senior ed toward for the atlantic, host of crazy genius. love the name of that. tony, you ve been digging through these ads. most of them, as far as i can see, it s not like they re endorsing a specific candidate. what they re doing is spreading inflammatory messages on sensitive subjects including immigration, race. was this largely a campaign to inflame and divide the american voter? it was absolutely about sewing social and cultural unrest here in the united states at a very important time, right around the 2016 presidential election. starting at about mid-2015, facebook began to notice that online trolls associated with the internet research agency, which is a sanctioned arm of the kremlin, were posting these ads and other content on facebook. and then throughout that two-year period, we see constant examples of ads that play on issues of race, on issues like immigration, on gun control, on lgbt rights. some did mention donald trump and his candidacy and hillary clint and her c
important immigrants are to the united states. it s about getting folks on facebook to fight with each other over these very issues. in some cases, there were even rallies that the internet research agency planned to plan around some of these contentious issues about some of that fight and bring it into real life. i ve seen it colorfully called congress dropping the russian trolling mother lode. i mean, was this just incredibly politically savvy or was it more throw a lot of stuff up against the wall and see what stickings? well, it is called the internet research agency. to a certain extent, you think no company with a name that nondescript can be up to any good and indeed this one was not. that said, once they were doing is in many ways akin to research. in many ways, you have researchers all over the world who essentially said facebook is the greatest experimental platform for human behavior that we ve ever seen and that s why we love looking at it, that s why we love manipulati
think that this can be fixed by 2018. it can t be fixed by 2018. this is an unbelievably complex problem. mark zuckerberg has built mark zuckerberg of course. he s built a persuasion machine. he has built this platform. and he goes around telling advertisers we are the new television. we are the best way to tell people what to buy, how to buy it, how much to spend, where to go, come to us, give us your money, stop giving it to television. that is the reason why this company is worth 400, $500 billion, whatever its market cap today. you can t go around and turn to political organizations and say we can t persuade to anybody don t spend here. you can t turn that off without turning off facebook. tell us the name of the podcast again. crazy genius. i love it. thank you, tony, derek, appreciate it. a change in southern politics. this is really fascinating. rehema ellis reporting on a record number of black women on the ballot. why are you running now? there s a need.
standards on new protocols, on new rules, on what u.s. forces in africa have to do before they go out on a mission. we learned today that over the last year there have been about 10 troops in contact. that means exchanges of live fire with enemy forces in africa over last year. it s more dangerous than many americans realize. chris. a reminder of what a great debt we owe to all of them who are there fighting. thank you, hans nichols, we appreciate it. you can watch more of hans interview tonight on nbc nightly news. this hour, we ve got a very in your face kind of revelation about just how hard russia worked to divide americans during the 2016 campaign. more than 3,000 russia-linked facebook and instagram ads that ran during the election released this morning by democrats on the house intelligence committee along with specific details about how the russian troll farm targeted users based on their location, age, gender, even personality. i want to bring in tech policy reporter fo
in many ways, you could say that s part of what the ira, the internet research agency, was doing. i do think we should conceptualize this. two prongs. one prong was this misinformation campaign, yes. but the other prong was direct hacking of the dnc and e-mails belonging to democrats and not republicans. to say that this was nearly a research effort and nearly an attempt to see what makes americans tick i think misses a little bit of the fact that in the context of russian efforts to interfere in this election for the purpose, it seems quite clear to elevate donald trump and push down hillary clinton, we shouldn t be so quick to say, oh, well, they were just interested in manipulating facebook and looking at the results. and let s not forget the fact that jeff zuckerberg, who s been in the hot seat since all of this came out, has admitted that for everything they re trying to do, that everything other organizations are trying to do to help people identify when things are put out ther