Fake Russian Facebook Accounts Bought $100,000 in Political Ads

The hysteria over these unnamed, unproven Kremlin hackers reaches a new high just about every day.

$100,000 is absolutely nothing. Zilch. Nada. You can probably count the number of people that changed their vote because of that expenditure on one hand. It's just a number that you're able to trot out and your average lower-middle class American will say "that's a lot!" and lose their shit over Russian interference of tenuous consequence. If this was "on direct orders from President Vladimir V. Putin" you can be sure that he had a lot more than $100,000 dollars to dedicate to Facebook ads.

So far, we know this about Russian interference:

1.) Two unfathomably sophisticated threats successfully stole information from the DNC. 2.) We can reasonably assume that Russia made an attempt to interfere. They've probably been trying this halfheartedly for decades.

Now, we can get in to the wild, unproven conjecture that makes up the basis of much of this panic:

1.) Putin supposedly directly and personally ordered this operation. This assertion is based on pretty much nothing other than him being a "pretty powerful dude" (to paraphrase). 2.) We have supposedly identified that the aforementioned unfathomably sophisticated threats (responsible for the DNC incident) mentioned above are actually a specific part of the Russian government. This assertion is based on the attack having come from Eastern Europe, and having used tools that originated from Eastern Europe. Killer evidence, right? 3.) A few million dollars worth of advertisements and hired trolls supposedly meme'd a president into office. This is despite the absolutely horrid efficacy of online advertising, but apparently Russian witch magic turned the normal 0.5% advertisement engagement rate into a political wrecking ball.

I'm as interested in foreign interference as the next guy, but that's not what this is about. This is people refusing to believe that people disagree with them, and that disagreement led to their candidate and her poorly targeted campaign losing, for better or for worse.

Would that be less than about 1/20,000 of what the candidates and their publicly-supporting groups spent? [1] Does the NYT care to discuss how much the needle was and could be moved?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...