I’m sincerely at a loss for how most/many of these could have influenced the election. Part of me think that Congress is making mistakes and Putin is scrolling through these, laughing hysterically that we actually think he’d pay for this nonsense.
Most of these pages won’t be so forthcoming in their desire to influence. The idea for these ads is to pay for reach and credibility. Send it out there and hope that it goes viral. After which you’ve gathered a whole new army of people who have liked your seemingly innocent page. After that it’s just a matter controlling the tone on that page using bots to create a false narrative. As humans, we are so used to be told what to do that it becomes easy to follow the general flow of your social circle. If everybody you hang out with hates one politician, then the chances that you’re also going to hate that politician is high. So by creating pockets of people who are all there on the page because they have something in common, you can control it and therefore controlling the direction of their thoughts by manipulating their peer circles.
The ads were mostly for Facebook groups. Once those groups had a substantial subscribership, the Russians were able to push out far more vitriolic propaganda without having to pay for the audience.
Repeating "just the tip of the iceberg" three times in this discussion already looks like programming of public opinion kind of thing. Without proof of any sort.
That trick is as old as the Church that invented it for the obvious purpose.
That's like "election meddling" repeated on CNN 10 times per day just to convince people "it was something but we will not tell you what".
