Hi Peter,
Here it is. It wasn't dollars, it was Facebook posts.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2018 9:21 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] 33 Trillion More Reasons Why The New York Times
Gets it Wrong on Russia-gate
33 Trillion More Reasons Why The New York Times Gets it Wrong on Russia-gate
November 2, 2018
Further research shows The New York Times was even further off the mark in
blaming Russian social media for Trump's win, as Gareth Porter reports.
Facebook Said 80,000 Russian Posts Were
Buried in 33 Trillion Facebook Offerings Over
Two-Year Period Further Undermining NYT's Case
By Gareth Porter
Special to Consortium News
Even more damning evidence has come to light undermining The New York Times'
assertion in September that Russia used social media to steal the 2016
election for Donald Trump.
The Times' claim last month that Russian Facebook posts reached nearly as
many Americans as actually voted in the 2016 election exaggerated the
significance of those numbers by a factor of hundreds of millions, as
revealed by further evidence from Facebook's own Congressional testimony.
Th further research into an earlier Consortium News article shows that a
relatively paltry 80,000 posts from the private Russian company Internet
Research Agency (IRA) were engulfed in literally trillions of posts on
Facebook over a two-year period before and after the 2016 vote.
That was supposed to have thrown the election, according to the paper of
record. In its 10,000-word article on Sept. 20, the Times reported that 126
million out of 137 million American voters were exposed to social media
posts on Facebook from IRA that somehow had a hand in delivering Trump the
presidency.
The newspaper said: "Even by the vertiginous standards of social media, the
reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000
posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual
audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone." The paper argued that
126 million was "not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in
the 2016 presidential election."
But Consortium News, on Oct. 10, debunked that story, pointing out that
reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti failed to report several significant
caveats and disclaimers from Facebook officers themselves, whose statements
make the Times' claim that Russian election propaganda "reached" 126 million
Americans an exercise in misinformation.
It's a stretch to believe Russian FB posts threw the election.
The newspaper failed to tell their readers that Facebook account holders in
the United States had been "served" 33 trillion Facebook posts during that
same period - 413 million times more than the 80,000 posts from the Russian
company.
What Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch testified before the Senate
Judiciary Committee on October 31, 2017 is a far cry from what the Times
claims. "Our best estimate is that approximately 126,000 million people may
have been served one of these [IRA-generated] stories at some time during
the two year period," Stretch said.
Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established
fact. He said an estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at
least one story from the IRA -- not over the ten week election period, but
over 194 weeks during the two years 2015 through 2017-including a full year
after the election.
That means only an estimated 29 million FB users may have gotten at least
one story in their feed in two years. The 126 million figure is based only
on an assumption that they shared it with others, according to Stretch.
Facebook didn't even claim most of those 80,000 IRA posts were
election-related. It offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to
those 29 million people were.
In addition, Facebook's Vice President for News Feed, Adam Moseri,
acknowledged in 2016 that FB subscribers actually read only about 10
percent of the stories Facebook puts in their News Feed every day. The means
that very few of the IRA stories that actually make it into a subscriber's
news feed on any given day are actually read.
And now, according to the further research, the odds that Americans saw any
of these IRA ads-let alone were influenced by them-are even more
astronomical. In his Oct. 2017 testimony, Stretch said that from 2015 to
2017, "Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or 'served,' a total of
over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds."
To put the 33 trillion figure over two years in perspective, the 80,000
Russian-origin Facebook posts represented just .0000000024 of total Facebook
content in that time.
Shane and Mazzetti did not report the 33 trillion number even though The New
York Times' own coverage of that 2017 Stretch testimony explicitly stated,
"Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule
amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through
users' News Feeds everyday."
The Times' touting of the bogus 126 million out 137 million voters, while
not reporting the 33 trillion figure, should vie in the annals of journalism
as one of the most spectacularly misleading uses of statistics of all time.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian
writing on US national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in
February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.
