On Wednesday, Facebook confessed to selling at least $100,000 in ads to a Russian company using social media to cause damage to the United States.
Facebook, the dominant social media network, said 3,000 ads and 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages spread polarizing views on topics including immigration, race and gay rights.
Another $50,000 was spent on 2,200 “potentially politically related” ads, likely by Russians, Facebook said.
Meanwhile, over at Donald Trump headquarters, investigators have been looking into Jared Kushner’s digital operation for the Trump campaign for over a month.
Investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.
When operatives arranging a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. said that the information they were offering was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” they meant exactly that—it was part. The emails that Russia hacked for Trump provided fodder for the nightly rally, but the biggest part of what Russia did for Donald Trump didn’t come in the form of meetings, phone calls, or even Wikileaks. It came as targeted ads and social media, carefully delivered to critical voters in swing states. It came as a drip-drip-drip of almost-plausible information just outrageous enough to make it stand out in a mailbox, or collect a like, or score a retweet. It came with stories designed to erode Hillary Clinton’s support and build the idea that Donald Trump was somehow the champion of the working poor.
That the Russians did all this to help Trump isn’t in question. Neither is the fact that the Trump campaign knew it was happening. What’s in question is how much the Trump campaign helped.
It’s a sure thing that Republican operatives outside the immediate campaign worked to help the Russians realize the greatest value from their stolen information. For example, there was Florida GOP operative Aaron Nevins.
More impressed after studying the voter-turnout models, Mr. Nevins told the hacker, “Basically if this was a war, this is the map to where all the troops are deployed.”
At another point, he told the hacker, “This is probably worth millions of dollars."
And there was Michael Flynn associate and long-time GOP operative Peter Smith who attempted to get emails from the Russians.
Mr Smith believed the emails had already been obtained by Russian hackers, and that they may provide evidence of wrongdoing by Ms Clinton. …
“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” Eric York, a computer-security expert who worked with Mr Smith told The Wall Street Journal.
What interests investigators most is if the Trump campaign, with digital operations directed by Jared Kushner, worked—as did Nevins—to help the Russians identify their most valuable documents and help them determine areas and voters to target. Donald Trump frequently repeated false narratives that appeared in social media, and he gleefully touted the stolen information provided through Wikileaks. To what extent did the Trump campaign help shape those narratives, or determine what emails were released?
Russia’s operation used computer commands known as “bots” to collect and dramatically heighten the reach of negative or fabricated news about Clinton, including a story in the final days of the campaign accusing her of running a pedophile ring at a Washington pizzeria.
One source familiar with Justice's criminal probe said investigators doubt Russian operatives controlling the so-called robotic cyber commands that fetched and distributed fake news stories could have independently "known where to specifically target … to which high-impact states and districts in those states."
In Florida, Nevins helped Russia locate the most valuable districts and showed them how to use stolen documents on the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort to drive down turnout. Did Trump’s campaign play a similar role on a national level?
[Democratic Representative Adam Schiff] said he wants the House panel to determine whether Trump aides helped Russia time its cyberattacks or target certain voters and whether there was “any exchange of information, any financial support funneled to organizations that were doing this kind of work.”
Trump ran a campaign that was heavily dependent on social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, to spread its message. Russia was using the same media to distribute both stolen emails and false stories to drive down support for Hillary Clinton and increase support for Trump. It’s also clear that someone provided the Russians with information on swing states, swing districts, and even specific swing voters to be targeted—information that Trump had, especially after securing the nomination.
The ads identified in Facebook’s Wednesday “discover” appear to be more generic than most, but that $100,000 is a tiny drop in the ocean of money spent in social media in advance of the election. Researchers inside Facebook and other sites are working to identify other media firms that made big buys in advance of the campaign.