Facebook says it sold political ads to Russian company during 2016 election | Hacker News Reader

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

washingtonpost.com

160 pointsaaronbrethorst163 comments

I implore everyone alarmed by recent Russian assaults on Western Democratic institutions to get their hands on an English translation of 'The Foundations of Geopolitics' by Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin is a Russian academic and the book is essentially a textbook on how Russia should seek to subvert and destabilize Europe, the US and other Russian rivals in order to forge a new empire for the explicit purpose of ethnic Russian domination of the world.

Dugin is not some fringe academic and the book is well known among the elite of the Russian state. According to the Wiki page:

>"The book has had a large influence within the Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites and was allegedly used as a textbook in the General Staff Academy of Russian military."

More on the book's approach towards destabilizing America:

>"Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."

We must unite in the face of division, both for the sake of unity and because the Russians are actively trying to divide us.

I haven't been able to find a copy of the English translation online. I was only able to get my hands on one because of a connection that works in DC. If anyone knows where to get one online please post a link.

Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics?wpr...

I'm curious: other than a will to power, is there any philosophical or principle-driven reason for Russia's actions? In other words, why don't Russians want Western liberal democracy for themselves?

The Russian regime doesn't want Western liberal democracy because it's incompatible with the self-sustaining kleptocratic autocracy that they are running.

Individual Russian people may or may not want Western liberal democracy for any of a variety of reasons (they “not” side in part driven by regime propaganda), but those preferences are not controlling regime actions.

No, double digits of KGB and CPSU staff had bank accounts abroad just like Chinese CCP members do now.

And more power, means more money for them, just like usual.

To disrupt Russian political establishment, you do same things you do to disrupt criminal gangs. Plain and simple.

Gathering all of NATO's paratroopers and sending them to Moscow will work too, but at a bigger expense

A similar question, but specifically related to "…in order to forge a new empire for the explicit purpose of ethnic Russian domination of the world." – what is the purpose of this in this day and age, it would take generations by which time the people initiating change would be dead, is it just an archaic form of racism?

In Russia the word "democracy" has some negative meaning. After Soviet Union collapse there was a period (1990-2000) of "freedom" with economic downturn, poverty, hyperinflation, corruption, raise of criminal activity and a war in Chechnya. By the way, Wikipedia says [1] that ecomomic problems might be a result of reforms suggested by American economists. Russia began recovering only when Putin became a President.

Putin likes to remind about this saying things like "Do you remember what the country was before I became the President? You don't want to return to that time, don't you?"

People in Russia want higher salary (median salary is $500/month) and reasonable mortgage interest rates (now it can be as high as 12%), not more democracy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Russia#Transition_t...

This New Yorker article from March provides a lot of background on Russia's "Hybrid War" strategy and its motivations:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-an...

Reading that article left me pretty slack-jawed.

It cites a 2013 article, "The Value of Science in Prediction", by Chief of General Staff of Russian Federated Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov as a canonical text behind the Russian election interference campaign. After reading the New Yorker article, I tracked down a translation of that text here:

http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/...

Strange to think that the Arab Spring helped function as a trigger for white nationalist marches in this country.

Yes, it was that New Yorker article that I was remembering. In particular, this bit:

> In 1996, during a summit meeting in Moscow, Clinton went for an early-morning run with Talbott in the Sparrow Hills, near Moscow State University. Clinton had known Talbott since they were students at Oxford, and confided his anxiety. He did not regret the expansion of NATO or the decision, at last, to battle Serbian forces in Bosnia. But he knew that he was making Yeltsin’s political life excruciatingly difficult.

> “We keep telling ol’ Boris, ‘O.K., now, here’s what you’ve got to do next—here’s some more shit for your face,’ ” Clinton told Talbott as they ran. “And that makes it real hard for him, given what he’s up against and who he’s dealing with.”

> Earlier that year, Yeltsin had summoned Talbott. “I don’t like it when the U.S. flaunts its superiority,” he told him. “Russia’s difficulties are only temporary, and not only because we have nuclear weapons but also because of our economy, our culture, our spiritual strength. All that amounts to a legitimate, undeniable basis for equal treatment. Russia will rise again! I repeat: Russia will rise again.”

And yet so far Yeltsin is still wrong: Russia's difficulties appear to be permanent. Population and life expectancy have declined. GDP growth has been low and erratic; currently their economy is smaller than Italy. They rank 131st on the worldwide corruption index. All of these problems are self inflicted.

Maybe so. But time will tell.

In any case, it's not the accuracy of the prediction that matters here. It's the motivation.

And it's also not very charitable. It's an aspect of a mindset that perpetuates the cycle of violence. Long term, it works better for victors to be forgiving and magnanimous. But sadly enough, it's probably too late for that. Maybe about a century too late.

