Culture 3500 "Stealth Russian Ads on Facebook" published

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
TLDR: The "Stealth Russian Ads" were released on May 10 in a shitty way. This post covers someone that went through all the 3500 individual PDFs and made it much easier to browse.

"[Note: A significant percentage of the 3,500 ads are humorous memes with no discernible political message.]"

On May 10, 2018, the Democrat minority of the House Intelligence Committee released over 3,500 ads that Russian operatives placed on Facebook from June 2015 to August 2017. (A small number ran on Instagram, which is owned by FB.) At first, Facebook refused to hand over these ads that were meant to inflame social and political divisions and influence the 2016 presidential election. Eventually, the company relented and gave them to Congress, but still refused to let the public see them.

While it’s great that the committee posted all of these ads, they did it in a way that makes it impossible to casually view this trove of propaganda. The ads were posted in eleven large zip files (four are well over a gigabyte each). Inside these bulky zip files, each ad (and its metadata) is a separate PDF. That’s more than 3,500 files.
Click to expand...

The 3,500+ ads with metadata: June-Dec 2015 /// 2016 /// Jan-Aug 2017

http://altgov2.org/russian-fb-ads/

upload_2018-5-28_11-1-29.png

upload_2018-5-28_11-6-47.png

upload_2018-5-28_11-0-5.png

upload_2018-5-28_11-5-5.png

upload_2018-5-28_11-1-16.png
 
Click to expand...
Let it fucking go, Jesus Christ. Hillary was just that bad of a candidate, get over it.
 
Unseemly and Feral said:
How is the 2nd one even political? It looks like something from the Social Media Indian thread.

The third one is just about Jenner and the Wichita one looks like it tried to be some sort of meme with the big text.
Click to expand...
This is what all of the “muh russia!” shit turns out to be. Either split between both candidates, or nonpolitical.

Honestly the mixture looks more like a phishing scam, a “click here to support this!” Which ends up with your computer infested with ransomware, rather than anything political.
 
neverendingmidi said:
This is what all of the “muh russia!” shit turns out to be. Either split between both candidates, or nonpolitical.

Honestly the mixture looks more like a phishing scam, a “click here to support this!” Which ends up with your computer infested with ransomware, rather than anything political.
Click to expand...

If you look at the metadata of each advertisement you can see that they had specific "targets". I assume the "meme accounts" were in place because memes are a lot easier to build an audience with than boring political shit. Once the meme page gets popular then you only need to slip in occasional slightly-political stuff.

Given that they apparently targeted "everything" I think they probably recognized niche audiences and developed them all to create autism rather than making pointed political statements. All you have to do is guide the narrative a bit, make it noisy and the rest of the work is probably done elsewhere.

Coconut Gun said:
Let it fucking go, Jesus Christ. Hillary was just that bad of a candidate, get over it.
Click to expand...

I made the thread because its an interesting topic to be able to look at the idea of what essentially amounts to being modern propaganda. Being able to view all the ads + metadata is more interesting than the actual politics for me and I think there are probably better place to discuss that angle of it.
 
neger psykolog said:
I made the thread because its an interesting topic to be able to look at the idea of what essentially amounts to being modern propaganda. Being able to view all the ads + metadata is more interesting than the actual politics for me and I think there are probably better place to discuss that angle of it.
Click to expand...
Lol, I meant that post towards the people who blame Russia for everything, not you. Probably should have been more clear.
 
So, two years of Russia fear-mongering, and this is all you've got? "Ads" as transparently phony as the fill-in-the-blank-by-IP bots that generate those annoying "See how this tiny (your town) company is disrupting the billion-dollar energy business!" or "Hot singles near (your town) want to meet you!" banners on unpoliced websites?

I think it says more you fell for them than the intent of whoever is behind them.

Unless making you look bonkers two years down the line when you freak over third-rate tryhard meme garbage was the goal.

If so, that's some impressive 5D chess, but Russians are good at chess.
 
Shit you're telling me tumblr has been sharing a Russian Nazi alt-right white supremacist racist homophobic islamaphobic Russian meme about spaghettios this entire time? Call those hoes out.
 
So are these things random Russian people did, or do they have some tangible connection with political entities in Russia?
 
Clearly there was a Russian force behind this. Just like there was with people disliking The Last Jedi.
 
3500 "Stealth Russian ads on facebook"

versus

3500 "Stilted, shitty political ads taken out by a foreign govt so broke they could only afford 3.5k shitty facebook ads"

What a fucking joke.
 
sperginity said:
So are these things random Russian people did, or do they have some tangible connection with political entities in Russia?
Click to expand...
According to the MSM, there are "troll farms" located in St. Petersburg and the Balkans where the Russian government pays freelancers by the post to Google Translate shitty memes and get them up on Facebook.
 
millais said:
According to the MSM, there are "troll farms" located in St. Petersburg and the Balkans where the Russian government pays freelancers by the post to Google Translate shitty memes and get them up on Facebook.
Click to expand...
Is there any way for regular people to verify that?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom