Reply to post: You're missing the point

US Congress finally emits all 3,000 Russian 'troll' Facebook ads. Let's take a look at some

veti Silver badge

You're missing the point

The ads themselves may have swayed a vanishingly small rounding error of people.

That's not what they were for. Clearly, the originators spent more on crafting the messages than they did on publishing them. Hundreds upon hundreds of ads, each one only viewed a few dozen times? - that's not a campaign, that's A/B testing. What these ads were for was not to sway voters, but to find out what messages would give the best click/response rates.

That's why the ad spend was so low. The real heavy lifting was done by the trolls on message boards, some on Facebook but many more out here on the real web. They were the bastards who reduced just about every well-trafficked forum on the 'net to a cratered hellhole in the second half of 2016. And they're still here, ready to do it again.

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