Dark Posts And Facebook's Deals With The Devil

``Dark Posts, which Facebook calls "unpublished posts," are those that appear outside an account's timeline. They're essentially untied from a company's main branding effort and are often used by companies to target specific groups or experiment with new messages. There are a lot of them: 18% of the posts brands use are Dark Posts, according to Socialbakers, a VC-backed social monitoring firm. It has been easy enough for someone with bad intentions to set up a fake account, apparently, and have at it. In the case of the Russian scandal there were about 3,000 posts placed by 470 accounts and pages spending about $100,000.''