Context matters a lot when it comes to media.
Of course it does, and the number of people exposed isn't a terribly useful metric by itself either. If you're sitting on a couch reaching a million users this morning with paid ads in the sidebar, you're not swaying opinions in the same way as my 65 year old father's facebook feed being 90% Hillary memes. He's only one user, but virtually 100% of his online news was about Uranium One and Benghazi and the Muslim Brotherhood. "Hillary eats babies! She's killed Vince Foster in a BDSM role play gone wrong! George Soros is running a pedo ring in the basement of a pizza parlor!" If that's all you see all day, it's easy to stay home on election day even if you don't particularly like Trump. All it took is for a tiny fraction of a percent of geriatric white facebook users to buy into that bullshit, in a few key districts, to hand Trump the oval office. They probably didn't move the needle very much in absolute terms, but the election was so close that it was more than enough.
If you still have doubts, I suggest you read some of those reports linked above for the context you seek. You asked for sources, we provided them. I look forward to your analyses of those sources.
As a small business owner myself who also runs ad campaigns, I get a very strong sense that you guys have no idea about the scope of social media advertising.
Going back to that TENGOP Twitter account, 130k followers is a decent amount, but it is one account in literally thousands of tweets you would see in a single day. The odds that one account tweeting memes on your feed would in any way affect you is just not how Twitter works. It would be like saying a forum poster in the Book Club thread is having a huge impact on my overall experience on this forum.
Regarding Facebook, I’m glad HBFIRE chimed in, because 130 million impressions is NOTHING on Facebook. It is a thousandth of a percent, if not smaller, of overall impressions in a day. I think you guys also fail to see that the Hillary memes originated here and then were latched onto by the troll farms. It was like shit being thrown on top of shit.
Honestly, I think the biggest thing I think you fail to see is the self selection of following these accounts and sharing these posts. Do you honestly think someone following a Facebook account that regularly accuses Hillary Clinton of running a child molestation ring out of a pizza shop were independent voters that could have been swayed? Of course not. They were diehard R’s that listen to Rush Limbaugh when they go to bed at night.
Putin is laughing and stroking himself knowing we are giving him this much credit.
BRB though, have to go to my mailbox to get my paycheck from the Kremlin.