RUSHIN’ JUDGMENT
Don: F’book disproves elex meddle
President Trump griped Saturday that the mainstream media ignored the fact that Russia’s Facebook-ad spending rose after he won the 2016 election — a sign in his view that Russia had some other goal than putting him in office.
“The Fake News Media never fails. Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!” the president tweeted at 3:11 p.m.
Trump then quoted Goldman’s tweet from 8:57 p.m. Friday:
“The majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election. We [Facebook] shared that fact, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative of Trump and the election.”
Facebook reported in October 2016 that 44 percent of the Russian ads were displayed before the election and 56 percent were displayed after the election. The ads were seen by about 10 million Americans, Facebook estimates.
Goldman also said that promoting Trump “was *NOT* the main goal” of the Russian ads.
“The main goal of the Russian propaganda and misinformation effort is to divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media, against us,” Goldman wrote. “It has stoked fear and hatred amongst Americans. It is working incredibly well. We are quite divided as a nation.”
As an example, he cited an incident in Houston last May in which Russian trolls persuaded two protest groups to face off in front of an Islamic center. One group wore “White Lives Matter” shirts and the other carried signs that said, “Muslims are welcome here.”
“Americans were literally puppeted into the streets by trolls who organized both sides of the protest,” Goldman wrote.
Russia’s disinformation campaign used YouTube and Twitter as well as Facebook and Insta- gram, which is a Facebook-owned platform, according to the indictment brought by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mueller’s indictment lays out a sophisticated plot that started in 2014 to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and boost Trump through social-media accounts filled with sham content produced by a team of 80 Russians.
The indictment says the Russians’ strategy “included interfering with the 2016 US presidential election, with the stated goal of ‘spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.’ ”
The Russian Web trolls were instructed to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary” but to avoid criticizing Democrat Bernie Sanders and Trump, because “we support them.”
Trump on Saturday cited Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s comments at a news conference: “There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.”
Nonetheless, Trump’s top national security adviser said the evidence of Russian interference is “incontrovertible.”
The indictment brought by Mueller makes the facts about Russia’s meddling “very apparent to everyone,” National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said at a conference in Germany.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov hit back by calling Mueller’s indictment “just blabber.”
A Trump administration spokesman insisted that Democrats and the media sowed more confusion than any Russians.
They “continued to push this lie on the American people for more than a year” that Trump colluded with Russia, Hogan Gidley, a deputy White House press secretary, told Fox News on Saturday. “Frankly, Americans should be outraged by that.”