Still, we should look into why a campaign season wastes 1.5 billion on one contest and no one bats an eye, or some do a little but the media couldn't care less. It's one of their cash cows.
And just because we do shitty things to other countries doesn't mean we should roll over and allow it to happen to us (see also: cyber attacks).
Inject 100k on a fake news items like "The pope is a paedofile" for instance and see the whole world talking and reposting it the next day.
Spend a billion promoting something real but boring and you might see almost non-existent tracktion.
By definition disinformation and destabilization campaigns are 1000x more effective, especially if organized by entities specializing on those for decades.
In your example Satan is accused of owning the pope and all other miscreants.
You know, even if the amount were $10 million, in the face of over $1 Billion, it's still peanuts.
If it were that easy, we'd be toppling regimes all over the world for pennies on the dollar but we're not because that's dreamland stuff.
You're basically arguing the angriest electorate will win. Obama won on Hope.
I think what won the election this time was that people were a bit sick and tired of pols who promised all kinds of things but never delivered. Hillary promised all kinds of things and I would venture she never intended on delivering on many. Personally, I voted third party.
I mean, if we look at her political history, it's always been opportunistic -by that I mean changing political position if it favored her. From the Super predator stuff to opposition to gay marriage to many things in between. I think people were tired of that and thought Trump offered an alternative which even if it didn't match up in all counts, they could at least believe he had the US interest in mind (as opposed to globalists who might have other priorities.)
I think it's interesting that at one time the left campaigned against the mainstream left's globalist interventionist agenda but now they are proponents of globalism and interventionism and open borders. It's an interesting dynamic to witness.
I don't know enough about what happened in this case, but you can't dismiss the entire argument purely on the spend amount.
There is no way that a crack Russian/Ukranian team understand or have better info on the American public than American "pundits" and campaign professionals.
Why couldn't Bernie buy 200k of highly targeted ads and beat Hillary or why couldn't a very well connected Hillary (who has good connections to Russia as well) not buy highly targeted and effective ads?
I don't buy that narrative. There is no way a rag-tag team with $100k beats a political machine with real connections in DC, Wall Street, etc. which happened to also spend over $1billion. It's a ridiculous assertion.
Why don't we, the US, buy these highly targeted ads in a place like Venezuela and get people to vote against Maduro (or any other gov't we don't like).
It just does not work that way. Or, if it were to, the likes of FB and Google are doomed. Whoever this band of propagandists are they can undercut Madison ave and rake in the money for pennies on the dollar from corporate America.
The thing is, if that team has a secret sauce to convince people to change their minds, they are in the wrong game and would rake in billions serving corporate America and unseating Google and Facebook at their game.
It's a tempest in a teapot.
The sums are laughably trivial, precisely because anything larger would be too difficult to set the fraud up for (anything that could be considered business significant, millions of dollars, would be too easy to tightly audit; plus the smaller sums play to the angle that it's easy for it to get lost in the overall, so the company doesn't look too extremely negligent; no doubt that was part of the deal Facebook and Google made in helping with the setup).