Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

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That's ridiculous.

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.

This argument seems to fly in the face of the startup ethos (which I guessed had some currency at HN). It is precisely a rag-tag team with $100k and _a different way of thinking_ that brings down a $1bn machine. I'm not saying that this is what happened in this case, but it could happen (or have happened), so don't dismiss it just because of the resourcing asymmetry.

But it's likely true that it wasn't all their doing if they do exist. They could handy fall guys for whomever did the real work.

Sure, it's a fake prop to enable tighter political regulations online. The entire thing is a sham that Facebook and Google are gleefully willingly going along with. There is a long, disgusting history of powerful corporations in the US working with politicians to achieve mutually beneficial goals that relate to carving up the economic or political spheres.

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).

One of the questions being investigated is how such targeting might have been achieved. There just happened to be a data operation run by Jared Kushner, who is at the center of Mueller's investigation.

I also like to direct people to the following https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great... Also "no way a rag-tag team beats.." is straight from the plot of the movie Moneyball which is what we're talking about here. Also no-one is talking about GDPR which could stop this (please see below).

We're talking several orders of magnitude here. It's not comparable to the moneyball sitch.

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 think you're right just wanted to highlight that some seriously impressive tech was applied. Any suggestion that it was a exclusively Russia/Ukrainian team that did everything could be a distraction so that the whole issue can be lumped into the popular dialogue. I'm sure there was a Russian or two on the real team.

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