I thought this bit was interesting:

>In 2008,[...] Russian hackers accomplished a feat that Pentagon officials considered almost impossible: breaching a classified network that wasn’t even connected to the public Internet. Apparently, Russian spies had supplied cheap thumb drives, stocked with viruses, to retail kiosks near nato headquarters in Kabul, betting, correctly, that a U.S. serviceman or woman would buy one and insert it into a secure computer.

That's interesting. Stuxnet used a very similar strategy. It was identified in 2010, but could have been in use earlier. So I wonder if the Americans/Israelis got the idea from the Russians, or vice versa. Or maybe they both got the idea from malware hackers. Or employed them ;) Maybe even the same malware hackers. That'd be a trip!

Where is a good place to learn about these things in the future. I'm a bit floored by all this but want to keep tabs on it all too.

Another excellent speech on reds' tactic is this https://youtu.be/5gnpCqsXE8g , old, but I believe relevant

I didn't read the book but it is worth noting that those ideas are Dugin's personal opinion (of course there might be people who support it, for example there are people that dream of reviving Soviet Union). It is not official Moscow's policy.

Also ethnic Russian domination might be a bit difficult because in Russia itself there are many different ethnic groups [1] that wouldn't approve this idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Russia

The US "won" the Cold War by bankrupting the former Soviet Union. And then they humiliated its leadership. Putin was Yeltsin's protégé, and watched him dying of alcoholism. He's still angry. And remember, much of his family died in the siege of Leningrad.

So, yes. They have a plan.

The Soviets bankrupted themselves by being Soviets.

Putin is angry because Yeltsin died from alcohol? What US has to do with it? Or with the fact that Putin's family died in the siege (which was USSR faut, by the way, since they've friended Hitler in 1939)?

Putin is angry because the US humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. Which was reflected in Yeltsin's collapse, through depression and alcoholism. And regardless of the causes of Leningrad's sacking, many of Putin's family died there. All of which has given him a rather negative attitude toward the US and its allies.

And by the way, remember that the US and its allies invaded Russia at the end of WWII, after the Tzar was deposed. So it's not at all surprising that Stalin initially allied Russia with Germany.

WW1, not WW2 (I think that is just a typo)

US humiliated Russia? Care to provide some clarifications?

Calling publishing some ads in Facebook an "assault on Democratic Institutions" is a bit exaggerated.

The Russians have done a lot more than Facebook ads. I'll give you $100k on ads from Russia is not much compared to the ~$800m the Koch's are said to have put up.

A lot of Putin's ideas about how to subvert and destabilize western powers have apparently also come from Vladislav Surkov.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hi...

That's why it troubles me so much that everyone succumbs to this, like small children. Not just the media that are fueling the divide - but my own friends, making big drama everyday, insulting those with different political views - making the divide even bigger. It really saddens me, especially when I see it among my close ones. It's like mass hysteria, it got completely out of control.

Here's Aleksandr Dugin on youtube talking about Trump's election https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEQlNJdR8jo&feature=youtu.be...

As it is rarely mentioned in the US media, I'd just note that the US pretty openly interferes in Russian elections, and has been doing so for a long time. It's curious this is virtually never mentioned amidst all the accusations of Russia involving itself in US elections.

There are many tentacles to the US octopus, for starters you can look at an organization created by and funded by the US congress, the soi disant National Endowment for Democracy. They have a conference opening next week containing some of the people the US has been using to interfere in Russian elections ( https://www.ned.org/events/prospects-for-russias-democratic-... ).

> virtually never mentioned

I (anecdotally) hear this tidbit in every comments section relating to Russia's involvement in the U.S. election. Almost as if it's a common talking point.

Reminds me a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

EDIT: ... And so a conversation was effectively derailed and nothing was gained. Arguing about the validity of Whataboutism or who is doing it isn't the point. It's a deflection technique that works in spite of you calling it out.

It's the line that Putin and Lavrov (foreign minister) have been pushing since forever: "you westerners are no better than us, stop shaming us for the shady things that we do". That's an easy way to keep your population happy – tell them that life is no better in other countries. Corruption is everywhere, police state is everywhere, etc. And most Russians believe that.

Whataboutwhataboutism-ism.

Well it's true in the us, Russia, china, Australia. That's not everywhere but that is quite a lot of ground.

Russia does not have actual meaningful elections. That's a fairly fundamental difference.

Neither does the US really, in the sense that no matter who wins, you lose.

It's true. You can only win an election with piles of money. With gerrymandering and lying. The US government is a train wreck

There's a definition for that: "reverse cargo cult". Russians are told to believe that Westerners build their planes from branches and dirt too - but Westerners pretend better.

Sure, but what about it? Does it not invalidate the basis for complaining, or at least the moral high ground, if you do the same thing? Of course on some level it can be a legalistic tool where while you might have done something illegal you can sue the other party for having done the same, like a countersuit.

I'm almost willing to bet that if Merkel was found to have interfered on behalf of Bernie, we'd hear some musings, but not nearly the vehemence we hear about alleged Russian interference (that particular accusation seems to have become muted recently, however).

