Mr. Nix is a director of SCL Group, a British political and defense contractor, and chief executive of its American offshoot, Cambridge Analytica, which advised the Trump campaign. The firms’ employees, who often overlap, had contact in 2014 and 2015 with executives from Lukoil, the Russian oil giant.

The British tool must be ages behind Facebook’s internal tools and Russia has to ask them for ideas to get started.

Of course Russia does what it can. But it only gets Facebook’s external data, not their full internal tracking information.

Russia has to play the algorithm while Facebook can just change the parameters to rank the content however they want.

The imbalance of power is so big that Russia couldn’t have influenced the election in a meaningful way.