The big Washington news outlets have all been talking about ads on Google paid for by the Russians. Facebook has already gone through this messy review of its ads to see (1) did the groups pay in rubles, (2) did they have IPs in Russia, (3) were the keyboards set to Russian language communications to the place the ads were purchased from?
Few, if any of these news outlets have focused on the right thing. It is foreign involvement in influencing the outcome of a U.S. election that we should be concerned about. The kinds of reviews social media companies have done will not do that, and grossly underestimate the numbers of ads paid for by anybody trying to influence the election. Here is why.
1. Most of the money given to US politicians is given to their party or to their campaign directly. They pay for the ads themselves using that money. That money is laundered through US entities as I previously described in posts dealing with Chinese contributions to US charities that paid money to the Clintons during the last campaign. The money is almost untraceable, as most politicians already know. They can get on their soapboxes and wail about the amount of Russian ads running on Facebook, Twitter and Google, while they pay for their own ads with foreign money given to their friends. They don’t even see the hypocracy.
2. Governments are not stupid, or as naive as they would have to be to run ads in the US from computers that are set to Russian language, paid for in rubles, or located in Russia where IPs were known to be Russian. They don’t have to do any of those things and would not unless they were off the rails, or non-government entities. Nobody has ever accused the Russians - as we are doing by inference in some of these Congressional Committees - as being that dumb. They run very sophisticated campaigns against many different governments who know how to run those kinds of operations themselves.
3. The US is not the only country the Russians are trying to influence. There are traceable activities in Germany, France, Estonia, Ukraine, Latvia and a number of others that show the Russians will do most anything to influence the outcome of an election - or bend a policy to fit their agenda. This is Political Warfare which is not particularly new, having been around in its current form since WWII. Some researchers believe it went on hundreds of years ago, but that is debated.
4. Many other countries were trying to influence political candidates in the US and the Russians were only one of them. By focusing on the Russians, we avoid looking at the sources of campaign money paid by other countries, laundered though political groups, and paying for all kinds of ads directly.
We should not be worried about the crude that floats to the surface of our election baths, and never quite gets to go down the drain with the water. This is left-over that materializes every election. The “their is no evidence of election fraud” theme plays out in a system that has plenty of election fraud every year. I saw it in Chicago with the votes of dead people counted over and over in every single election. We saw it in Virginia where illegal immigrants were voting.
We really want to believe that the Russians were paying for ads to lead us astray. Only that wasn’t what the Russians were doing, since those ads were not trying to influence votes. They wanted to promote dissent. They were looking for causes that promoted hatred, bias, and disruption of both our political system and our election. They found some, and they have not stopped promoting them.
The Russians could not have been very effective with such a small amount of ads placed in all of the social media. Political campaigns spend billions of dollars without having the desired effect, and the Russians are accused of spending less than a million. They would have had to have the most effective ad campaign ever to have achieved sufficient influence to affect voters. People all over the world would have been flocking to their doors to buy that kind of influence. They may be good, but they are not that good.
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