I don't think you can discount that a concerted effort to create viral content will spread much farther than arbitrary wall posts by individuals. There are statistical methods Facebook could use to figure out how much of an impact that they had and I have not seen any such analysis yet.
That's only one reason this whole thing is bullshit. The other is that the alleged content is just random gibberish with no obvious intent or means to subvert anything. It's only by assuming that every post had its maximum theoretical pernicious effect (and that a pernicious effect was the intent in the first place, which is just supposition) that this whole thing becomes meaningful.
It is the desire to make this assumption (that Russia subverted the campaign) that drives the conclusion more than anything else. None of which is to say FB is innocent of blame. But their crime is hooking up an ad network to the social network, not colluding with Russians.
Viral gibberish can still influence subconsciously. But I think FB gets more blame than they should out of all this, and agree the collective is trying to pin the blame for complex social trends on a singular actor. Domestically, the fault is on FB, internationally on Russia, clean and tidy right? Makes it seem like regulation will solve the perceived issues next time around, while the bulk of the real issues are overlooked or ignored. I like Martin Gurri's take on this right now.
Its also worth noting that when something goes viral, its often not contained on one social network, and it becomes impossible for the platform to measure its reach and impact.
How could twitter, for example, really measure the impact of something like that video of the Covington High School kids, which was amplified on twitter (shared by a fake account, IIRC), picked up by the media, and then talked about incessantly for weeks, all over the place?
