[rjf72]

The report is publicly available here. [1] This is mostly covered on pages ~22-26. Quite a short read since it's redacted like crazy. The 'massive influence' seems to have been a company that setup some fake accounts on Facebook with a total advertising spend of $100k, and one that also had a few thousand spam bots on Twitter that 1.4 million people had "been in contact with" - a phrase which was left undefined.

[1] - https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

[tsimionescu]

Thanks for the link, but it mostly disproves your dismissive attitude: according to the report, posts generated by accounts controller by the Russian company reached 29 million people on Facebook alone (and " may have reached an estimated 126 million people."), with hundreds of thousands of direct followers for several individual accounts. That is not nothing.

[mediocrejoker]

It's not nothing, but it's interesting to note that the amount they spent is dwarfed by the amounts currently being spent by top democrats (and Trump's re-election campaign), several of which are in the low millions of dollars.

> According to Facebook, the IRA purchased over 3,500 advertisements, and the expenditures totaled (sic) approximately $100,000

I think everyone would like to know how much actual influence it had in the election but I'm not sure we will ever know definitively.

[rjf72]

You need to put things in context. Facebook sells advertising or "reach." Countless groups, and obviously the campaigns themselves, were spending millions on similar ads. $100k is going to provide a proportional level of influence, which is to say not much. The same thing is true on Twitter where you can buy followers from a wide array of third party sources. The main reason this is an issue is because of politics. It's Benghazi, 2016 version. That comparison is particularly apt as it's not to say nothing untoward happened - it obviously did. But the issue itself is/was amplified tremendously for partisan political purposes.