Under constant attack from the Parkland students and pro-gun law advocates, the NRA aggressively increases its advertising.Update!

Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune:  

Immediately after the horror of the February 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the National Rifle Association halted all of its digital advertising, including ads on YouTube, banner ads on websites, and Facebook ads. 

Within four days, though, the NRA had returned in force, increasing its advertising aggressively on Facebook, and spending so widely and indiscriminately that its ads on YouTube showed up on videos for school-age kids. According to a previously unpublished review by Pathmatics, a company that scrapes data from online ads, the NRA spent more than six times as much on digital ads after the Parkland shooting than it did in the weeks before it. Its average daily spending in the 24 days before Parkland was $11,300, according to Pathmatics. In the 24 days after its silent period, that average jumped to $47,300.

Nearly all of the increase was on social media, primarily Facebook, where the NRA took its spending from an average of $4,400 a day in the three weeks prior to Parkland to $34,000 a day in the three weeks after the silence. Florida was heavily targeted in the post-tragedy ad burst. The state went from ninth most targeted in January to third between mid-February and mid-March. 

The NRA didn’t change its message – the ads were the same as before the shooting. The message was just pushed much harder. For the past year, the NRA had been ranked No. 706 by Pathmatics on its list of top YouTube video advertisers. In the period since Feb. 21, the gun-rights group jumped into the top 100 at No. 92.

The NRA did not stop with simple pro-gun advertisements, they also sent their spokespeople and Right Wing supporters out to attack the Parkland students.

In fact Laura Ingraham even went so far as to attack one of the student's grade point average.

David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable given acceptance rates.) https://t.co/wflA4hWHXY

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 28, 2018

Wait, seriously?

That seems like a rather pathetic attempt to undermine a teenager's credibility.

Hogg's sister, displaying far more maturity than Ingraham, responded with this:

How low are your ratings @IngrahamAngle that you have to start attacking my brother’s grades to get attention? If you ask me, he is more articulate than you and has far better character. Man, that’s real low even for you. Coming from a 14 year old, please grow up. #NeverAgain https://t.co/CgUVeGRfxP

— Lauren Hogg (@lauren_hoggs) March 28, 2018

For his part social media savvy David Hogg simply tweeted this:

Soooo @IngrahamAngle what are your biggest advertisers ... Asking for a friend. #BoycottIngramAdverts

— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) March 29, 2018

And yes that has started a boycott.

Now you might think that NRA members would be embarrassed by all of this and perhaps be less supportive, but you would be incorrect.

Courtesy of the New York Post: 

Contributions to the National Rifle Association’s political action committee tripled in February amid public attacks against the organization following the Feb. 14 high school shooting in Parkland, Fla. 

Supporters of the Second Amendment donated about $779,000 in February to the NRA’s political arm, the Political Victory Fund, according to recent Federal Election Commission (FEC) data. 

The figure marked a more than threefold increase compared to January, when the PAC received nearly $250,000 in donations, and was the fund’s second-best month over the last year.

Well I guess if you define your manhood by the size of the metal penis extender you have strapped to your body it is a little hard to shame you about anything.

P.S. Okay just like an hour after I wrote this post Laura Ingraham caved under pressure and apologized to David Hogg on Twitter.

Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA —incl. @DavidHogg111. On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland. For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David...(1/2)

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 29, 2018

Really? If you think he should be proud of a 4.2 grade average than why did you say that nasty shit in the first place?

In my mind these Right Wing trolls attack these Parkland kids at their peril, because these teenagers know exactly how to use social media to deal with idiots like them.

Update: I think this belongs here.

"This kid's not scared. He's not scared of the NRA. He's not intimidated and scared by Laura Ingraham ... Half the Republican party is hiding under the table, under their bed. They're so scared ... Not these kids, though" - @SteveSchmidtSES w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/QZE5I6zmv3

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) March 29, 2018

Very well said.

How Facebook's advertising algorithm allowed the Trump campaign (And the Russians) reach far more people, for far less money.

Courtesy of Wired: 

Like many things at Facebook, the ads auction is a version of something Google built first. As on Google, Facebook has a piece of ad real estate that it’s auctioning off, and potential advertisers submit a piece of ad creative, a targeting spec for their ideal user, and a bid for what they’re willing to pay to obtain a desired response (such as a click, a like, or a comment). Rather than simply reward that ad position to the highest bidder, though, Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is. If Facebook’s model thinks your ad is 10 times more likely to engage a user than another company’s ad, then your effective bid at auction is considered 10 times higher than a company willing to pay the same dollar amount. 

