Social media, like everything, is a mixed bag. I am figuring out how to effectively use it for my business. Apparently I should take a page out of the Russian playbook. They leveraged social media quite efficiently to misinform Americans concerning issues of the 2016 election.
The Rachel Maddow show yesterday discussed the story that Facebook, which has been in denial since May of this year, finally admitted that there is evidence of thousands of Facebook ads originating from Russia at the time of the 2016 election cycle. Some of the ad placement was done via an entity named the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St. Petersburg whose financer is a close Putin ally with ties to Russian Intelligence. Russian groups placed over $100,000 in advertisements on Facebook. I am not a big fan of Facebook and like Rachel Maddow I would like to know why they placed the ads without noticing they were from a foreign source and why it took them four months to admit that this did indeed happen. Of course to be fair they were not the only social media tool used by Russia to manipulate the American public.
The issue is the inability to know what the truth is and who is telling it. We have to be more sophisticated and not rely so heavily on our technology that can easily be used to confuse us. We easily ignore our own biology. Our gut reactions tell us when something is not right. If we can’t put a label on what the feeling is we ignore our own intuition. I have done this many times, but now I am more aware of what I am feeling. I don’t rely solely on what my thoughts on the subject are.
My gut tells me that there is much more to the Russia investigation.
Inside Russia’s Social Media War on Americaby Massimo Calabresi (Time