Utter nonsense. E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/facebook-russi...
Also, not to get into a debate on the stale issue, but hypertargetted ad buys (Cambridge Analytica) in key districts can swing elections when they are decided by tens of thousands of votes in those districts. I find it endlessly fascinating that Putin et al understood our election system better than us. I guess he didn't have the luxury of motivated reasoning and reality distortion fields.
I think you’ve been brainwashed on this one. Local campaigns spend orders of magnitude more money and are run by extremely capable social media strategists. The IRA struggled with proper English grammar and mis-targeted their ads to staunch Republicans.
It was by all actual evidence an extremely shoddy effort run on a shoestring budget that made no difference at all.
Which when you look at the general competency level of Russia these days, I guess it’s par for the course.
For me the big takeaway isn’t arguing about political bygones. It’s that by and large, these boogeymen are entirely incompetent at what they purport to do, and don’t deserve a fraction of the hand-wringing that they seem to elicit.
They are hyped up boogeymen for political purposes. The reality is that they are poorly trained, underfunded, and entirely corrupt, and so the results of their efforts are predictably lame.
That’s exactly the BS that was peddled back in the day that people like the NYT happily took home Pulitzers for, but where it turned out they spun it nearly out of whole cloth.
Actual research [1a] into the effect of such a meager ad buy showed not only were staunchly Republican voters the ones who predominantly saw the ads, but unsurprisingly it had no effect on their voting.
Looking back, it’s fair to say that on the order of 0-100 votes may have been changed by this “meddling”, for which the nation was subjected to years of breathless left-wing coverage.
It was, in short, a sham story and it’s well past time to be still be carrying water for such thoroughly debunked propaganda.
[1] - https://www.scribd.com/document/618991728/Nature-Article-on-...