I’ll be very curious to learn why Facebook would lie for so long and then suddenly(?) come clean. Something is, as they say, very rotten in the state of Denmark.
Spectrum Health, Trump Tower, Alfa Bank - Jared’s stealth data machine. Not to mention the Mercers Cambridge Analytica
If only there were some way to get Americans to spy on themselves…willingly.
And feed Big Brother everything: their hobbies, politics, jobs, health, daily activities…24/7.
Maybe even post photographs of themselves, their families, their friends, their travels and celebrations…
Available anywhere on the planet to hackers, identity thieves, corporations, scammers, organized crime…
If only we had something like that.
You forgot what we eat. 
I had missed that Times piece until Josh referred to it and linked to it this morning. If you haven’t read it, it’s a Big Deal piece. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?mcubz=0&_r=0
And … once upon a time my late mother was a state co-chair of Common Cause - per filing a lawsuit - Go Common Cause!
This, btw, is the kind of analysis that should take hours or days at most if you give some thought to what you’re looking for. They haven’t even gotten to the question of ads bought from russian IPs giving an address in russia.
This story will get only bigger. No earthly reason for Russia to limit its ad buy to 100k.
In my experience they very rarely say more than they have to. When I was at the Guardian we reported their editorial guidelines for a team of editors they hadn’t admitted existed; they wouldn’t even admit that the algorithm wasn’t exclusively edited by their software until we described the guidelines we had to them.
I am not the only one that thinks the total paid to FB by Russian interests was significantly higher than $100K
Wow - your mother must have been something! That’s so cool.
And thanks for the link.
I still don’t understand why they suddenly felt compelled to release this information after so many months of denial. Why the change, @samt? Subpoenas? Threats from lawmakers, law enforcement? A sudden spasm of altruism?
BTW: You’re a hell of an addition to the TPM team!
This is very much the tip of the iceberg. When the investigation is complete I’m sure we’ll be told that the Russians actually had a huge impact on the 2016 election. They coordinated with multiple right wing organizations (including the Trump campaign). They infiltrated the Sanders campaign and completely hijacked his movement. And they infiltrated all aspects of social media with an army of trolls and volumes of fake news posts. Those are only a few of the many ways in which they probably attacked our election last year.
Propaganda works and this proves it. Millions of Americans on both the left and right were successfully manipulated by this disinformation campaign. The end result was that an unqualified idiot was elected President of the United States. The worst part of this is that most of those who were effectively manipulated (both on the left and the right) will never admit it. As Mark Twain (allegedly) once said:
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.
Always concerned over the number of folks who sign in to those “free” games and self-actualization exercises (“Are you related to royalty?” “Want to see yourself as a classical painting?” and so on) with the caveat that they sign on using their facebook profile (“Don’t worry, your fb information is kept secure and private, blah blah blah”). And I have some pretty smart friends who should know better.
Yup. Exactly what I came to say.
Also:
Here is some pure speculation on my part.
I think that the reason Facebook has gone public with these findings is that Mueller’s team put pressure on Facebook to reveal. At least this way Facebook can control the message.
Facebook is control freak private, but Zuckerberg has no desire to be painted as the next Julian Assange. Sabotaging HRC’s campaign with Facebook ads placed by a Russian troll farm just doesn’t sound like something he’d be interested in covering for. And my guess is the troll farm tracks lead to those Facebook ads, Mueller followed them, and the truth was headed towards the public record.
That’s stunning and just about what I thought when the story of those servers first broke. That is not just collusion, it’s a conspiracy to throw a United States presidential election and they are all guilty.
guilty guilty guilty
I’ll secondary that !
Earlier today, reading a story about Mueller’s relations with Congress, I was reflecting upon how hard Mueller is charging, how aggressive his investigation has been, how hard he appears to be squeezing witnesses, how hard-nosed he’s being with Congress. And thinking about how hard-core he’s being, I tried out the hypothesis that it was just a typical case of the Feds getting started on investigation and then not letting it go when the thing that started the investigation doesn’t pan out.
Because God knows they do that. All the time. Ask Bob Menendez, who is now on trial on a rather nebulous corruption charge that started out based on an anonymous tip claiming he was going to the Dominican Republic as a child sex tourist. (Reeks of Roger Stone, that, but I have no proof.)
And that hypothesis just didn’t fit either with what we know of Mueller or the intensity level we keep seeing signs of. No, he’s onto something, something big, something real and something Russian. Just as sure as anything.
And three pieces fell into place for me at that point: a) the thing I linked to in the original post, b) the fact when Mueller came on board, the first thing he would have seen was the haul from when the FBI got a FISA warrant for that damn server in Trump Tower, albeit possibly too late, and c) this 200 tweet tweetstorm by Seth Abramson connecting dots in lawyerly fashion that someone here (apologies, can’t remember who) hooked me up with a couple of days ago. (Some considerate Kos commenter detwitterfied it here. Slightly less maddening to read.)
You know, probably better than I, that the worst thing a lawyer, or, worse still, a cop, can do is fall in love with his or her dot-connecting before all the evidence is in. But the dots being connected are real. And the way it tracks the Steele Dossier, which is worth rereading when you finish reading Abramson’s tweetstorm, is extremely sobering, in a DiFi and Grassley Leaving the FBI SCIF White as a Sheet kind of way.
You know, I go over into places like the comments at the Hill to get a sense of what the MAGA True Believers are saying and thinking, and its clear they think this is a particularly vicious game. They think we’re taking pleasure in this, and making it all up in a gleefully vindictive attempt to hurt him because we won’t get over their Great Victory. And sometimes we are and sometimes we overindulge in the glee. But every time you set aside the daily updates and the latest revelations and our general loathing and take a deep dive back into this stuff, it’s shakes you to the core. It sickens you like reading about a torture-murder and it sobers you like a tornado (or a hurricane) warning in your area. It’s bad. It’s just really, really bad. And it’s coming.