A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook’s estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor. That’s why, if you’ve noticed a News Feed ad that’s pulling out all the stops (via provocative stock photography or other gimcrackery) to get you to click on it, it’s partly because the advertiser is aiming to pump up their engagement levels and increase their exposure, all without paying any more money. 

During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money. In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone’s screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating.

The article goes on to explain that it was actually more costly for the Clinton campaign to target Facebook users in urban areas, where her demographics were better, than the Trump campaign's attempt to reach voters in rural areas.

To be fair many of these same tools were also available to the Clinton campaign, however you also need to keep in mind that Facebook sent folks to the Trump campaign to specifically teach them how to better use the platform.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Fleshed out, Parscale is the man behind the Trump campaign’s digital media efforts in 2016. He was hired to create a website for $1,500 (as he explained in that “60 Minutes” interview) and then his role expanded until he was managing tens of millions of dollars intended to promote the presidential candidate online. 

The point of the interview was, in part, to serve as a profile of Parscale but, more broadly, to explain the primary way in which those millions were spent. Per Parscale’s accounting, that was largely on Facebook advertising. Trump’s team advertised on other platforms, too, but “Facebook was the 500-pound gorilla, 80 percent of the budget kind of thing,” Parscale said. 

He also revealed that Facebook even sent staff — whose political persuasion had been cleared by the company — to aid in that effort, to help Parscale “know every, single secret button, click, technology [they] have,” as he said in the interview. The campaign poured money into Facebook, sending thousands of versions of tweaked ads to maximize response. Then it won the presidency by a margin narrow enough that Parscale (and Facebook) can justifiably take credit.

That's right Facebook worked hand in orange tinted hand to help the Trump campaign beat Hillary Clinton.

 And that is without even taking into consideration how they allowed the Russians to weaponize their site to attack Clinton voters and spread misinformation to Trump supporters.

So when they say that Facebook was a neutral participant, or that they are simply a social gathering place with no agenda, they are full of shit. 

The Koch brothers are planning to throw massive amounts of money at the 2018 midterms.

Courtesy of Axios:

The Koch network will spend 60% more on the 2018 cycle than it did on the 2016 presidential election, the largest midterm investment it's ever had, Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity told reporters Saturday. This includes up to $20 million on “communicating the benefits of tax reform," along with other policy and politics efforts. The network spent about $250 million on policy and politics in the 2016 cycle.

I would REALLY like to say this won't work because Americans are too smart to be manipulated by money and advertising, but we all now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that that is simply not true. 

This most certainly WILL have an effect, so it is up to all of us to focus on strong grassroots organizing and a huge get out the vote campaign.

Right now these elections are ours to lose.

Let's not give these assholes the satisfaction.

Facebook is now going to let you find out if you were manipulated by Russian propaganda. Spoiler alert: You probably were.

Courtesy of Bloomberg:  

Facebook Inc. will show people which Russian propaganda pages or accounts they’ve followed and liked on the social network, responding to a request from Congress to address manipulation and meddling during the 2016 presidential election.

The tool will appear by the end of the year in Facebook’s online support center, the company said in a blog post Wednesday. It will answer the user question, “How can I see if I’ve liked or followed a Facebook page or Instagram account created by the Internet Research Agency?” That’s the Russian firm that created thousands of incendiary posts from fake accounts posing as U.S. citizens. People will see a list of the accounts they followed, if any, from January 2015 through August 2017.

It’s Facebook’s most direct effort to explain to users how they may have been affected by the IRA’s postings, which reached an estimated 150 million people and stirred up controversy over gun rights, immigration, race relations and religion in the U.S., sometimes prompting real-world protests on both sides of a debate. 

“It is important that people understand how foreign actors tried to sow division and mistrust using Facebook before and after the 2016 US election,” the company said in the post.

I know my headline seems a little assholey, but even if you did not participate on Facebook, friends and family members who you spoke to very likely did.  

So while they were expressing their political point of view to you, it is quite likely, whether they were conservatives or liberals, that the Russians helped to influence it just a little.

I told you about that one friend at the gym who said that he saw a photo of Hillary Clinton standing among dead bodies that convinced him she was a war monger.

I never saw such a picture, and believe me I looked for it, but it still bothered me. It manipulated my emotions to some degree.

