Half of IRA’s Facebook ads were purchased after the 2016 election
...PeaceData was accused of being funded by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which the Times says “was very active in the 2016 presidential election, and a recent bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report detailed Russian interference in support of Mr. Trump’s election.” In fact, half of IRA’s Facebook ads were purchased after the 2016 election and half of those before the election supported Hillary Clinton, and the other half, Trump. The IRA spent about $100,000 on the ads, compared to the $6.5 billion spent by the Clinton and Trump campaigns....
...IRA has never been proven to be a state actor.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted IRA officials in 2018 for supposedly interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. But the Department of Justice, after stalling on IRA lawyers’ demands for discovery, then dropped the case in March, arguing that the company sought to “weaponize” the documents they obtained. A federal judge had earlier ordered Mueller to stop referring to the IRA as a state actor.
The dropping of the 2018 case against the IRA is not mentioned in The New York Times account on Wednesday accusing the IRA of new allegations of electoral interference....
“The Peace Data site appeared to be a more worrying example of ‘information laundering,‘ a more covert and potentially dangerous effort by Moscow,” reported the Times, which has itself made a habit of laundering anonymous U.S. intelligence disinformation — from WMD in Iraq to Russiagate....
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