We discovered Merkel was spied on by the NSA. I believe she had her phone tapped. That was pretty big but it blew over.

I don't think anyone is trying to make the case that their side is morally superior. The issue at hand is how to prevent and punish what looks to be serious, efficacious interference, not how to perfectly avoid being biased or hypocritical. Like, pointing out "liberals would be arguing less vehemently about interference if it had produced an outcome they wanted" is pretty meaningless, don't you think? And "they did a bad thing, but we do it too, so guess we can't do/say anything about it" is nonsensical in a world where we aren't all competing for moralistic brownie points.

Not that humanity would be better off if we were less biased, of course. <30 percent of Republicans and >70 percent of Democrats believe Russia tried to influence our election. Disheartening.

If say the Russians had had an information/disinformation programme to help Hillary win and she had won, I am sure Repubs would have cried to the high heavens, but I think the media would have been less vehement about it.

I do think the US does put forth the idea that we do operate from a relatively higher moral ground vis a vis Russia (and others) and human rights, freedoms, cronyism, corruption, etc. We have NGOs working to that effect in addition to the diplomatic ranks and corporate governance, etc.

It's not that we are wrong, but we're also not always right.

Interesting as this is the first I've heard about it (anecdotal as well).

Though I admit most of my news on this comes from non-comment based news sources (tv, etc)

The US has a long and sordid history in interfering in the political affairs of other countries.

That said, our government doesn't subjugate dissenters or lock up journalists. They let our corporations do that.

The US alone? Or every major political power in human history?

And if you don't believe Russia is actively running interference in other countries via "little green men" etc then I'd encourage you to read more about the current political affairs of nation states like Ukraine or Georgia. Or about a little historical event called the iron curtain and it's associated revolutions.

Many horrible things have been done in the name of Western hegemony but let's not pretend these actions occur without provocation from other geopolitical actors or without context. Can and should we do better - absolutely. But the real world isn't always as nice as our morality would like it to be.

As for your second point, are political opponents of Western leaders being beaten to death in prison? Or banned from voicing their views? Or disappeared in the night? We've got a long way to go before we're comparable to Russia in terms of how dissent is stifled.

In most cultures, you don't criticize somebody for something while doing the exact opposite.

Whataboutism does not apply to 90% of conversations but don't tell that to people who think they are smart by bringing it up.

Whataboutism:

A) 'You interfered with our elections!!' B) 'You bombed a children hospital! What about that?'

NOT Whataboutism:

A) 'You interfered with our elections!! YOU HACKED OUR ELECTIONS!!! PUTIN ORDERED TO STEAL OUR VOTES!!! B) 'That's great, you have been doing the same thing for decades all over the world. Mind shutting up?'

Sorry, but I fail to see the difference between your contrived examples. And I'm amused that you think people are being pretentious for bringing up "whataboutism," when the term itself is arguably a colloquialism.

You make a poor point.

First, your definition of whataboutism doesn't jibe with ones in common use, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism.

Second, your "NOT" example only works if A and B are equivalent, which, obviously they are not for several reasons. (the tactics and secrecy are different as are the elections.

Actually, you make a very poor point, when I consider the the insult you hurled at someone for daring to bring up whataboutism -- a term apparently invented to describe the tactic of deflecting criticism of Russian actions, which is exactly this situation.

Poor show.

On the one hand, a better beef for Russia would be the US military intervention on Soviet soil for the anti Bolshevik forces in 1917, on the other hand, that's a incredibly long time to hold a grudge/cold war, though Iran's theocracy looks like it's going to milk US interference in their country for a couple more generations, too.

The other side of this is Russian involvement in the US/Western Europe seems to follow many of the key points of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics where Putin has already though direct military action or political involvement, accomplished the goals of distancing the UK from Europe, made progress on retaking Ukraine, allied with Iran, gotten a windfall with Turkey being run by an authoritarian and distancing itself from the West, and diminished the US in the eyes of the world with the election of Trump.

I never understand what is wrong with "whataboutism". When someone pretends that he has a moral highground, it is a reasonable thing to call them out on it. If you dont't want a conversation to be "derailed", stop making unsupported, wrong or dubious assumptions.

Just because A doesn't do X, but asks B to do X, doesn't mean B can argue the value of not doing X by saying “A doesn't do X, so neither should I" because: A (-X) ≠ B (-X)

So what? Now tell me in terms of the US and Russia what is the connection between your imaginary situation and reality.

It's basically breaks down to "two wrongs don't make a right."

I don't see how this phrase is relevant?

Never heard of the term until Trump took office.

Whataboutism was okay during President Obama's term. Bush's screwups were often brought up to deflect criticisms lodged against President Obama.

edit: meta

Obama didn't do it noticeably, Trump often, hence you hear about it.

I think there is an important difference to whataboutism because what the parent mentions is not merely something similar but a reciprocal action.

