indication that the Kremlin’s attempts to shape America’s political discourse moved beyond fake news and led unwitting Americans into specific real-life action.
Click to expand...
 
H

Hickbilly Deluxe

Banned
The Exploder said:
Yeah I can't believe people are talking about a Zuckerberg presidency. I'd rather vote for my own asshole, and that's saying something because it would be a huge inconvenience for me personally if my asshole was elected president.
Click to expand...

He'll likely be a big contender for the nomination once its time.
 
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