[peoplewindow]

I was wondering how far down I'd have to scroll to find the first sensible comment. Congrats.

The internal logic of these claims is non-existent. During the actual campaign Hillary and her supporters were convinced Russia (the generic bogeyman of the western establishment everywhere) was shilling for Trump. After all Trump was a lot more friendly and Hillary was stating that she'd shoot Russian planes out of the sky over Syria, so such a motive would have at least made sense.

Now that whole narrative fell apart entirely. We have the head of famously anti-gay and conservative Russia posting LGBT memes and supporting Hillary, despite the risk of war between Russia and America should she have won.

Yet, the desire to believe is so strong, that like all conspiracy theories it's simply morphed into whatever the smallest step to fitting with new information is, that preserves the core. Now it's all a genius plan to "sow division" by posting pictures of fox statues made of shotgun cartridges. Quite why Russia specifically benefits from generalised "division" or why US culture needed help being divided is left unexplained.

This is exactly the behaviour you'd expect to see if people with strong motivations were looking at noise. Leading us to your last question:

how much confidence do we have these are Russian state sponsored ad?

We only appear to have Facebook's word for it. But you have to watch out. One of the subtle ways this conspiracy theory tends to morph and warp is the distinction between the Russian government and Russians. Even in the headline of this thread, note that it's "Russians" and not "the Russian government".

There are liberal Russians. There are conservative Russians. There are 144 million Russians, a little under half the population of the USA itself. If even 0.1% of them decided they cared about the globally-famous US election, and if Facebook had simply selected "ads paid for by Russians", then this is exactly what you would see - a mishmash of stuff with no unifying theme or agenda.

Or Facebook could have just made a mistake. The government asked them to find evidence of Russian interference, and let's face it, going back with "there's nothing there you are all delusional" is not a good political strategy. I'm sure they felt they had to find something.