‘RussiaGate’ was our most preposterous scam

And the press hasn’t focussed on the most ridiculous assertions.

Supposedly, Russian Trolls hacked or stole the 2016 Presidential Election for Donald Trump, largely through ingenious Facebook ads. We’ve never seen photos of these trolls, but this is one artist rendering.

I’ve recently been reading more articles in the alternative press about the “RussiaGate” scam. The good news is more Americans realize what a hoax the RussiaGate scandal was. However, even journalists on “our side” are perhaps getting far too deep in the weeds in their efforts to expose this scandal.

All along, I’ve contended any sane person should know the entire scandal was preposterous as the main point Trump’s enemies were trying to make was the asinine notion “Russia” somehow “hacked,” stole, manipulated, rigged or otherwise determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

According to the “authorized” narrative,  Trump - with the help of his friends in Russia - actually “stole” the election via one of two methods: 

1. A small team of Russia “trolls” did this by creating and then placing X number of ads on Facebook. These ads were so unusually persuasive they caused hundreds of thousands (millions?) of voters who might have voted for Hillary to suddenly decide to change their vote to Trump. And/or:

2. “Russia” - via its cyber nerds - somehow hacked into the voting machines and literally changed the vote results.

For the record, in eight years, I’ve seen no credible evidence that the voting machine hard drives were hacked in 2016. In this article, I’m going to show how preposterous it is that some Facebook ads placed by Russian trolls could ever swing an entire presidential election. 

Two quick points …

If a series of Facebook ads created and placed by some Russian trolls (who don’t even speak English as a first language) can swing an entire election, I’m going to start my own political ad agency and surreptitiously hire every one of these trolls - and pay them whatever they want. If these advertising savants can guarantee our client is going to win any election contest, I’m going to make more money from my ad agency than Bill Gates made on vaccines.

I’m eminently qualified to write this article because my college degree’s in political science, which means I know how presidential races are conducted (and won) in America. I’ve also spent years selling advertising so I know how advertising works (or doesn’t work).

Here’s how advertising works:

An advertiser wants to achieve X result. This person or organization then creates a message(s) via advertising to hopefully make this result more likely to happen. Once an ad agency has created the advertisement, it pays a media company like Facebook to publish this ad and reach its “target audience” … which in the case of elections is “likely voters.”

The basic concept is that enough of the target audience will see the ad, find it convincing, and then vote for the candidate the advertiser wants this person to vote for (or not vote for the other candidate).

Of course, the thought process is actually far more involved than this. In presidential races, most voters know early on who they’re going to vote for. Most voters wouldn’t change their vote if they saw 10,000 Facebook ads for the other candidate, who they usually despise.

Trying to change the vote of such people would qualify as a futile effort, advertising money flushed down the proverbial drain.

So advertisers who want to help their client win focus only on the “undecided” voters - which is maybe 10 percent of the voting population.

Furthermore, American presidential elections are actually 52 different elections (50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico). As everyone should know, every presidential race now comes down to the votes in about seven key “swing states.”

This means if the Russian Trolls (who supposedly wanted Trump to defeat Hillary) were placing many ads in the California “market,” this was wasted ad spends. Hillary was never going to lose California … no matter how many Facebook “impressions” voters in California saw from the Russian trolls.

Conversely, the Russia trolls didn’t need to bother placing ads in my state of Alabama as footage could be published showing Trump clubbing baby seals to death … and Trump would still defeat Hillary in a landslide in Alabama.

I’ve already debunked the Russian Troll Theory …

From these advertising truisms, we already know the Russian trolls were advertising dumb asses because they were spending their tiny advertising budget (see later) trying to reach voters across the entire country. If these were politically-savvy trolls, they would have known that 86 percent of the state election results - 43 of 50 states - were in the bag before the trolls produced and placed their first ad.

To have any hope of swinging the election to Trump, the Trolls would have placed all of their ads in markets that would be seen by the undecided voters in the seven swing states. Per the financial records the RussiaGate committee subpoenaed from Facebook, the troll factory didn’t do this.

This article by The Washington Post tells us that the trolls placed 3,500 ads over about two years, but the article admits all of these weren’t “presidential election” ads.

From my training in newspaper and radio advertising sales, I know that for an ad to be effective it has to reach the right person with a “compelling” message and, also, a person has to be exposed to this message over and over and over again.

Judge for yourself …

In my research for this article, I found one story from Business Insider that showed actual samples of actual Russian troll Facebook ads from 2015 through 2017. (I don’t know why the ads from 2017 were included as this was after the November 2016 election).

The story depicts 18 ads, which must have been the most egregious examples of the Russian trolls’ handiwork as these ads were shown on the big screen at a Congressional hearing on “RussiaGate.”

I encourage readers to inspect these ads for themselves and then answer a couple of questions:

Did you actually see any of these ads on your own Facebook account in the months before the 2016 presidential race? If you did, was this ad what made you decide to flip your vote from Hillary to Trump? If it did, do you happen to live in one of the swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin?

More Mainstream Media misleading statistics …

If you read The Washington Post story, you’ll be told these ads reached 140 million Facebook users - which is a joke. 

Facebook no doubt reaches 140 million Americans but hundreds of thousands of people and companies buy ads on this social media behemoth … so the odds any one Facebook user would have happened to see one of these Russian trolls ads (much less 10 or 100) during the the time he might have been perusing Facebook is … not very good.

