Ex-Facebook Data Experts Spent $75M on Targeted Anti-Trump Ads

At the moment I feal that it's a lost cause. There is no longer any connection between the people running the ads and the communities they are impacting. When the printing press was invented, the people writing the paper and publishing stories tended to live in the communities they published in. As media empires started being built in the 1980s and 1990s, local ownership vanished, and local content disappeared as well. The internet then amplified this effect as the advertising empires of Google and Facebook began to grow in the '00s. I don't think this is healthy for humanity. And I don't think we have the collective political will to fix this.

Why do people still joke as if the Russian hacks and russian social media war was fake. The republican led gop senate investigation concluded russian hackers were behind the dnc/podesta hacks and were working to boost trump on social media in ways never seen before in the states.

Edit: Adding relevant excerpts from the 5th, I think final, senate GOP led report's executive summary. This is the Republican led report. This was not led be democrats.

Hack and Leak

>"The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process. "

Social Media executive summary ("Influence for hire" section)

>"The Committee found that highly evolved tools used to shape popular sentiment were utilized in support of the Trump Campaign during the 2016 election season, and Russia has made use of such tools in its influence operations, but a link between Russian efforts and the Campaign's use of these tools was not established. These commercially available services many of which are based overseas-rely on an array of personal information to build targeted messaging profiles. Russia applied these sam·technologies and methodologies to its influence· campaign during the 2016 election and, in doing so, conducted foreign influence operationsagainst the United States with a speed, precision, and scale not previously seen."

And from the intro of the actual section on Influence for hire.:

>"All three companies either aspired to apply micro-targeted social media messaging techniques comparable to those employed by Russian information operatives with the Internet Research Agency, or actively engaged in the application of these techniques. "

Do you see a difference between citizens pooling small donations to run ads vs a foreign state running a misinformation campaign to affect an election?

It's a complete cliché even Mike Judge would pass if the script wasn't something in the line of Idiocracy.

James Barnes is a salesperson, not an engineer.

Well we could legislate those ads out of existence. Free speech is one thing but paid promotion of ideas isn’t protected.

Seriously this. There have been lots and lots of studies on the impact of internet ads on voting, most of it appears to be super negligible.

TV ads? That's a whole different ball game that has clear signal in the polling.

> 4 years of Trump is what got Biden elected

Trump got 63 million votes in 2016. He got 7 million more in 2020. In the end, what decided the election is 3 votes every 100. The result is clear-cut: one wins, the other loses. But in reality what decided the election is a really tiny difference. Small enough for ads (from all sides) to have an effect on it, and really too small to say that anything has actually changed in the country.