Research Suggests Reach of Russian Facebook Posts Much Larger Than Ads Alone (Oct 6, 2017)
Facebook still hasn’t shared all of the details of the ads bought by Russian agents on Facebook over the last few years with Congress, and hasn’t really shared any of the details with the general public. However, some of the details have emerged regardless, and one researcher has used that information to do some analysis of the reach of some of the posts on the accounts controlled by entities tied to the Kremlin. What he found is that the organic reach of those posts has been enormous, much larger than the numbers reached by the ads themselves alone as reported by Facebook, suggesting that Facebook is using the narrowest possible definitions of reach in its reporting and thereby downplaying the impact.
Until Facebook does release the full details of the Russian operations, we can’t know the true reach for sure, and this analysis is merely indicative of organic reach achieved by half a dozen of the biggest accounts we do know about. But it’s clear that the operation was both sophisticated and very effective in reaching large numbers of people, leveraging many of the same techniques used by legitimate news organizations and others on Facebook. Given that these techniques are all available to anyone who uses Facebook, the only way they could have been stopped is if there was clear evidence that the accounts behind them were “inauthentic” (to use Facebook’s terminology) way earlier in the process. And given that neither it nor the US government were actively investigating that possibility during the election, that was never likely to happen. It’s also not clear how Facebook would go about policing this kind of thing going forward.
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