In the end if you did not vote for Hillary Clinton, which seems to have been the absolute focus of this propaganda, then it is more than likely that you were at least subliminally influenced by something the Russians sent out on social media.

One third of Americans received Russian backed content on their Facebook feed during the 2016 election cycle.

Courtesy of NBC News: 

An estimated 126 million Americans, roughly one-third of the nation’s population, received Russian-backed content on Facebook during the 2016 campaign, according to prepared testimony the company submitted Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee and obtained by NBC News. 

Underscoring how widely content on the social media platform can spread, 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.”

The testimony by Facebook's general counsel, Colin Stretch, was submitted to the Judiciary Committee ahead of a hearing on Tuesday with executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter. The hearing is part of the congressional inquiry into Russia’s use of these platforms to try to influence last year’s U.S. presidential election.

Facebook was not the only social media platform to provide stunning evidence of Russia's interference during the 2016 campaigns.

Courtesy of the New York Times:

Twitter, in its prepared remarks, said it had discovered more than 2,700 accounts on its service that were linked to the Internet Research Agency between September 2016 and November 2016. Those accounts, which Twitter has suspended, posted roughly 131,000 tweets over that period. 

Outside of the activity of the Internet Research Agency, Twitter identified more than 36,000 automated accounts that posted 1.4 million election-related tweets linked to Russia over that three-month period. The tweets received approximately 288 million views, according to the company’s remarks.

I think we can do away with the talking point that Russia only paid about $150,000 to influence our election. They clearly paid significantly more than that.

This was a very large, and very coordinated effort to do three things.

Divide Americans and get them fighting one another, defeat Hillary Clinton, and help to elect Donald Trump.

And to their credit they manage to accomplish all three.

Twitter announces that it will now clearly identify tweets supporting candidates and utilize stronger penalties for those who misuse the social media platform.

Courtesy of CNBC: 

As political pressure mounts on social media companies to say where ads are coming from, Twitter will reveal more information about political advertising on its platform. 

Twitter said in a blog post on Tuesday it would clearly label political electioneering ads, which the Federal Election Commission (FEC) defines as an ad used to promote a specific candidate for elected office or affiliated party posted within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election. Electioneering ads can also include any ad clearly promoting a political candidate at any time. 

The ads will have some sort of visual marker, likely a purple dot next to the user handle, and a purple box with the text "Promoted by" and the name of the sponsor.

In addition, the company will limit which criteria can be used to target people and will introduce a "stronger" penalty on those who do not abide by the new rules. The company did not say what the tougher standards or penalties will be.

I am not really sure how much this will help, since what really needs to happen is that Twitter identify and purge fake accounts and bots that simply promote misinformation to mislead the public.

However I guess we can view this as a good first step, and at least they are willing to do something.

Still it really needs to be up to the individual user to be vigilant and to do the legwork to research things they see on Twitter and make sure it is accurate.

Donald Trump minimizes the impact that the Russian ads had in helping him to win, and claims that Facebook was really supporting Hillary Clinton.

Keep hearing about "tiny" amount of money spent on Facebook ads. What about the billions of dollars of Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC & CBS?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2017

Crooked Hillary Clinton spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on Presidential Election than I did. Facebook was on her side, not mine!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 21, 2017

Yeah how can people say that the Russian attempts to undermine our democracy was such a big deal when they spent such a piddly amount of money?

After all Clinton spent a lot more money using actual legal contributions, so wasn't she also cheating?

P.S. It should be noted that Russians not only spent money on Facebook, but also on Twitter and other social media outlets, as well as to finance rallies and protests in America in the lead up to the election.

We actually do not yet know exactly how much they spent, but it has to be in the millions of dollars.

The question to ask is "What did they hope to buy with all that money?"

John McCain first Republican to sign onto Democratic bill to make Facebook ads more transparent.

Courtesy of Politico:

Sen. John McCain has become the first Republican to sign on to a draft bill from Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner that would increase the transparency of political advertisements on social media platforms like Facebook. 

The move, announced Wednesday, marks a win for the bill's Democratic authors, who have been working for weeks to secure GOP support. 

The proposed legislation, the Honest Ads Act, is an offshoot of the investigations into Russia's use of Facebook, Twitter and Google to influence the 2016 election. It would create federal disclosure requirements for political ads sold online — including who paid for them — so they are "covered by the same rules as ads sold on TV, radio, and satellite," according to a news release. 