In fact, I watched some of those hearings and, at the time, remember thinking about the evidence Peter Schiff didn’t present. 

For example, Schiff didn’t call one Facebook user who testified, “Yes, I saw that ad - and, yes, I live in Pennsylvania and, yes, it definitely caused me to change my vote from Hillary to Trump.” 

Even if Schiff and his aides found one voter who was willing to testify under oath that he changed his vote because of the troll-produced ad, that would not be persuasive evidence this event flipped the race to Trump … because one vote in Pennsylvania would not flip the state to Trump. 

Schiff would have to produce 34,001 Pennsylvania residents who said the exact same thing to prove that the Russian trolls stole the Pennsylvania general election results.

In examining these Russian troll ads, I’m also struck by the fact the content in said ads was never original at all. That is, the message of the ads was repeated probably billions of times by plain-Jane and Joe-Six-Pack Facebook users.

For that matter, Trump’s own campaign was spending tens of millions of dollars on his own ads. All the conservative groups were also spending every dime they had on “anti-Hillary” ads. 

Question: How can anyone know that it was the Russian troll ads - and the Russian troll ads alone- that actually made the difference in the 2016 presidential election?

Example 1 of Russian Trolls at Work …

Here’s the big headline from one of the 18 ads the RussiaGate Committee saw:

“Press like to help Jesus win!”

Question: How many people did this ad flip into the Trump column?

One can actually make a guess because Facebook provided the number of “clicks” this ad generated. It generated 14 clicks.

According to Business Insider, the trolls spent 64 rubles with Facebook to place this ad, which, in U.S. dollars, is a little more than a dollar.

(According to a handy ruble-to-dollar exchange rate link I found on the Internet, one dollar in 2017 = 58.3 rubles. Said differently, one ruble equalled about 1.5 cents.)

But even that one-dollar investment was a waste of money because 11 of the people who clicked on the ad lived in a state that was never going to flip from one candidate to the other (and we don’t even know if all 14 people who clicked on the Jesus ad would have shown up to vote).

The math is preposterous

This anecdote brings me to another important point about how the Russian trolls used Facebook to swing the 2016 election to Trump. Per my math, they did it with an investment of probably less than $100,000, certainly less than $1 million. (For context, one 30-second commercial in the Super Bowl cost $7 million.)

The Washington Post article doesn’t tell us how much the trolls spent with Facebook, but I can tally the figure from the 18 ads cited in the Business Insider story.

The biggest spend was 93,000 rubles (which is about $1,200 U.S. dollars). About half of the ad-buys ranged from 6 to 1,000 rubles (or less than $10 to $20).

From these 18 cited ads (one assumes, the worst-of-the-worst of the troll ads), the Trolls spent less than $3,000.

The only ad I saw that seems to be germane to the presidential race was one that depicted Hillary primarily opponent Bernie Sanders with the headline:

Bernie Sanders: Clinton Foundation is a “Problem.”

My comment: Here, the Russian trolls were not spreading disinformation because the Clinton Foundation should have been viewed by voters as a “problem.” Bernie Sanders must have thought it was. One hundred million Americans probably think/thought the same thing.

Note: It cost the Russian trolls 500 rubles ($6.50) to publish this ad on Facebook. (I guess it was okay for Bernie Sanders to place an ad saying this, but not the Russian trolls).

***

Another heinous Russia Troll ad featured the headline: “Don’t Mess with the Texas Border Control.”

This ad seems to focus on issues of interest to Texas citizens, which is something a political operative might want to do. My only comment is there was no way in heck Hillary Clinton was going to win the state of Texas, so why did the trolls even bother wasting 500 rubles on this ad?

One what-about-ism …

I also want to point out something the RussiaGate Committee didn’t point out. The Committee’s big gripe is that the Russian trolls were trying to “manipulate opinion” of American citizens. To be fair and balanced, one Committee member should have at least pointed out that people who work for the American government have been trying to influence public opinion in probably 100 nations for probably 70 years.

And our government has been spending a lot more than 200,000 rubles to fund these opinion-manipulation projects. In fact, the U.S. government must have orchestrated a half dozen successful coups around the world just in my lifetime. What’s the going rate for a successful coup?

Also, I can’t help but wonder if every message American taxpayers paid to influence voters in other countries was really 100-percent truthful? That is, if our government can publish a little borderline disinformation in other nations, why can’t another government do the same thing in our country?

And, again, the ads I looked at all seemed like they were building on messages or themes that were shared by large swaths of the American population. That is, the Russian trolls were simply plagiarizing the messages of 500 other domestic groups. Every ad the trolls placed had been voiced by millions of citizens (back in the days when Facebook users could say what they wanted about politics).

Conclusion …

Again, I know The Washington Post and Cong. Schiff don’t agree with me, but the Russian trolls are not the election-rigging savants they’ve been made out to be.

In fact, I think the number of American voters who changed their vote from Hillary to Trump because of Russian troll Facebook ads is probably about the same as the number of healthy children who really died from Covid - maybe 10 or so people … And 10 votes is not enough to flip a presidential election.

The disinformation that matters isn’t coming from a group of trolls in some basement in Russia.