"You never answered my question about why billions are invested in this
. Why are they paying people so much to write those algorithms?"
We are talking about a specific act by a specific party and not a holistic relection of the ins and out of this industry. The positive claim being made here by democrat partisans is that Russia interfered in 2016 and this was of some significance. Can this be substantiated?
We know how much IRA spend on memes, advertising etc for the 2016 election.
A recent disclosure by Google that Russian-linked accounts spent $4,700 on platforms in 2016! $46,000 was spent on Russian-linked Facebook ads before the 2016 election (0.05% of what Trump/Clinton campaign spent on ads)
Muelller report stated IRAs budget was $ 1.2 million. Does this mean this $1.2 million was solely for the US. Read on for below this line it states it was for "domestic audiences within the Russian Federation and others targeting foreign audiences in various countries, including the United States.
So what does an analysis of the IRA content tell us? Just “11% of the total content” attributed to the IRA and 33 percent of user engagement with it “was related to the election.” The IRA’s posts “were minimally about the candidates,” with “roughly 6% of tweets, 18% of Instagram posts, and 7% of Facebook posts” having “mentioned Trump or Clinton by name.”
Does this justify the attention it is getting?
So how can we determine how effective IRA ads were. The one example put forward on this thread to as a great example of Russia interference and stirring the pot so to speak was the Heart of Texas protests. The IRA propaganda campaign was so successful that virtually no –one turned up. Ooops!
What about the memes themselves. How targeted and wicked was their messaging? Lausten links the 10 worst of the worst. A link to an author who choose 10 out of 3,500 post without telling us how many overall were pro trump, how many were pro Clinton and how many neither? And of the 10 picked, how many of these were pre November 2016 !!