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Comment by simiones | Hacker News Reader

> And the previous election was heavily influenced by a foreign government using American social media networks to influence.

Heavily influenced is a massive overstatement. Russia spent less money on US election influence than most individual mega-churches.

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> Russia spent less money [Citation needed]

You have no idea how much money they spent. What we do know from sworn testimony is that they reached 126 million users through Facebook alone [1] We also know they funneled millions into NRA to influence our elections with dark money.[2] They also had an army of social media influencers working at the IRA with a $1.25 million monthly budget. [3] And, what is the value of the influence from their state sponsored hackers that stole data and leaked through WikiLeaks? [4] No megachurch can do that.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/technology/facebook-googl...

[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/the-nra-spent-dollar...

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-troll-farm-spent-mil...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

Russia has tens of thousands full-time people sitting on computers just doing fake stuff on social media in America.

They basically took all the money and people they would have put into their regular army and put it into a social media army.

You’ve found those figures from the transparent and independent Russian statistics department giving the figures in roubles?

The cost to hack hilary's unauthorized personal email server could not have been that high.

Hillary didn't get hacked, it was one of the other people in her circle who got phished. John podesta I think?

Anyways. Yeah, phished. Maybe it's super secret agents or maybe it was a teenager from 4chan.

Both happened. The spearfishing John Podestra gmail hack was separate.

The Hilary personal email server used for government business that contained classified information that was illegal was hacked by Russian agents the fbi alledged.

FYI, putting in heavy partisan asides in comments hurts credibility with neutral readers.

I think you're confusing the DNC and campaign server hacks with Hillary's personal server she used while at State. No indications her personal server was hacked: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/mueller-clinton-arizona-ha...

Hillary's IT Admin was asking on reddit how to wipe a server of a VIP. With such incompetent admin there is a high probability that the server was hacked.

> Maybe it's super secret agents or maybe it was a teenager from 4chan.

Actually Hillary was hacked by a lone wolf from Romania, and he received jail for this https://youtu.be/8gfzNyZ3trI

From Wikipedia[0], quoting the Mueller report:

> The Mueller report detailed that the IRA spent $100,000 for over 3,500 Facebook advertisements, which included anti-Clinton and pro-Trump advertisements.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report#Social_media_ca...

That an outrageous 0.0015% of the estimated 6.8 billion price tag of the 2016 election. Damn Ruskies and their election interference [shakes fist at the sky].

Fun fact, 100k is 0.4% of the price of the Mueller report itself, at 25M.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016s-price-tag-6-8-bi...

https://time.com/5557693/mueller-report-cost

That is Facebook ad spend, not the total cost of the attack.

It doesn't include other things described in the paragraph that the IRA did, like organizing Trump rallies and running troll farms where they posed as Americans on social media.

It also doesn't cover things like paying for the operation to infiltrate the NRA etc.

And then of course there could be stuff we don't know about

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