"This is the first substantive bipartisan piece of legislation that’s trying to — with a very light touch, because we don’t want to slow down innovation, or restrict free speech or people’s access to the internet — to deal with the problem that we saw in 2016 in terms of foreign interference in our electoral process," Warner told reporters. 

McCain said he backed the bill “for the same reason I have been for transparency in campaign finance reform for the last 25 years." He said he didn't know if other Republicans would get on board or if GOP leadership supports the proposal.

There have been some reports that John McCain wants his final act on earth to be to sabotage Donald Trump's presidency as much as possible. 

That may well be, and it would be completely understandable given how Trump has treated McCain in the past, however it could also simply be that McCain is getting back in touch with his long dormant patriotism and wants to protect his country from future manipulations by adversarial nations determined to undermine our democracy.

Facebook "corrects bug" which scrubs data from the internet that allowed investigators to learn ads bought by the Russians reached far more Americans than previously reported by the company.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research last week showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well. 

Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything — thousands of Facebook posts and the related data — that had made the work possible. Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis he had done just days earlier.

“This is public interest data,” Albright said Wednesday, expressing frustration that such a rich trove of information had disappeared — or at least moved somewhere the public can’t see it. “This data allowed us to at least reconstruct some of the pieces of the puzzle. Not everything, but it allowed us to make sense of some of this thing.” 

Facebook does not dispute it removed the posts, but it offers a different explanation of what happened. The company says it has merely corrected a “bug” that allowed Albright, who is research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, to access information he never should have been able to find in the first place. That bug, Facebook says, has now been squashed on a social media analytics tool called CrowdTangle, which Facebook bought last year.

CrowdTangle had allowed advertisers to view the metrics concerning the reach of their ads.

Now that Facebook has "fixed" it viewing that information is no longer possible.

I think it is now time to stop viewing Facebook as a benign social media platform who were simply used to help an adversarial foreign government hijack an election. 

It appears now that they have revealed their true nature.

According to Facebook as many as ten million people saw those Russia linked ads.

Courtesy of Time Magazine: 

Facebook said that the 3,000 Russia-linked advertisements it turned over to congressional investigators on Monday were seen on the social network by an estimated 10 million people in the United States. 

The social media company said 44% of the ads were seen before the 2016 presidential election, and 56% of the ads were seen after the election. 

Facebook turned over the ads this week in the midst of public scrutiny over its role in spreading "fake news" stories that critics say might have influenced the outcome of the election. Russia created fake accounts on Facebook and bought ads with the goal of spreading false stories. And last month, Facebook said nearly 500 accounts that originated in Russia purchased $100,000 worth of Facebook ads during the 2016 election.

Well that's disturbing.

And what is more disturbing is that Facebook just handed them the tools to pull it off.

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, say people familiar with the investigation into foreign meddling in the U.S. election. 

The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online. The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by U.S. political activists. 

The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, say people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details from an ongoing investigation.

We can blame Facebook for their part in this, that is fair, but we also have to recognize that none of this would have been possible if the American people had not proven to be so susceptible to manipulation.

Now I know from experience that a number of you will say that this is the reason you don't go on Facebook, or use other types of social media, but that misses the point of all this.

It does not solve one single problem that you yourself don't use Facebook, because you are only one person and in the grand scheme of things your choice matters not at all.

The real problem is that multiple millions of people DO use Facebook, and THEY either need to be better educated or Facebook needs to protect them from manipulation.

That second one will simply never happen, because our entire capitalist way of life depends on the ability to manipulate people into buying certain products, adopting new technologies, and trying to live a lifestyle that advertisers convince them is more desirable than the one they are already living.

So that means we are left attempting to educate those who are likely targets of the kind of manipulation that puts people like Donald Trump and Sarah Palin into office.

And that my friends does NOT mean abandoning Facebook. It means sharing factual, informative articles on all social media platforms in an attempt to offset the fake news that is already much too readily available.

Keep in mind that if you are not part of the solution, then you remain part of the problem.

Ten days after the election President Obama warned Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook's extensive involvement.

Hey you little shit, you just helped to send a White Nationalist to the White House.

Courtesy of WaPo:  

Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call. 

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more. 

Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.

Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy remedy, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation. 

This was on November 19th, but sadly it took Facebook all of this time to finally accept how the Russians used their platform to spread fake news and conspiracy theories, and negatively impact the outcome of this last election.

