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Comment by DFXLuna | Hacker News Reader

Didn't the FBI and the Mueller report pretty thoroughly lay out the massive scope of Russian social media influence on the 2016 election and beyond? I thought this was a decided issue but maybe I'm wrong.

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The report is publicly available here. [1] This is mostly covered on pages ~22-26. Quite a short read since it's redacted like crazy. The 'massive influence' seems to have been a company that setup some fake accounts on Facebook with a total advertising spend of $100k, and one that also had a few thousand spam bots on Twitter that 1.4 million people had "been in contact with" - a phrase which was left undefined.

[1] - https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

Thanks for the link, but it mostly disproves your dismissive attitude: according to the report, posts generated by accounts controller by the Russian company reached 29 million people on Facebook alone (and " may have reached an estimated 126 million people."), with hundreds of thousands of direct followers for several individual accounts. That is not nothing.

It's not nothing, but it's interesting to note that the amount they spent is dwarfed by the amounts currently being spent by top democrats (and Trump's re-election campaign), several of which are in the low millions of dollars.

> According to Facebook, the IRA purchased over 3,500 advertisements, and the expenditures totaled (sic) approximately $100,000

I think everyone would like to know how much actual influence it had in the election but I'm not sure we will ever know definitively.

You need to put things in context. Facebook sells advertising or "reach." Countless groups, and obviously the campaigns themselves, were spending millions on similar ads. $100k is going to provide a proportional level of influence, which is to say not much. The same thing is true on Twitter where you can buy followers from a wide array of third party sources. The main reason this is an issue is because of politics. It's Benghazi, 2016 version. That comparison is particularly apt as it's not to say nothing untoward happened - it obviously did. But the issue itself is/was amplified tremendously for partisan political purposes.

Those reports laid out Russian attempts to influence. We have no way to determine whether they actually influenced the behavior of any voters.

> We have no way to determine whether they actually influenced the behavior of any voters.

What conclusions can we draw from this fact?

Wasn't that thorough. ODNI report from 2017 was broader in scope (https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf). The 2019 Mueller report looks restricted to areas where there was possible collusion (just some of the social media stuff that was retweeted by Trump campaign people/stuff related to the DNC hacks/etc.).

This report might be interesting as well.

https://disinformationreport.blob.core.windows.net/disinform...

The two biggest caveats about it in my mind are that 1) all the data was provided voluntarily by the tech companies, with no indication of how they determined what was a Russian account, and 2) they don't really have any way to measure what actual impact it had on the election, or how effective the disinformation campaigns were

Yes they did.

Yet people (even here on HN) refuse to look at the evidence and pass around things like the Seth Rich conspiracy as facts[1].

The same thing happened here with the Comet Pizza conspiracy theory.

Facts don't matter, and they just act as ways to polarize people.

Edit: and see how the voting goes on this and the parent comment, and on the thread I linked. The battle for facts is lost, and partisanship is all that is left.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997995

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