I've heard the number $100,000 thrown around [1] as possibly Russian ad-spend on Facebook for "political" ads. I've read a story about a pretty corny Facebook group [2] promoting Texas succession and possibly also links to CA succession rallies as well.<p>What I haven't heard is a reasonable argument on whether this mattered in the slightest. This is an election where over a billion dollars was spent by the major parties. The amount of hand-wringing over some astroturf seems over the top.<p>Both campaigns spent heavily to influence social media. I remember reading specifically about Clinton PAC Correct the Record spending $1 million [3] to basically troll for her on social media.<p>There is absolutely no reason, absent extraordinary evidence, to believe any of this influenced the election. It's not enough to just not want to believe people freely voted the way they did because the "wrong" candidate won.<p>Take for example the "hacking" of 21 states election systems. Washington Post reports [4] that actually this was basically port scanning. Some states said the attack amounted to about one minute of scanning in an environment where they are being probed millions of times per day. It just seems rather breathless to me to single out "Russia" (actually Russian IPs) when scans are coming from IPs all over the world.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/07/a-russian-firm-spent-100000-on-facebook-ads-trump-spent-0-on-tv-ads-for-the-first-202-days-of-his-campaign/?utm_term=.22100591c7c4" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/07/a-...</a><p>[2] - <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-facebook-group-ads-texas-secession-secede-trump-clinton-2017-9" rel="nofollow">http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-facebook-group-ads-tex...</a><p>[3] - <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct-the-record-online-trolls/484847/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/correct...</a><p>[4] - <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/23/what-we-know-about-the-21-states-targeted-by-russian-hackers/?utm_term=.a1e94e959783" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/23/wh...</a>