https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russi...
$100,000 in Facebook ads versus billions in advertising spending from the DNC and RNC? http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/10/hillary-clin...
It is a manufactured conspiracy theory.
There is a problem right there, if there was state funded/directed interference in US elections then Facebook have every incentive to downplay and hide this.
Given the resources available to these state actors, isn’t it possible that the easily tracked $100k spend is the tip of an iceberg?
No. That would be a conspiracy theory.
And beyond the miniscule amount in ad spending, you also have to accept that a small number of political ads on Facebook swung the election in the States that Clinton lost.
If there's one constant in the investigations, it is the steady drip of new facts. In fact, it is self-assured reactions like the above that have destroyed a lot of people's credibility on the topic.
That's just speculation. We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
At that rate, even if the Russians ads we're discussing had all been targeted at the Presidential election in those 3 states (far from true), that only equals about 5,000 votes.
Further assuming that 2/3's of votes aren't changeable and the $2.5 billion was spent to influence the remaining third, we're talking about 1500 votes influenced.
And I brought up credibility because one important facet that seems to be serially forgotten is that the major targets of the investigations have already destroyed their credibility, as have many commentators. I would encourage some googling to look at the past claims people make - more often than not you're hearing assertions of tribal fidelity rather than arguments based on factual exploration, and one bit of that information available to us now is a fair amount of background on motivations.
> We can only base rational discussion on the information available to us now.
This is false. We are planning animals. We do what-if projections constantly. In fact, we can't not do it - you did it yourself to make an implicit argument above attempting to make any forward-looking seem silly.
Off the top of my head I can think of at least two instances where they blatantly miscounted the amount they charged advertisers for paid traffic they never sent, and that's without even getting into zuck's wild claims that fb had zero effect on the 2016 election, and then months later admitting that was completely wrong.
There is very little reason to trust 'facebook releasing numbers' on this issue. They have EVERY reason to obfuscate, stall, and misreport on it - they are complicit in an extremely serious federal crime.