Say, bringing up alleged violations of human rights in the US in response to mentioning censorship in Russia is whataboutism, but mentioning that not only Russia but both countries try to influence each others elections may signal that two countries are actually having a fair fight (for some definition of fairness) in the information wars as opposed to Russia being the sole aggressor.

OP 'Balance Factor' has only made political comments with their HN account. Repeated discourse with an unstated agenda is an attack vector most of us aren't prepared to defend against.

Political discourse is an "attack vector" now? Dystopian.

This is the kind of delusional thinking that powers most of the American hysteria over Russia. "I can't accept the reality that President Trump appealed to lots of people, so it must be the result of external manipulation of the stupids".

Occam's Razor says: maybe people who post on HN like to keep their political speech separated from their technical speech, the latter which can be done under their real name? That's how I do it. This account posts to technical stories sometimes but mostly to stories on social issues. I have another which is used mostly for technical stories.

The reason is simple enough: just look at the prior story I posted comments on ("At liberal tech companies...").

In the current atmosphere, especially in the west, there is absolute hysteria and a general mental breakdown going on amongst the sort of globalist/elitist population that thinks Trump is the anti-Christ and Brexit is Revelations. This is an atmosphere in which people find some random bot-driven Twitter account that publishes politically conservative stories and label it as a Russian plot on the basis of no evidence whatsoever ... and people start debating "why is Russia doing this?" instead of asking where's the evidence.

It is a witch burning atmosphere. Trump and Brexit didn't happen because of Russia, except maybe in the sense that Hillary Clinton adopting a policy of starting a hot war between America and Russia turned voters away from her and towards the anti-Russia-war Trump. These things happened because of mismanagement and an attitude of "we can't hear you" towards large segments of the population from the sort of people who are attracted to politics.

Now they've been forced to progress from "first they ignore you" and "then they laugh at you", they've moved on to "then they fight you". Their weapon of choice being an attempt at disenfranchisement through claims that anyone who disagrees with their agenda doesn't really disagree. They've just been reprogrammed through Facebook ads bought by those evil Russians. Once you take out the malign mind-control of a shadowy international conspiracy, Clinton would definitely have won!

Well, both Putin and the US have good-to-them reasons to interfere in each others elections. And to interfere in Russian elections.

On a serious note, the reason you don't hear about it is because US interference in Russia, whatever that was, didn't come even close to turning Russian elections.

So, if I was to draw a parallel, murder is only bad if it is successful?

First, that's not much of a parallel. The morality of generic murder is clearcut, the morality of interference with other countries elections is not. Not everyone subscribes to prime directive. As a Russian I personally appreciate that someone is at least trying to instill some positive change in Russia.

Morals aside, you said

> It's curious this is virtually never mentioned amidst all the accusations of Russia involving itself in US elections.

I told you why. Because whatever the US did was not effective, and it's not as newsworthy as things that are happening in the US and affecting Americans.

That is somewhat true, I believe attempted murder sentences are lighter than actual murder sentences.

> murder is only bad if it is successful?

If it’s nobody gets killed, it’s not murder. I think the principle that attempted murder, unsuccessful conspiracy to commit murder, or soliciting a murder which does not actually occur are lesser offenses than murder is fairly well established.

Here in Sweden, conspiracy to commit murder (which includes solicitation of murder) carries the exact same punishment as murder, successful or not.

I remember a old conspiracy case (not for murder) where the actually crime could not be proven to have even existed, but the conspiracy could, so the accused got convicted and sentenced as if the crime had existed and they did it.

So? This isn't about morally shaming Russia.

In fact we don't have any elections. Opposition leaders are banned or get killed (Navalny, Nemtsov). The opposition is only allowed to have marginal media (Echo of Moscow, TV Rain). An opposing media that becomes popular gets seized by loyal oligarchs supported by corrupt courts (NTV, Lenta.ru, RBC).

And no color revolution took place in Russia.

Somebody else that manipulates and corrupts Russian elections: Putin.

I bet we spend a lot more on it than the maximum $150k discussed in the article. Talk about a nothing-burger.

Russia doesn't have free or fair elections anyway- how could the US possibly corrupt it any more than Putin cronies personally controlling almost all domestic Russian media?

The US had a major role in creating the environment that lead to Putin gaining power, with a much heavier hand than anything Russia is accused of at this point. Matt Taibbi had a good article on this a little while ago:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-what-d...

If you have any illusions about independence of US mass media after this election cycle, there's some swampland in Florida that I'd like to sell to you.

USSR controlled all of the available media, but that didn't help, and 200..300k (unofficial: 1m) of working class went to Moscow streets in 1990. Meetings of modern russian opposition counts up to few thousands, mostly consisting of bored bohemians. Also, the opposition seems to lose the generic idea, chasing the wrong issues.

- When do we get vodka?

- The Center holds it. It is necessary to take away the vodka and the Kremlin.

