I see a bunch of the pictures they advertised organized events. How did that work if these ads and supposedly pages were run by Russians? Were those events real? Who showed up? Who organized the protest on the ground?
> 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.
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.
Also, link aggregator sites (like our very own HN) are susceptible to vote manipulation, which can promote the content the attackers want, and demote the content they don't want.
These ads were just to rope people in. You can see that "Black Matters" has 200k+ members. Those are people who are now getting information directly from the Kremlin on their feeds now.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/reddit-check-out-our-russian-t...
https://www.inquisitr.com/4790689/reddits-the_donald-was-one...
Pretty good listen if you're interested in a deeper dive.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/curious-case-russian-flash...