By now, it’s common knowledge that Russian companies bought more than 3,000 ads on Facebook, along with countless posts across other platforms. Many, though certainly not all, of those ads featured racist and anti-immigrant messages. It’s impossible to quantify the impact those messages had on vote tallies. On any given day, in any non-presidential election year, social media is crowded with political memes, misinformation and inflammatory content from questionable sources; propaganda is nothing new, and Russia has long been particularly masterful in its application. (So, too, for that matter, has the U.S., never a slouch in the art of political manipulation.) It’s undoubtedly possible that Russia’s deployment of racially divisive digital content, along with a host of other factors, may have helped win the presidency for a dangerous, unqualified liar. It’s also true that a racially divisive digital campaign could only have had impact and influence in a country already rife with bigotry, which savvy Russian actors simply exploited.