(Boris Eltzin meeting with real people)

I'm not claiming that what we have now is the best vector of evolution, but the opposite forces are simply weak and up in the clouds by their nature.

That's the benefit of being a sole superpower. There are double standards here for a reason.

> I'd just note that the US pretty openly interferes in Russian elections

If Russia had meaningful elections to interfere in to start with, that would concern me a little bit as an American, and a lot if I was a Russian.

Since Russia doesn't, however...

So your test for whether or not US interference in a foreign election bothers you is whether or not they have sufficiently "meaningful" elections? What?

Yes, if there is nothing substantial to interfere with, it's not possible to have meaningful interference, and therefore alleged “interference” is not, as such, a source of concern. (The acts alleged as interference may be concerning for other reasons, but not as election interference.)

This is because it's usually discussed with the idea that Russia had actually compromised electronic voting systems in the US. That's different from trying to strengthen a political campaign in another country.

Hypocrisy is still not a fallacy.

Not only that, but the media, especially the washingtonpost, strong-armed google, facebook and other social media into turning over the news to them recently.

Visit news.google.com and check out how many WaPo links there are.

Now use waybackmachine or another internet archive and go back 3, 4 or 5 years and check out how many WaPo links there are. None.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140319161446/https://news.goog...

It's even worse in the US and World sections ( which unfortunately isn't archived ).

Now a WaPo or NYTimes article is almost the top story 24/7.

Also, the hypocrisy isn't just with russia. The media's insane coverage of NK, China and everything else. It's just opened my eyes to the fact that our media is just propaganda like anything else and they are spinning a narrative.

They got away with it when the world was bigger and people weren't as connected, but now I have family and friends living in Europe, Korea and Japan and I can interface with them in real-time and immediately know that the media is just full of it.

Are they just getting the population for a war that the elite are planning? I don't get this non-stop fear and panic inducing nonsense. Every other month, it's a war with NK or China or Russia or Terrorists. It never stops.

And so what if FB sold ads to a russian company? How much ads did they sell to everyone else? How much did canadian companies spend? Chinese companies? Israelis? British? Or most importantly, american companies?

>I'd just note that the US pretty openly interferes in Russian elections

Ah yes, the famous counter-point from the Eastern-block. I'd just politely ask, what Russian elections exactly?

Is anyone going to claim with a straight face Russia has open and fair democratic elections? I'm the first to laugh at the pointless US 3 letter agencies' misguided operations, but even they are not so naïve as to believe Putin would allow any actual legitimate political opponent, much less a foreign sponsored one. Any such individual, there friends and family would immediately be under investigation and then the individual placed on house arrest...and obviously that's if they were lucky.

Putin does this with journalists, businessmen and certainly political opposition. It's like when I used to tell people Lance Armstrong was doping in the middle of his 7 championships and people would ask how I knew that, all I did was point to every Tour de France winner since the 70's, and they all popped positive, then people believe out of nowhere a cancer survivor comes and wins 7 straight while clean...it's a nice story, just like Russian elections.

As dumb as it sounds just watch the Anthony Bourdain Russia episode where he has dinner with one such individual under house arrest and then visits Russian intellectuals in Siberia who live like so many sardines packed together.

I think the Russian may consider the elections in Ukraine as one of their elections.

Russian also interferes in Russian "elections".

Evan McMullin, previously the House Republican caucus's chief policy director, had the following to say on this topic:

    This is a Kremlin talking point. The U.S.
    doesn't undermine liberal democracies
    overseas. Any examples otherwise would be
    from the Cold War.

https://twitter.com/Evan_McMullin/status/905572789666635777

Facebook's blog post on the matter: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/09/information-operations-...

... and they do this while the were openly taking money from Russian/KGB campaigners round 2010, dispatching campaign consultants and overall trreating them as first tier clients. Same was true of Google in Russia, while they still had hopes of somehow greasing hands with the establishment. They evacuated the most valuable staff out of Russia around 2015 to Switzerland, when they finally gave up. I still do remember them quitely delisting online resources with corruption exposures circa 2007, that were reappearing with simple reversal of word order.

They may've been just "probing where the water is shallow" in 2010 with "seemingly innocent" think tank drivel and consulting buys, and then went full throttle when it did matter the most.

American top C-Levels, officials, 3 letter agency employees, and other American beau monde all have that "smart, sophisticated, brilliant, but damn naive" note in their personalities. All such types do remind me of people who are "trying to win in a casino," while having "I know what I'm doing" look on their face. They can't win there, it not their league.

To prevail, Americans need to overhaul their political establishment and institutes of power with virtuous and competent people.

If I was the US congress, I would've put it very square, if a dot com like FB actively conspires with Russians, and then pretends that they didn't, then everybody along the chain of command down to founders, c-levels, and major financiers (with their own respective boards) are detained, subject to criminal prosecution and given prison sentences

Out of curiosity, are there any laws on the books right now which are meant to prevent this sort of thing?

