Looking at key states, the total spent on ads targeting Wisconsin was $1,979, according to Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr. Ad spending in Michigan was $823. In Pennsylvania, it was $300.
That is not the stuff of rigging elections.
Of course, Facebook is more than ads; the vast majority of the material on it is so-called organic content, produced by the people who use Facebook. The company estimates that a total of around 150 million people may have been “served content” from a page associated with the Russians during the two-year period before and after the election. That means that some Russian-produced content was visible on news feeds — not that Facebook users necessarily saw it or engaged with it.
“This equals about four-thousands of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content,” Facebook executive Colin Stretch said in prepared testimony before the Senate last November.
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