The Russian Twitter Trolls Were NOT About Rigging an Election
Russia Russia Russia. Its all we hear about on CNN, CBS and NBC. Of Course Trump colluded with the Russians, how else could he manage to defeat the heir apparent Hillary Clinton? Or so goes the common narrative of the mainstream media. So Congress launches an Independent Counsel to investigate. Special Counsel Robert Mueller uncovered a grand conspiracy of a bunch of Twitter and Facebook accounts that were promoting memes and ideas that generated outrage among both the Trump supporting camps and the Hillary supporting camps. That outrage directed social media users to websites that supposedly attempted to influence the election. But was that really what those websites were for?
What the indictment and the mainstream media lack is a sense of how the Internet and the Advertising ecosystem really works. And how Clickbait works. Lemme ‘splain it to you. Then make up your mind about the indictments, which, by the way, are completely useless since the US and Russia do not have an extradition treaty, which means the indicted Russians will never see the inside of a US courthouse unless they take a gambling excursion to Estonia.
Everyone thinks the Internet is this gigantic free thing. It’s not. Web servers, like the one you are reading this on, costs money. In my case, about $200 per year for hosting, DNS services, time spent patching, etc. Most websites, (not this one, still ad free!) recoup those losses by running advertising banners and java scripted inserts into the HTML pages that should help generate cash if someone clicks on the ads, or, if you join an advertising collective, pays for “impressions” or the number of times an ad is seen, to the website owner.
And that’s just the most basic advertising, such as Google Adwords. Next, if your site is really popular and gets tons of visits, you can get a much higher level of advertising, including fancy flash videos, fancy full page popups, or promoted content from other content providers, such as what you get with Taboola. You know, all those annoying ads that make you never want to click on that website again. This includes right wing Breitbart and left leaning Politico.
If you really have your act together like most mainstream media sites like the WashingtonPost, CNN, and even Drudge, who garners hundreds of thousands of visits per day, you get to participate in Real Time Ad Bidding, which takes place in the background so fast you don’t even know it’s happening. Here is how RTB (Real Time Ad Bidding) works in the simplest terms- An auction for valuable ad space on a popular site takes place in milliseconds, and whomever pays the highest price to show their ad gets to place an ad on the website. These ad views are sold in 1000 view blocks. 1000 impressions for an ad can cost about 49 cents for some sites and as high at $1.95 for really popular sites. All for that one quick timeslice that the page loads. You pay more in ads, your ads show more frequently. Ever like a post on Facebook about a new Chevy and notice that all the ads for the next week are about Chevy cars? That’s how it works.
What does all of this have to do with supposed Russian Collusion? Nothing. And that’s what these indictment are really about. Bear with me.
How do all of these websites that garner thousands of hits per day stay in business having to spin up expensive cloud-based internet hosts just to handle all the traffic plus pay a full-time staff of writers, marketing departments, and PR staffers? They have to generate ad revenue. The more ad revenue, the happier the staff is, especially the editors, owners and investors of the website. What makes for the best ways to get those eyes on the website?
Clickbait. And nothing generates clickbait better than outrage. Not even porn. There I said it. Outrage beats porn for page clicks.
A tiny 200 character post on social media that says “You won’t believe Trump’s latest gaffe with the Democrats! Click here to read more!” will garner hits. As well as “Is Hillary really sick? Read what neurosurgeons say about those thick glasses!” It generates both intrigue and outrage, depending on your worldview. And outrage generates clicks, and clicks generate money.
The Russian trolls indicted by Meuller were not trying to influence the election. The indictments say they were playing both sides of the political spectrum, outraging righties as well as lefties. And remember, outrage generates clicks. The Russians were only creating clickbait social media posts to drive revenue to their websites via ad impressions. End of story.
All those “But But Hillary colluded too!” is just more clickbait. Remember, we are trying to figure out what impact Russian interference had on the elections, and the best Mueller could come up with was a cadre of social media trolls. What Mueller, most pundits, the news media, Congress and others failed to do here is simply FOLLOW THE MONEY. Outrage is the premium emotion of clickbait. The more outrage that can be generated, the more money people can make. Don’t believe me? Install an ad blocker and click on one of these outrage posts- leftist or rightist. Pick both to compare and contrast. Then watch how many ads get blocked. Just went to Breitbart and watched 20 ads get blocked. A CNN post about Trump endorsing Romney for Senate blocked 18 ads.
Clickbait is clickbait. The Russians just wanted a slice of the advertising pie. When it’s raining soup, the smart man holds out his hat.