For example, let's assume a foreign government decided to purchase ads either backing or attacking a US political candidate, and they were completely overt about it. (No hiding behind shell companies or transferring funds anonymously; completely out in the open.) Are there any laws or systems currently in place which would stop them from doing that?

And, as a related question - should there be? What about a foreign corporation? A foreign corporation with a domestic presence? A domestic corporation? None of these groups are beholden to the public interest.

Or just a foreign individual?

I'm a foreign individual who went around making comments on the US election... what's the difference between me doing it privately and a company doing it?

As much as America would like to think their laws apply across the globe, they don't actually have jurisdiction over you. There's nothing they can do to prevent you from talking about the campaign.

They do have jurisdiction over the candidate and campaign you endorse, though. If you contacted your candidate and offered them money or services in the hope that they could use your help to get elected, and they accepted your offer they would be guilty. You wouldn't be.

Unfortunately, it seems like a fairly impotent law if all you have to do as a foreign national with an interest in the election is to support a candidate without their endorsement.

> As much as America would like to think their laws apply across the globe, they don't actually have jurisdiction over you.

You might want to check with Humberto Álvarez-Machaín (acquitted, sure, but not because the law didn't apply to him) or Manuel Noriega about that.

Or Howard Marks in the book Mr Nice tells a bit about his thinking the US had no power over him and then, oops.

But I could, for instance, buy advertisements in support of my favoured candidate?

I guess not on US TV or US billboards since they're under the control of the US. But if I buy ads on the internet that just happen to be seen by US citizens there's nothing the US can do about it, right?

There are laws against foreign nationals to provide a "thing of value" to a US political campaign. This is obviously a difficult thing to tease out. My source on this is Eugene Volokh, a law professor and First Amendment attorney: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

The fundamental question then is: was this intentional on behalf of the foreign agent to provide a "thing of value" to a US political campaign, and/or did a political candidate or campaign solicit this?

But in this hypothetical scenario they're not donating to a political campaign, they're buying advertising space directly from a private organization.

I suppose you could argue that ads which advocate for a political candidate could count as a "thing of value" for that candidate, but even in that case, there _is_ no foreign national to punish here; the entity that funded the effort is a foreign government, not an individual person.

One doesn't have to donate to a political campaign to contribute a "thing of value" to a campaign, that argument is elaborated on in the link I shared. The law does not define thing of value to be a donation or monetary contribution to a campaign, but something much broader, see 52 U.S.C. § 30121.

Likewise, foreign national is a legal term that includes foreign principals, which includes governments, see 22 U.S.C. § 611.

My understanding is no, this is legal. But this would be illegal if a U.S. political campaign knew about and facilitated these ad buys, as then it would be a contribution. Source: https://transition.fec.gov/pages/brochures/foreign.shtml#Pro...

The Federal Election Commission would have something to say:

"The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) prohibits any foreign national from contributing, donating or spending funds in connection with any federal, state, or local election in the United States, either directly or indirectly. It is also unlawful to help foreign nationals violate that ban or to solicit, receive or accept contributions or donations from them. Persons who knowingly and willfully engage in these activities may be subject to fines and/or imprisonment." [0]

The definition of "foreign national" is quite broad.

How this works with regards to PAC contributions is unclear to me.

[0] https://transition.fec.gov/pages/brochures/foreign.shtml

> Persons who knowingly and willfully engage in these activities may be subject to fines and/or imprisonment.

Who are these "persons"?

It can't logically be the foreign nationals who are attempting to help a campaign. They're not under the jurisdiction of US federal law.

It also can't logically be the candidates. Otherwise, the obvious tactic would be to provide overt, unrequested aid to the opposition candidate(s) and send them all to jail.

I'm not sure it can be Facebook or other Internet sides. It is true that Facebook is a US company, but the content on their sites is protected under the DMCA safe harbor exemption. And then the law wouldn't handle the case of sites not under US ownership.

FECA dates back to the 70s, and it doesn't seem to do a good job of handling the globalization of the Internet. If someone from overseas looked at the facts themselves and, without talking to a candidate, just plastered Google and Facebook and YouTube and Twitter with endorsement of one candidate and criticism of another, is it reasonable to try to stop them?

> It can't logically be the foreign nationals who are attempting to help a campaign. They're not under the jurisdiction of US federal law.

Criminal violations of US laws whose prohibition is not expressly territorially restricted that occur outside of the US are successfully prosecuted in US courts with some frequency. Bringing people before the court for prosecution may be challenging where extradition isn't an option, but outright kidnapping from a foreign country or even full-scale military military invasion to do so have occurred.

In this this hypothetical scenario though it's not even a "person" providing the funds, but a foreign government organization. A US court can't "fine or imprison" the Communist Party of China, or the Russian GRU, for example.

There's always a person making the decision and moving the funds. The Russian GRU isn't a sentient entity by itself. In principle those people can be held legally accountable, although it practice it's probably impossible.