Now Zuckerberg is handing over more than 3,000 Russian linked ads to investigators, but why did it take them so long to admit their role in the 2016 outcome?

We are also learning today that Steve Bannon attempted to insert his own mole into the Facebook organization just days before he took over Trump's White House.

Courtesy of Buzzfeed: 

Steve Bannon plotted to plant a mole inside Facebook, according to emails sent days before the Breitbart boss took over Donald Trump’s campaign and obtained by BuzzFeed News. 

The email exchange with a conservative Washington operative reveals the importance that the giant tech platform — now reeling from its role in the 2016 election — held for one of the campaign’s central figures. And it also shows the lengths to which the brawling new American right is willing to go to keep tabs on and gain leverage over the Silicon Valley giants it used to help elect Trump — but whose executives it also sees as part of the globalist enemy. 

The idea to infiltrate Facebook came to Bannon from Chris Gacek, a former congressional staffer who is now an official at the Family Research Council, which lobbies against abortion and many LGBT rights.

You know that kind of makes you wonder if there are not more conservative, or perhaps even Russian, moles inside Facebook?

Because you know, that would help to explain a few things.

Facebook has handed over detailed records of the Russian ad buys to Robert Mueller. Far more info than they gave to Congress.Update!

Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: 

Facebook Inc. has handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller detailed records about the Russian ad purchases on its platform that go beyond what it shared with Congress last week, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The information Facebook shared with Mr. Mueller included copies of the ads and details about the accounts that bought them and the targeting criteria they used, the people familiar with the matter said. Facebook policy dictates that it would only turn over “the stored contents of any account,” including messages and location information, in response to a search warrant, some of them said. 

A search warrant from Mr. Mueller would mean the special counsel now has a powerful tool in his arsenal to probe the details of how social media was used as part of a campaign of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. Facebook hasn’t shared the same information with Congress in part because of concerns about disrupting the Mueller probe, and possibly running afoul of U.S. privacy laws, people familiar with the matter said.

This is interesting because not only does it mean that Muller's team might be able to follow the money to identify exactly who these Russian ad buyers might be, but also how they are connected to Vladimir Putin.

They might also be able to use the information to determine who these ads targeted, and how they were spread across the social media landscape.

And personally I don't blame Facebook for holding back from Congress. I simply do not trust the Republicans in charge of that investigation.

Update: I was notified of this rather interesting Twitter feed from a former federal prosecutor explaining why this story is so significant.

1/ Last night, the @WSJ reported that Mueller obtained info from Facebook via search warrant: https://t.co/zYqf1LCqaW

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) September 16, 2017

The case that he lays out shows that Mueller quite likely has the evidence needed to charge members of Trump's campaign with a very serious crime, and possibly even Trump himself.

So, do you want to see some of those batshit crazy ads the Russians bought on Facebook. You know you do, don't even try to deny it.

Courtesy of The Daily Beast:

That community, called SecuredBorders, positioned itself as the work of conservative Americans concerned about U.S. border security. In truth, according to (Russian news outlet.) RBC, it was operated by a notorious St. Petersburg troll factory called Internet Research Agency, which is financed by “a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence,” according to a public report by U.S. intelligence agencies. 

Facebook finally closed down the page last month in its belated purge of Russian propaganda. By then SecuredBorders had 133,000 followers. 

So far, Facebook is refusing to release any of the posts and ads from Russia’s campaign, opting instead for this terse description: “The ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum—touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.” 

That sanitary language doesn’t do justice to the actual content. The Daily Beast scoured search engine caches and found remains from the now-shuttered SecuredBorders page, just one of Russia’s propaganda communities, including dozens of their posts and graphics.

Here are a few more examples of what these Russian trolls vomited all over Facebook.

I think a new badge of honor should go to those of us who did not see any of this one their Facebook feed, because that means you are not burdened with batshit crazy, potentially racist, friends or family.

However before we pat ourselves on the back too hard, here are some that DID pop up on Facebook for many of us.

I am not sure about the last two but I definitely saw that first one on my Facebook feed more than once.

Remember the Russians did not only target the conservatives, xenophobes, and racists, they also targeted the progressives.

And they will do so again.

Unable to defeat Obamacare in the Senate Donald Trump is just going to starve it to death instead.

Courtesy of Vox:

The Trump administration has let funding for Obamacare’s $63 million in-person outreach program lapse, leading to layoffs and confusion among nonprofits that enroll vulnerable populations in coverage. 

