Staying calm on Facebook-Russia link
The latest excitement in the Trump-Russia investigation is a set of Facebook ads linked to Russia, about 3,000 in all, that some of the president’s adversaries hope will prove the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election.
“A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump’s victory last November,” CNN reported recently.
Some of the ads, the network continued, appeared “highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal” to Donald Trump’s victory.
Put aside whether Michigan and Wisconsin were in fact “crucial” to Trump’s victory. (He would still have won the presidency even if he had lost both.)
The theory is that Russians could not have pulled off such “highly sophisticated” targeting by themselves and therefore may have had help from the Trump campaign or its associates.
But is that the whole story? Not according to a government official familiar with the Facebook ads, who offers a strikingly different assessment. What follows is from the official and from public statements by Facebook itself:
1) Of the group of 3,000 ads turned over to Congress by Facebook, a majority of the impressions came after the election, not before. Indeed, in an Oct. 2 news release, Facebook said 56 percent of the ads’ impressions came after the 2016 vote.
2) Twenty-five percent of the ads were never seen by anybody. (Facebook also revealed that in the news release.)
3) Most of the ads, which Facebook estimates were seen by 10 million people in the U.S., never mentioned the election or any candidate. “The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting or a particular candidate,” Facebook said in a Sept. 6 news release.
4) A relatively small number of the ads — again, about 25 percent — were geographically targeted. (Facebook also revealed that on Sept. 6.)
5) The ads that were geographically targeted were all over the map. “Of those that were targeted, numerous other locales besides Michigan and Wisconsin, including non-battleground states like Texas, were targeted,” the government official familiar with the ads said, via email.
6) Very few ads specifically targeted Wisconsin or Michigan. “Of the hundreds of preelection ads with one or more impressions, less than a dozen ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin combined,” the official said.
7) By and large, the ads targeting Michigan and Wisconsin did not run in the general election. “Nearly all of these Michigan and Wisconsin ads ran in 2015 and also ran in other states,” the official said.
8) The Michigan and Wisconsin ads were not widely seen. “The majority of these Wisconsin and Michigan ads had less than 1,000 impressions,” the official said.
9) The Michigan and Wisconsin ads (like those everywhere else) were low-budget. “The buy for the majority of these Michigan and Wisconsin ads (paid in rubles) was equivalent to approximately $10,” the official said.
10) The ads just weren’t very good. The language used in some of the ads “clearly shows the ad writer was not a native English speaker,” the official said. In addition, the set of ads turned over by Facebook also contained “clickbait-type ads that had nothing to do with politics.”
And in general, the official’s view is that the ads simply were not terribly sophisticated, contrary to how they have been portrayed.
None of this proves anything about the Facebook part of the Trump-Russia affair. It doesn’t prove there was no collusion, and it certainly doesn’t prove there was.
But it does suggest this particular set of ads might not be a very big deal.
Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Republican Sen. Richard Burr Burr noted that he has no objection to Facebook releasing the ads publicly. Certainly doing so would go a long way toward clearing up the public’s understanding of the issue. Like everything else in the Trump-Russia affair, people need to know what happened.