<story><title>Russia used Facebook ads to exploit divisions over Black Lives Matter, Muslims</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-operatives-used-facebook-ads-to-exploit-divisions-over-black-political-activism-and-muslims/2017/09/25/4a011242-a21b-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html?tid=sm_tw&amp;utm_term=.946de0b7f4d4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PathToHumble</author><text>This started as &amp;quot;Russia hacked the election&amp;quot; and now we are talking about Russia taking out ads in support of BLM claiming its a psyop? At what point do people just accept the fact that Trump won a democratic election, racists voting or not.&lt;p&gt;The actual campaigns took out billions of $ in ads and campaign ads are never honest, accurate or logical. Who cares about $100k in Russian ads?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>beager</author><text>Those are not the same things. There is an unfolding story about employment of paid and farmed action on social platforms by Russia to influence the election, but also an unfolding story about attempts to infiltrate state voting systems and voter rolls. The nexus of the two is in how users were targeted for the former using data potentially taken from the latter.&lt;p&gt;It was pretty clear, even for the sensationalized media and sensationalizable public, that Russia did not &amp;quot;hack&amp;quot; the election and that no votes were altered, etc. But now it turns out, hey, there were actually successful penetrations of state voting systems, and at present we are not sure of the extent.&lt;p&gt;So while the initial &amp;quot;Russia hacked the US election&amp;quot; line was quickly redrawn to be precise about what we knew, it turns out now that there&amp;#x27;s a reasonable possibility that Russia actually did hack our election. To what extent or effect? Yet unknown.</text></comment>
<story><title>Russia used Facebook ads to exploit divisions over Black Lives Matter, Muslims</title><url>https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-operatives-used-facebook-ads-to-exploit-divisions-over-black-political-activism-and-muslims/2017/09/25/4a011242-a21b-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html?tid=sm_tw&amp;utm_term=.946de0b7f4d4</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PathToHumble</author><text>This started as &amp;quot;Russia hacked the election&amp;quot; and now we are talking about Russia taking out ads in support of BLM claiming its a psyop? At what point do people just accept the fact that Trump won a democratic election, racists voting or not.&lt;p&gt;The actual campaigns took out billions of $ in ads and campaign ads are never honest, accurate or logical. Who cares about $100k in Russian ads?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hackinthebochs</author><text>&amp;gt;This started as &amp;quot;Russia hacked the election&amp;quot; and now we are talking about&lt;p&gt;I guess you missed the news about their attempted and successful intrusions into state election databases?</text></comment>