A US court can fine or imprison any of the individual people who comprise, direct as superiors, or act on the direction of those abstract entities that the US executive branch arranges, by whatever means (which, again, have historically included both foreign kidnapping and outright invasion) to bring before the court. Vladimir Putin is obviously, as a practical matter, much safer from that than Manuel Noriega was, but lower level individuals may not be so much.

TFA:

"Under federal law and Federal Election Commission regulations, both foreign nationals and foreign governments are prohibited from making contributions or spending money to influence a federal, state or local election in the United States. The ban includes independent expenditures made in connection with an election.

Those banned from such spending include foreign citizens, foreign governments, foreign political parties, foreign corporations, foreign associations and foreign partnerships, according to the FEC."

> foreign governments, foreign political parties

How is that enforced? A US court can't exactly send the Russian government or the Communist Party of China to prison for breaking the law here, can it?

Well, it's important to bear in mind that most of these ads supposedly didn't back or attack a particular candidate, and that banning foreign funding of political and social activism of this kind would be a very Russian thing to do. Claiming they're foreign agents is one of the Russian government's favourite tactics for raiding and shutting down inconvenient political NGOs and activists. Frankly, I wouldn't entirely put it past them to fund these ads partly to bait out something they could use to justify their own domestic crackdowns and spin US criticism as hypocrasy.

Why would Facebook discriminate where ad $ revenue is coming from? Twitter, Instagram, doesn't matter, money is money.

Because foreign agents buying political ads violates US federal law

For the seller of the ad time or for the buyer?

>Because foreign agents buying political ads violates US federal law

WRONG. Nothing prohibits foreign entities from buying their own political ads.

http://fortune.com/2017/07/12/us-election-meddling-online-ad...

You're both right. Sounds like a law that hasn't been updated yet for online ads.

>The laws that prohibit foreign nationals from spending money to influence U.S. elections do not prevent them from lawfully buying some kinds of political ads on Facebook and other online networks

While in one sense true, the Fortune article seems to be reading the word “television” (or perhaps “audio or audiovisual content”) into the phrase “cable, broadcast, or satellite” as a distribution mechanism when it is not, in fact, present where that phrase is used in FECA, as amended (FECA does have radio and TV-specific provisions, and they expressly name radio and TV, and they aren't the ones of interest here.) Absent case law to the contrary, which is not cited, it would seem by it's plain language to cover most real electronic media including the internet (advertising on a isolated RFC 1149 network would not be covered, of course, nor would ads in plenty of pre-telegraph “old media” like dead-tree-only newspapers.)

and if that Russian company was an agent of Russian government ( 101 chances out of 100 that it was, i.e. any reasonable person would think so :) then FB doing that company's bidding was acting as an agent of Russian government, and doing so without registration as such a foreign government agent sounds to me (not a lawyer though) like a violation of another item of the federal law. At least it looks like doing such thing was a violation before the current administration - now they seem to accept "retroactive" registrations, at least from their own folks - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-trump-campaig...

You can take your assertions further -- every Russian, national or not, is an agent of the Russian government with 101% certainty at that. Furthermore, everyone who associates with Russians is an agent as well, with a reasonably high degree of confidence.

Well, first, there's law prohibiting foreign-sponsored activity of this sort, and prohibits assisting foreign parties in violating the prohibition.

And, second, they were channelled through false-flag accounts and pages, which violates Facebook's policies regarding authenticity.

If we just keep pointing at the Russian bogeyman, no one will care that individuals like Peter Thiel or companies spent 100 to 1000 times that amount of money on superpacs and eventually political ads for their favorite candidate.

Can we see what the ads were? Can we see how they were targeted?

Am I missing this somewhere?

I am in Switzerland and I keep seeing suggestions for "Anti trump" groups (None of my friends are part of them). Why?

"Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said."

Excuse my ignorance but isn't $100K chicken feed?

That’s what Facebook self reported that it discovered, not necessarily the whole operation. It’s also direct evidence of non-hacking related attempts to influence the election.

Furthermore, considering there is a criminal investigation going on over whether or not the Trump campaigned colluded with Russia on such activities, the dollar amount is pretty meaningless.

It's what FB reported unless you have reason to suggest otherwise the $100K is quite relevant.

> criminal investigation going on over whether or not the Trump campaigned colluded with Russia

It is technically a criminal investigation, though colluding with Russia would not be a crime.

Cheapo chicken feed.

Trump's campaign raised 2,600 times that amount.

Trump himself outspent these Ruskis 660x from his own pocket.

If this amount turned the election, everyone should fire their campaign staff and hire these guys.

Too bad, I was looking forward to the abominable shitshow that was going to be Zuck's candidacy.

This is likely just the tip of the digital advertising iceberg with all of this for FB and other advertising giants like Google and Twitter. According to this Wired article[1] Giles-Parscale, the agency behind a lot of the Trump election digital efforts "took in some $90 million, the vast majority of which went toward buying Facebook ads for the campaign."

