BYRON YORK: 10 reasons to stay calm about those Russia Facebook ads.
1) Of the group of 3,000 ads turned over to Congress by Facebook, a majority of the impressions came after the election, not before. Indeed, in a news release Monday, Facebook said 56 percent of the ads’ impressions came after the 2016 vote.
2) Twenty-five percent of the ads were never seen by anybody. (Facebook also revealed that Monday.)
3) Most of the ads, which Facebook estimates were seen by a total of 10 million people in the United States, never mentioned the election or any candidate. “The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting or a particular candidate,” Facebook said in a Sept. 6 news release.
4) A relatively small number of the ads — again, about 25 percent — were geographically targeted. (Facebook also revealed that on September 6.)
5) The ads that were geographically targeted were all over the map. “Of those that were targeted, numerous other locales besides Michigan and Wisconsin, including non-battleground states like Texas, were targeted,” the government official familiar with the ads said, via email.
6) Very few ads specifically targeted Wisconsin or Michigan. “Of the hundreds of pre-election ads with one or more impressions, less than a dozen ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin combined,” the official said.
7) By and large, the ads targeting Michigan and Wisconsin did not run in the general election. “Nearly all of these Michigan and Wisconsin ads ran in 2015 and also ran in other states,” the official said.
8) The Michigan and Wisconsin ads were not widely seen. “The majority of these Wisconsin and Michigan ads had less than 1,000 impressions,” the official said.
9) The Michigan and Wisconsin ads (like those everywhere else) were low-budget. “The buy for the majority of these Michigan and Wisconsin ads (paid in rubles) was equivalent to approximately $10,” the official said.
10) The ads just weren’t very good. The language used in some of the ads “clearly shows the ad writer was not a native English speaker,” the official said. In addition, the set of ads turned over by Facebook also contained “clickbait-type ads that had nothing to do with politics.” And in general, the official’s view is that the ads simply were not terribly sophisticated, contrary to how they have been portrayed.
The eleventh reason: Russia wants us upset about these ads, in order to discredit the result of the election and to turn Americans against one another. In this effort, the Kremlin is being aided and abetted by high-level members of the Democratic Party.