Nobody should be surprised by the socially disruptive campaign announced by Facebook yesterday. This is the Russian stock in trade for sowing division in countries all over the world. Pay for extremists to make false claims, extend the bounds of what is acceptable discourse, fight off contrary views, and bring discontent wherever they can. In the Ukraine they had gigantic billboard letting everyone know the Kiev government was "Nazi" showing the swastika in place of its name. Those things were not cheap. The BBC says they spent a few hundred thousand on this kind of thing and laid it to the Internet Research Agency, which usually spends a good deal more than this kind of piddly sum. In 2015, the New York Times did a long story on this organization which I would encourage anyone who likes this subject to read again. This sounds like a Russian Intelligence operation.
Facebook says it did an "extensive search" to determine if ads sponsored on social media were paid for by entities that were using Russian IPs, or US IPs that were providing Russian language support. That is a good way to do what Facebook would want - limit the number of accounts of any Russian involvement. Mark Zuckerberg is not one to criticize anyone who tries to undermine the current administration. In order to find any foreign involvement, he would have had to uncover the Chinese efforts to do similar things [see previous post ], the Iranians who are right behind them, and any number of other businesses and government entities that did the same thing. It was a lot more than $100,000 and Facebook knows it. Let's give the Russians a little credit here. They are not so naive as to allow this money to be traced to its source, and Facebook was not looking for the source of most of it. This Russian involvement is the only one that fits their narrative that the Trump Administration was cooperating with the Russians to keep Hillary Clinton from office.
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