A Reddit user who "was working at the other end of this pipeline that is selling digital adspace to consulting firms" (according to his post) also posted some very detailed insights as to how funds might have been laundered into clean political donations via small agencies and PACs in the US via digital media buys.

Here's his follow-up post from three months ago which has more info and links to his original post--really worth reading all of it, his original post, the subsequent threads, etc.: https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/6alzm0/fbi_confirm...

So the issue is less about ads purchased directly from Russia or by illegitimate companies with Russian IPs or anything of the sort as FB addressed in this statement. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the dollar amounts that might have been spent as part of the rest of the Trump media buys. The bigger story may actually be more about Russian (and other funds) funneled through small legit digital agencies and PACs (or through Parscale) in the US who then did ad buys driving for Trump donations which he was then able to legally use as campaign funds (or for enriching himself as the Reddit user hypothesizes).

There are likely FB sales reps and others there who have some insight into the ad campaign objectives, targeting details, and the source of that targeting data. The last bit is interesting there because it is still not fully understood how Cambridge Analytica plugged into all of this, and how they obtained their detailed targeting data. Mercer and Bannon both have direct Cambridge Analytica ties[2].

All of this is to say that I don't think the full story is being unearthed with these data points that FB shared. And I'd be willing to bet that FB sales reps who dealt with these accounts during the election know quite a bit more about what actually went on. However we may never know how deep the rabbit hole really goes, how dirty such funds might actually be, or how much FB, Google and Twitter really profited from the election (and ongoing campaigns).

I want to conclude this by stating that I am just posting my own personal thoughts based on a variety of articles and Reddit posts, and I don't purport to have any inside insight into these companies operations beyond my fairly deep experience in the online advertising space and my understanding of how that operates, so this is largely speculation and you should come to your own conclusions. That said, it is hardly outside the realm of possibility at this point to imagine how this sort of scheme could work, and how all of the players involved might have had strong financial incentives to not rock the boat.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/trump-russia-data-parscale-faceb...

[2] http://www.newsweek.com/did-russians-target-dem-voters-kushn...

I guess Citizens United doesn't just apply to citizens.

Citizens United was a good ruling because Congress and both political parties have been doing their damn best to limit the number of ways money can get into politics unless it is to them.

How? Simple, donations under $200 per person do not need be revealed until they exceed that number. Also taking foreign donations without proper tracking and the ease of generating new cc numbers / names works as well. However the number one method they use is exploiting campaign fundraising events where they can rake in millions. With the clout and friends in business how can a third party or anyone compete against it?

So while there are issues with money in politics all attempts to limit it have simply been done to protect the two parties who hold near absolute power.

The update for this article says that $100,000 ad buy may have reached 70,000,000 Americans.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/russias-facebook-fake-news-coul...

Regardless of legality, it will be interesting to see how this is spun if/when Zuckerberg runs for public office.

In the context of the 2016 election 100.000 usd is a tiny amount.

In the context of web ads it's not insignificant.

If you can sway a US presidential election from 99% chance of losing, to winning, using only a $100k ad budget. Maybe you deserve to be in power...

I certainly agree with this.

~ Gary from Marketing.

I'd agree with you if this was a domestic actor and not a foreign actor that presumably wishes to do Americans harm.

Does anyone have access to the oft-cited FireEye report on this topic? Can't seem to find it...

>Most of the ads focused on pumping politically divisive issues such as gun rights and immigration fears, as well as gay rights and racial discrimination.

When I read this I thought that this is what the US press does every single day wither it's WaPo or Limbaugh. It's all about selling fear and division. There's no longer nuance, no longer presenting both sides of an argument. It's all this is good or this is evil.

> When I read this I thought that this is what the US press does every single day wither it's WaPo or Limbaugh

WaPo, and even Limbaugh, generally does not invent false flag news stories on both sides of divisive issues purely to drive division. WaPo may perhaps distort coverage to favor one side of divisive issues because of editorial biad or focus on existing divisive voices because conflict draws eyeballs, and Limbaugh may generate outright invented propaganda on a particular side of divisive issues to favor a preferred outcome, but neither of those behaviors are at issue, and even if it was the same behavior, neither actor is an outside interloper.

They do it for profit though. I don't see the motive as particularly relevant, the result is the same, division and fear.

Limbaugh certainly does. He said Sandra Fluke was a prostitute. I'm sure he's said many other things. WaPo and NYT are a little better, but their writers have gone a little bonkers over Trump hurting their credibility. I'm sure there are some Limbaugh like news sites on the left. There have to be, riling people up is very profitable. What about the DNC pushing Sanders off the ticket story? I mean take as step back and analyze all this stuff the press puts out. It's pretty divisive.

I'd really like to see a side by side comparison between Russian planted ads and comments and domestic ads and comments. Do you think we could tell the difference?

When things go sideways, ain't it tempting to find an enemy to blame...

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