RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Frontier Moved.

The Russian effort was in fact so small, especially when laid alongside Hillary’s giant purchases, that when asked to find the ads Facebook couldn’t even detect them. “Instead of searching through impossibly large batches of data … Facebook zeroed in on a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency, which had been publicly identified as a troll farm. ‘They worked backward,’ a U.S. official said of the process at Facebook.” Only then could they find the needle in the haystack.

Faced with the numbers Madrigal concludes the ads themselves were unimportant. The Kremlin must have bought the ads as research; to discover what messages bombed and which succeeded. “Think of it as a real-time focus group to test for the most viral content and framing.” But the theory that Russian genius guided Trump’s diabolical babblings fails before one fact. It is now known that Facebook itself that was guiding Donald’s campaign.

Yes, Facebook helped Trump.

This was a regular product offering. Facebook had built analysis tools and offered consulting services to both candidates but apparently only Trump’s newbie team used the analytics Facebook supplied. Hillary’s team decided it did not need help, while Donald’s team took full advantage of it. “The Trump campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, says Facebook targeting played a major role in the president’s win last November. Parscale says the campaign accepted help from Facebook employees, which he ‘heard’ the Clinton campaign did not do.”

Fascinating, and serves as further evidence that Clinton made an election-losing mistake in making Robby Mook her point man for All Things Data.

For whatever this anecdote is worth, I’ve also noticed that while YouTube appears to be throttling (and in at least one case, demonetizing) Bill Whittle.com videos, on Facebook our traffic is still trending upwards.