Fake News about Fake News, or How do I hire those Russians?

Latest news on the Russians on Facebook brouhaha from Recode

At Facebook, roughly 126 million [or about half the voting population] users in the United States may have seen posts, stories or other content created by Russian government-backed trolls around Election Day, according to a source familiar with the company’s forthcoming testimony to Congress....

Google, which previously had not commented on its internal investigation, will break its silence: In a forthcoming blog post, the search giant confirmed that it discovered about $4,700 worth of search-and-display ads with dubious Russian ties. It also reported 18 YouTube channels associated with the Kremlin’s disinformation efforts, as well as a number of Gmail addresses that “were used to open accounts on other platforms.”

And Twitter will tell Congress that it found more than 27,000 accounts tied to a known Russian-sponsored organization called the Internet Research Agency:

There is a bit more from NBC:

Facebook says in the testimony that while some 29 million Americans directly received material from 80,000 posts by 120 fake Russian-backed pages in their own news feeds, those posts were “shared, liked and followed by people on Facebook, and, as a result, three times more people may have been exposed to a story that originated from the Russian operation

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Beforehand, Facebook had said they had found about $100,000 of Russian spend on the platform over the election.

To put these numbers into context, the Clinton campaign spent about $1.4 billion on media during this period, and that is without the free publicity from nearly every US media organ being mainly on the Democrat side. The Russian media pieces would have been swamped by this spend and volume, never mind all the rest of the pieces of media on the average social media timeline. The Trump campaign spent c $1bn itself, not on Russians.

A BBC article says Facebook estimates that:

"just one in 23,000 or so messages shared on the network were from the Russians".

That's a ratio of 23,000/1 (about 0.004%), and if you compare the ratio between the Russian spend of c $100k vs the c $2.5 bn spent by Trump & Clinton (25,000/1) then they are no more effective in getting their message transmitted than any other piece of media on average. If the Russian spend is underestimated then they are in fact quite poor at writing attractive content, unless of course the volume is also underestimated in which case it approaches this average again. .

The election was won on c 55,000 voters voting for Trump in marginal wards, of a total of c 130m voters. about 0.04% of all voters. So for the Russians to have "stolen the election" with 0.004% of all Ads, their Ads must be 10x as persuasive as all others just to be have an equal chance. Or they have to be extremely targeted. But from the above, it seems the Russians reached c 50% of the potential voting population or about 130m people , so doing the paper-napkin maths at the most optimistic (The 130m messages seen went only to the "right 50% of the 130m who actually voted) so 23,000/1 is now 11,500/1, about 0.02%, so they are 2x more targeted and thus have to be only 5x as persuasive.

So in order to believe the Russians "stole the election" you either have to believe that either:

(i) They are extraordinarily persuasive copywriters and great targeters to boot, and can do wonders on a shoestring, beating the best US Ad agencies that Democrat money could buy (they bought the best) or

(ii) Facebook (and the others) are massively underestimating both their spend and % of all messaging, but it has to be at least 10x more just to get parity on reaching those 0.04% of marginal voters who turned it for Trump, never mind persuading them

Or alternatively, you have to believe they were a pretty marginal force in the election (albeit with intent).

Incidentally, we used our data analytics technology to predict Trump's win (and a few other recent elections too) correctly, and we did it by analysing social media support for Trump vs Clinton. It was highly predictive, forecasting a neck and neck race, and we edged it to Trump based on small signals. We're pretty confident our system is fairly good at negating the obvious bots (which are the ones that operate in volume) but there's no doubt we saw some Russian Fake News in the results. However our main impression is by and large people knew which candidate they wanted (or quite frequently, which one they most certainly did not want) and shared media that agreed with them in their own filter bubbles.