“I have delivered 10 layoff notices to staff members,” says Donna Friedsam, director of Covering Wisconsin. “We don’t have a funding flow anymore.” 

The government had previously announced it would cut the budget for Obamacare’s navigator program by 41 percent. But right now, the program has no funding at all. Last year’s grants ran out on September 1, and the administration still has not awarded next year’s money. 

The sudden funding halt comes at a critical time for the Affordable Care Act. Navigator groups were just beginning to ramp up outreach for the health law’s open enrollment period, which begins November 1. Now, some have done an about-face: They’ve canceled outreach work and appointments with potential enrollees because they have no budget to cover those costs. 

These groups often work with the most vulnerable populations enrolled under the Affordable Care Act. One-third of those who seek in-person help signing up for coverage do not have internet at home, and one in 10 do not speak English. 

You have to add this latest tactic to the ones already in underway to undermine the Affordable Care Act, such as weakening enforcement of the individual mandate, imposing employment requirements for Medicaid recipients, and refuse to do any advertising to bring new clients into the system.

Essentially Trump is working to kill the program through neglect.

However all this really does is to reinforce the need for the Medicare for all program that is now receiving so much support among Democrats.

That is why we need to turn out in huge numbers in 2018 and get as many new Democratic Senators and House members as possible.

There has rarely been a more important reason to get out the vote as we have right now, so if we cannot get our shit together in this midterm than we have nobody to blame for what happens next except for ourselves. 

Facebook sold $100,000 worth of ad space to a Russian troll farm in 2015 and 2016 so that they could influence our elections. Isn't Facebook great?

Courtesy of WaPo: 

Representatives of Facebook told congressional investigators Wednesday that the social network has discovered that it sold ads during the U.S. presidential campaign to a shadowy Russian company seeking to target voters, according to several people familiar with the company’s findings. 

Facebook officials reported that they traced the ad sales, totaling $100,000, to a Russian “troll farm” with a history of pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda, these people said. 

A small portion of the ads, which began in the summer of 2015, directly named Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, the people said, although they declined to say which candidate the ads favored. 

Most of the ads, according to a blog post published late Wednesday by Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, “appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights.”

Last night Rachel Maddow pointed out that Facebook officials have been denying that this took place for months, so the fact that NOW they are coming clean is likely only the result of the ongoing investigations.

Speaking of investigations apparently Facebook has delivered the information about these ads and who purchased them to the Mueller team: 

Facebook has turned over all information about ads "likely" purchased by Russian operatives to special counsel Robert Mueller, according to a report. 

A source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Wednesday that the social media giant had sent the former FBI director data including copies of the ads and the identity of the buyers. That report followed news that an internal Facebook investigation found it is agents of the Kremlin may have spent $100,000 on ads with "divisive messages" between June 2015 and May 2017.

Well gee it's nice to see Facebook taking responsibility after it is too late to help to help save our democracy.

Let me state this emphatically once again, the ONLY reason one should have a Facebook account is to keep touch with families members and to see which one of your high school friends is now on their third or fourth marriage.

It should NEVER be used to stay informed about ANYTHING important.


. 

Pre-purchased conservative TV ads showed up celebrating the repeal of Obamacare. Only problem, the Republicans failed to make that happen.

Courtesy of NPR: 

Some basketball viewers on Friday night were subjected to television commercials that were guilty of peddling some alternative facts. 

That's because in some markets with conservative-leaning districts, commercials aired praising some Republican House members for their efforts in repealing the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare. 

The problem of course is that repeal effort, which many thought would be a slam dunk, was abandoned because the House Republicans didn't have enough support from within their own ranks.

In the generic ads, the American Action Network, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, urged viewers to call their member of Congress to thank them for keeping their "promise and replacing the Affordable Care Act with a better health care you deserve."

The premature ad buy was supposed to coincide with the long-awaited victory lap Washington Republicans campaigned on – that once they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, Obamacare would be tossed out.

However as we know that vote never took place because Paul Ryan could not get the Freedom Caucus to play ball and so they ended up pulling the bill.

I know that it is considered bad form to flaunt a victory in your opponent's face, but I have to say that this victory is especially delicious.

And the fact that the conservatives were cocky enough to have these ads waiting in the wings just makes it more so.

As does this:

Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 26, 2017

Yep, delicious. 

Google to revamp advertising policies after boycott over ads placed on controversial You Tube videos.

