by SP
ConsortiumNews.com has been very critical of the NYT assertion that Russian operatives using facebook ads, “stole the election” “handing it to Trump.” (and here)
Here is another ConsortiumNews piece by Gareth Porter that profoundly undermines this narrative.
The reason that I am posting it here is not as much about this article’s CONTENT of the Russia stole the electionstory, BUT THE METHOD OF SHAPING PUBLIC THINKING–THE USE OF MAJOR TRUSTED NEWS SOURCES.
This story, like the selling of the Iraq WMD process lead by the NYT, demonstrates a systematic, organized and deliberate distortion of the truth in order to shape public thinking.
This is a conspiracy story.
The New York Times is a massive purveyor of fake news.
The NYT reported that a private Russian company, Internet Research Agancy (IRA), purchased 80,000 facebook ads over a 2 year period. It was via these ads that Putin stole the US election.
1. Facebook did NOT report how many of these ads had to do with the election, nor did they claim that most ads were election related.
2. The 2 year period included 2015 – 2017, which includes 1 full year AFTER the election. (And, I’m quite sure that most ads purchased AFTER the election were NOT election related.)
3. Counsel for FB testified that “as many as 126 million people MAY have been exposed to one of these ads over this 2 year period.” This was based on the assumption that some users may have *shared* the stories increasing exposure.
4. However, FB acknowledges that generally, only about 10% of newsfeed articles are read by users.
5. And most telling, the NYT did NOT mention that during this same time period, 33,000,000,000 (33 Trillion) content items were served on fb news feeds. [I am not sure if this 33 Trillion figure includes just paid ads or all news stories delivered into FB newsfeeds.]
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 [NYT authors] did not report the 33 trillion number even though The New York Times’ own coverage of that 2017 Stretch [FB counsel] 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.
The omission of these context elements severely distorts the impact of these “Russia-linked posts.”
I am absolutely certain that this kind of deception is not accidental. It is conducted by operators of very high intelligence and excellent verbal skills. This is the oligarchy and its team of brilliant operatives, using their talents and position to guide the sheep to the slaughter.
Our protection is to recognize that conspiracies happen all around us, and that our trusted and authoratative news sources are liars.