Quote:
Originally Posted by Rajoo
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Great. Yet another opinion that is accepted as mostly fact.
Yes, Manafort stated that he gave Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian business associate he had known for years, polling data. The ALLEGATION is that Kilimnik was a Russian asset. The ALLEGATION is that Kilimnik turned the info over to his contacts in Russian intel.
If any of the above is true about Kilimnik, and assuming for a moment that he did turn the polling data he received from Manafort over to Russian Intel, then what possible value would this info have been to the Russians, within the context of "election interference"?
The
SPECULATION is that the Russians used this info to target on-line advertising, particularly on Facebook.
But there's a pretty big problem with all of this speculation.
1) If that's how the Russian Intel folks want to spend their rubles, that's fine and dandy. However, from a purely "advertisement purchase" perspective, it was a pretty lousy buying decision. Why? Consider
this:
If you’re looking to run ad campaigns on Facebook, you’ll need to know exactly who to target campaigns to, and men aged between 25 and 34 make up 18.4% of Facebook’s ad audience. Women in the same age group account for 12.6%.
The demographics with the lowest ad reach are men and women aged 13-17 and seniors aged 65+.
That means that Russians would have bought ads on Facebook, and those ads would likely not reach something close to 60% of likely voters.
2) The Facebook target demographic - let's just call it the under-40 demographic - ended up
voting for Clinton, and by a pretty significant margin.
So, SPECULATING that this is what the Russians were up to, it was a lousy decision that certainly didn't have the "intended" results.
Bottom line, lots of editorializing based on limited facts.