Courtesy of The Guardian: 

Google has promised a wide-ranging overhaul of its advertising policies in response to a growing boycott of the company’s platforms from leading brands and advertisers including the UK government, Marks & Spencer and McDonald’s. 

In a blogpost published on Monday night, Philipp Schindler, the company’s chief business officer, wrote: “We have strict policies that define where Google ads should appear, and in the vast majority of cases, our policies and tools work as intended. But at times we don’t get it right. 

“Recently, we had a number of cases where brands’ ads appeared on content that was not aligned with their values. For this, we deeply apologise.” 

Many of the companies involved in the boycott had discovered that their advertising spend was being used to place banner adverts over YouTube videos from groups such as Britain First, indirectly funding extremists and damaging the prestige of their brands. 

In response, Schindler has promised a three-tier overhaul of Google’s advertising policies, both on YouTube and on the company’s wider ad products.

My favorite part of this article is that it mentions Breitbart specifically as being the source of fake news and racism.

Hopefully with Google and Facebook now taking ownership of their part in disseminating disinformation and hatred we will soon see a dramatic change in the ability of certain sites to spread racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

And wouldn't that be nice?

John Oliver comes up with perfect way to troll, and educate, Donald Trump.

Courtesy of NBC News: 

Comedian John Oliver's politically-charged HBO series "Last Week Tonight" returned to the airwaves for the first time this year on Sunday night — and the show seems to have discovered a creative new way to troll President Donald Trump.

On the show, Oliver highlighted just how much the president appears to absorb and parrot information he gets from early morning cable news broadcasts, and other, even less reliable sources. 

So Oliver and his staff came up with a potential way to capture the president's attention (since, the host conceded, Trump doesn't watch "Last Week Tonight," which has been on hiatus since the Sunday after the election). 

They bought ads, in the style and tone of medical catheter commercials which frequently air on networks like Fox News, meant to "educate" the president on crucial issues like the nuclear triad.

"And that little fellow there is what we call the clitoris."

Damn did I miss this show!

And this idea of the ads is perfect, because not only do we KNOW for a fact that Trump will see them, but he might actually learn something which might help to keep us all safe.

Another advertiser bails on Breitbart due to hate speech.

Courtesy of Bloomberg:

Kellogg Co. is pulling its ads from the website Breitbart News, the right-wing news organization whose former chairman Steve Bannon was tapped as a top adviser to President-elect Donald Trump. 

Brands that advertise on Breitbart have drawn flak in recent weeks, with activists saying the website espouses racist and anti-Semitic views. A screen shot showing an advertisement for Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats was part of an online campaign to get marketers to abandon the site.

“We regularly work with our media-buying partners to ensure our ads do not appear on sites that aren’t aligned with our values as a company,” said Kris Charles, a spokeswoman for Kellogg, which also makes Frosted Flakes and Special K cereal. “We recently reviewed the list of sites where our ads can be placed and decided to discontinue advertising on Breitbart.com. We are working to remove our ads from that site.”

You may remember that Breitbart also lost a major source of revenue when a leading ad exchange blacklisted them for being a home for racism, antisemitism, and misogyny.

But don't you worry about ole Breitbart, I understand that white sheet distributors and companies who sell do-it-yourself flaming crosses are beating down the door to buy ad space.

By the way in response to this Breitbart is calling for a boycott of Kellogg's products.

Do racists even eat Frosted Flakes?

The new Hillary Clinton ad featuring Khizr Khan is brutal!

Courtesy of CNN:

An emotional Khizr Khan asks Donald Trump in a new Clinton campaign ad whether his son, a US solider who was killed in Iraq in 2004, would "have a place in your America?" 

 The ad is part of Clinton's closing message, one that her top aides hope will be uplifting and hopeful, offering an implicit contrast to the combativeness that the Trump campaign has turned to in recent weeks. 

Khan, who was thrust into the national spotlight after he excoriated Trump in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, is seen at his home in the ad, looking at keepsakes from his son, Army Capt. Humayun Khan's, life. 

"In 2004, my son was stationed in Iraq. He saw a suicide bomber approaching his camp. My son moved forward to stop the bomber when the bomb exploded. He saved everyone in his unit. Only one American soldier died," Khan says as video shows the father holding the flag that was draped over his son's casket.

That does not only hit you in the feels. It takes those feels and stomps them into a bloody mud hole. 

You know if this election were solely based on the effectiveness of advertisements Hillary Clinton would be leading Trump by double digits. 

Oh wait......