Don't dismiss a (even much) smaller amount; if properly targeted it can be a lot more effective than the crop dusting approach that traditional advertising takes.
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 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).
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.
I don't know enough about what happened in this case, but you can't dismiss the entire argument purely on the spend amount.