All images of the Facebook ads Russians purchased during the election

> The power to disseminate information (or disinformation) is not one that should be taken lightly.

curious to know if you believe the power to disseminate info should be regulated by the govt.

I don't get what education has to do with it.

HN is a forum full of hyper-educated users, but it still greys out downvoted comments by default. I don't think the reason for that is because it makes it slightly more convenient to read comments. I think the reason is because it lowers the probability that hyper-educated users get irritated and end up expending energy responding to low-effort comments.

Think about it.

Extreme progressives would destabilize the country by setting up structural racism and sexism in order to achieve "equity", dissolving borders, gutting the police, and over taxing companies.

Extreme rightists would destabilize the country by repealing too much of the social safety net, closing down the country to immigrants, militarizing the police, and letting companies behave anti-socially with no repercussions.

Our enemies are smart to try to push us into embracing extreme policies. Either way they win. Because when our institutions start to fail we won't be able to project power anymore. It will draw us off of the world stage to some extent.

It'd also be interesting to see what the official campaigns targeted advertising looked like, including that of related arms length groups that presumably do the dirty work.

How do you even formulate the policy? Sure, you can ban/annotate the ads that are specifically about Clinton or Trump, but where do you draw the line?

The fascinating thing about these ads is that most of them plucked on the political strings of the audience indirectly.

And this is a tiny blip compared to hacking into the DNC's email servers. I see a lot of these ads are stupid and people totally think that was all there was. The ads were the part of the iceberg you can see.

> The Russians also recruited and paid real Americans to engage in political activities, promote political campaigns, and stage political rallies. The defendants and their co-conspirators pretended to be grassroots activists. According to the indictment, the Americans did not know that they were communicating with Russians.

Pretty good listen if you're interested in a deeper dive.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/curious-case-russian-flash...

Cyber space is a high leverage domain which rules out the possibility of a shortage in resources from the opponent. It is also a recent evolving space which makes it more difficult to assess the opponents capabilities, reach and sophistication.

By its nature this operation seems to be part of a bigger destabilisation strategy, maybe a stress test to validate different tactics.

I would be really worried once the ads become well written which would increase the complexity of the situation since quality measures can be manipulated.

In other words once they can fake "fake news", things might get really weird.

As for the pro-LGBT/liberal ads: One of the strategies the Russians used here was to infiltrate and divide. Only propagandizing to one side of the American political spectrum isn't as effective as playing both sides and turning them against each other.

These ads are just the tip of the iceberg. There were still countless bots and sockpuppet accounts used to sway people one way or the other - but typically against one another.

It's worked really well, and keeps working today.

If both parties are unified in pursuit of one goal, then we may act vigorously on it over the long term through the course of multiple changes in which party controls what. If both parties can't stand each other enough to cooperate on anything, then foreign policy and behavior will be half-hearted pushes in constantly changing directions.

Russia can't and doesn't want to control us entirely. They do want us to not interfere effectively in their attempts to control the neighboring Eastern European states.

Each image includes some targeting info.

The internal logic of these claims is non-existent. During the actual campaign Hillary and her supporters were convinced Russia (the generic bogeyman of the western establishment everywhere) was shilling for Trump. After all Trump was a lot more friendly and Hillary was stating that she'd shoot Russian planes out of the sky over Syria, so such a motive would have at least made sense.

Now that whole narrative fell apart entirely. We have the head of famously anti-gay and conservative Russia posting LGBT memes and supporting Hillary, despite the risk of war between Russia and America should she have won.

Yet, the desire to believe is so strong, that like all conspiracy theories it's simply morphed into whatever the smallest step to fitting with new information is, that preserves the core. Now it's all a genius plan to "sow division" by posting pictures of fox statues made of shotgun cartridges. Quite why Russia specifically benefits from generalised "division" or why US culture needed help being divided is left unexplained.

This is exactly the behaviour you'd expect to see if people with strong motivations were looking at noise. Leading us to your last question:

how much confidence do we have these are Russian state sponsored ad?

We only appear to have Facebook's word for it. But you have to watch out. One of the subtle ways this conspiracy theory tends to morph and warp is the distinction between the Russian government and Russians. Even in the headline of this thread, note that it's "Russians" and not "the Russian government".

There are liberal Russians. There are conservative Russians. There are 144 million Russians, a little under half the population of the USA itself. If even 0.1% of them decided they cared about the globally-famous US election, and if Facebook had simply selected "ads paid for by Russians", then this is exactly what you would see - a mishmash of stuff with no unifying theme or agenda.

Or Facebook could have just made a mistake. The government asked them to find evidence of Russian interference, and let's face it, going back with "there's nothing there you are all delusional" is not a good political strategy. I'm sure they felt they had to find something.

The ads are just the tip of the iceberg.

There were many Russian state controlled political Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of subscribers who joined because of these relatively tame ads. Those groups then pushed a more extreme set of values onto the subscribers, with the aim of turning those groups against each other.

Sure, an anti-Sharia-Law demonstration doesn't seem so bad, nor does a pro-Syrian-Refugee demonstration. But if the same group is organizing both events to take place at the same time and location, then that group is just stirring the pot and trying to divide society against itself.

The ads are a big deal for what the accomplished, not just for what they read at face-value.

I say this because you talk as if it's easy to separate fact from fiction these days. If you think it's easy, then I think there are some very important things you're missing.

Here is the first image I clicked on at random. What is this evidence of? https://www.documentingreality.com/forum/russian-ads/2015-Q2...

They were created and promoted by the Internet Research Agency, a troll factory run by the Russian government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency