Make Up Your Minds

So we’ve been hearing for two years how Russia “hacked the election” by putting up false events and bots as well as ads on Facebook. We’re supposed to believe these things made enough of a difference to convince people to vote for Trump and thus Putin masterminded Trump’s election.

Some of you still believe it.

But here is what we do know. Russia spend diddly on it. High assertions of how much they spent was $150,000 on Facebook ads. Yup, 150,000 is allegedly all it takes to suppress national voting level and convince people to vote for Stein, Sanders, and Trump instead of Hillary. Man, the people and campaigns spending orders of magnitude more on it must be rubes of the highest order. At most we are looking at 150k in Facebook ads which accounts for less than one percent of the election’s spending on Facebook.

Now any reasonable person at least raises an eyebrow and looks askance at a claim that a paltry 150k was able to entirely outweigh the rest. More likely there may be a guffaw. But the New York Times has really put a large anchor on such a notion with their recent article. Essentially, democratic operatives/researchers tried the same thing against Roy Moore. Not conspiracy, they admit it. They wanted to see how it would work. They spent 100,000 on Facebook ads for a race in one state, where the total spent on the race was some 51m. So they spent some 2% as opposed to less than 1%.

The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

Wow. But wait, there is more!

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

I guess if one cries “false flag” long enough it will be true at some point. But lets be clear about this.

The report does not say whether the project purchased the Russian bot Twitter accounts that suddenly began to follow Mr. Moore. But it takes credit for “radicalizing Democrats with a Russian bot scandal” and points to stories on the phenomenon in the mainstream media. “Roy Moore flooded with fake Russian Twitter followers,” reported The New York Post.

Ouch.

Now, this next bit may seem pretty damning, but don’t let that fool you:

When Election Day came, Mr. Jones became the first Alabama Democrat elected to the Senate in a quarter of a century, defeating Mr. Moore by 21,924 votes in a race that drew more than 22,800 write-in votes. More than 1.3 million ballots were cast over all.

It would be trivial to connect all of those dots together and think this group “hacked” the Alabama election. But it isn’t likely true. I draw this out to make the final point more clear. If you were to make an argument that their action affected this, numerically the case would be plausible. A single state as opposed to the entire country was the scope, and it came down to less than 20,000 votes. But did it? I doubt it. Nor am I alone in this.

There is no evidence that Mr. Jones sanctioned or was even aware of the social media project. Joe Trippi, a seasoned Democratic operative who served as a top adviser to the Jones campaign, said he had noticed the Russian bot swarm suddenly following Mr. Moore on Twitter. But he said it was impossible that a $100,000 operation had an impact on the race.

Re-read that last sentence and let it all sink in. Nearly as much in absolute dollars was spent on FB ads in a state level election (and roughly half of it really) which comes out to more than double the Russian ads proportionally and Joe Trippi claims it was “impossible” that it had an impact. An impact. Not even “it wasn’t enough to change the result”, but that it didn’t matter. It caused a national news event, but it didn’t matter for Alabama voters.

Tell you what, lets accept that claim. However, in order to do that we have to then apply that lesson. In an election where a group admittedly tried this stuff in an election that was arguably tailor-made for it and certainly had a much lower bar for effectiveness, it had no impact. How many votes had to be swayed to change the result in Alabama? Twenty-two thousand out of 1.3 million; yet 100k, some outrage stories and apparently a Russian botnet could not possibly have made the difference even a little. Honestly, I can say “well, yeah” to that.

If so, what does that mean for the claim that a mere 150,000 in a national pool where the total cost was in the billions (2.5 of them even), and the people behind it were quite amateur in their methods?

It means it had no impact either. The NYT article goes out of its way to both point out the alleged sophistication of the “experiment” and how it was entirely ineffective. Are we to believe the comparatively weaker and much less sophisticated attempts were magically effective because they were’t Americans? Or perhaps the “experiment” just spent too much, that the real secret to flipping an election is to spend a tiny fraction of a percent on Facebook ads? Is there some magic barrier/algorithm at Facebook where 100k in spending is allowed to go unaided, but once you spend 150k magic happens? Yeah, I wouldn’t buy that either.

I don’t care where your politics lie. These two narratives are diametrically opposed. Regardless of whether you were/are pro-Trump, anti-Hillary, or anti-Trump, pro-Hillary, or somewhere in between that mess, the POTUS election was nowhere near as tight as the Alabama senator race was. As such, you can’t reasonably accept that it is impossible that the “Alabama experiment” had an impact, let alone was the difference, but that the Russian one bears responsibility to thwarting the election of Hillary to POTUS. Unless you’re just a partisan hack who doesn’t give two spits of a concern for rationality and facts. But even then, you would know you don’t buy that narrative either, you just don’t care that it isn’t true because it serves your ends.