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by thrower123 2565 days ago
That's really peanuts though. If that was all they spent, then for less than the cost of one fighter jet, they destabilized the most powerful country in the world for three years, so far. That would be the most wildly successful propaganda campaign in history.
2 comments
EvilTerran 2565 days ago
That's just known expenditures by the Internet Research Agency, though. For a full accounting, you'd not only need to know if that was all the IRA spent, you'd also need to include, say... how much Russia spent on hacking into the DNC's emails, and into 39 states' election infrastructure[1]; how much value they extracted from the polling data Manafort sent their way[2]; etc.

And even with all costs taken into account, it took a perfect storm of factors outside their control for their actions to actually change the result. I doubt they even expected that outcome themselves.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-13/russian-b...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/03/mueller...

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jessaustin 2565 days ago
...perfect storm of factors outside their control...

This is what I was talking about above. Both Ds and Rs ran noxious morons, and they got beat by a different noxious moron. Both Ds and Rs ignored real things that real people care about, like fewer evil wars and more good jobs. Trump had some lip service on those topics, and that was enough.

Oh, also there was the fact that Trump was on every channel of TV news, all day every day for 1.5 years. That probably had something to do with it, and Russians had very little influence over that. Why has there been no great hue and cry about investigating MSNBC's and Fox's editorial and programming decisions? Why, indeed.

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dillonmckay 2565 days ago
It is at least a glowing endorsement of the efficacy of a well-run Facebook properties ad campaign.

Google Adwords has much less ROI in this context.

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