Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by willis936 2436 days ago
And this somehow isn’t evidence of the effectiveness of undisclosed campaigns based around lies presented as truth? All Clinton did wrong was not involve foreign governments to operate guerrilla smear campaigns.

Oh wait. That isn’t wrong. What are you arguing in favor of again?
1 comments
malvosenior 2436 days ago
Clinton not winning the election isn’t proof of Russian interference.
link
willis936 2436 days ago
It isn’t not proof either. It seems rather strange to posit that dollars spent is the only factor dictating the effectiveness of marketing.
link
repolfx 2436 days ago
Your position is unfalsifiable. If there had been Russian advertising at scale, it's proof of foreign interference. If there's basically no spend at all, that's still proof of foreign interference because dollar spend doesn't matter.

Look, the whole Russia angle is a hoax. When put under enormous external and internal political pressure (remember Twitter/FB are filled with Trump haters), all they could come up with was a tiny number of ads labelled "Russian" that appeared to support nobody in particular. Hardly anyone saw them, so they can't have had much impact. And was that some plot directed by Putin or just ads by people who happened to be Russian? It's never made clear.

Back when Obama was in power and there was Citizen's United, he said words to the effect of "we must consider changing the constitution to limit political spending" and the Clinton wing of politics was spitting bullets about how in future Republicans would just buy elections outright.

Then Trump came along and beat Clinton, despite being outspent 2:1. Clinton's campaign steamrollered Trump's financially yet still lost. The whole theory of elections that had been pushed until that point, that marketing spend determines victory, it was just completely invalidated overnight. Democrats who couldn't psychologically explain voter disagreement via policy arguments could no longer explain rejection as a function of ad spend either, so had to come up something new - hence, this spectre of "foreign interference", as if Putin has some kind of mind control rays.

link