The IRA’s digital prowess: crude but effective

Relative to commercial standards for Facebook advertisers, the IRA’s methods were not sophisticated. They targeted their ads to very broad geographic areas, like the entire United States, with the majority of ads using Facebook’s interest targeting system, which targets ads according to users’ Likes and other expressed preferences. Interest targeting is considered a fairly crude targeting method. In fact, about 6% of ad spend was completely untargeted, leaving these highly specific, polarizing ads to be seen by random US adults, a technique that would be malpractice for professional digital marketers.

As told by this dataset, the IRA was not investing in sophisticated targeting. They were not targeting specific lists of voters or only swing states. They didn’t need to; the content they produced, their relentless iteration, and the reach of Facebook’s platform enabled their ads to have an extreme amount of engagement.

Efforts at engaging Muslims were notably less successful — a likely reflection of content that didn’t resonate with its audience as well as others did.

Strong messaging and relentless iteration paid off

That the IRA’s project, paid for in Rubles, was aimed at distributing content to create strife in the United States is not new; what is now clear, though, is that American Facebook users responded incredibly well to it. A click is just a click; it does not equate to a changed mind or a manipulated election, but the high rates of engagement with this polarizing content suggests that it successfully registered with its viewers. Whether by bad intent or good luck, the IRA’s propaganda successfully tapped into a strong vein of divisive identity politics, and Facebook’s reach and algorithmic bias towards engagement enabled it to spread and resonate amongst more than millions of Facebook users.

Special thanks to Ethan Chen and Alex Lindsay, as well as Data For Democracy volunteers Scott Came and Jeff Kao for their work parsing and clustering this dataset.