You are not logged in. Please register or login.
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
Re: US Politics Thread
Jill Stein is leading the recount in all the swing states and she's just about raised the money to do it. Here's a great idea, how about she not run a race she can't possibly win and only serve to take votes away from the democrat in the first place?
I'm really not a conspiracy nut, but if Russia was behind the Clinton/DNC email hacks, behind wikileaks, and behind all the fake news Trump supporters were spreading (some of that lazy, sack of shit news even made it into this thread) I wouldn't be surprised they hacked voter programs. They really wanted Trump president.
Like Mitch, I almost don't have the energy to care.
Re: US Politics Thread
Jill Stein is leading the recount in all the swing states and she's just about raised the money to do it. Here's a great idea, how about she not run a race she can't possibly win and only serve to take votes away from the democrat in the first place?
I'm really not a conspiracy but, but if Russia was behind the Clinton/DNC email hacks, behind wikileaks, and behind all the fake news Trump supporters were spreading (some of that lazy, sack of shit news even made it into this thread) I wouldn't be surprised they hacked voter programs. They really wanted Trump president.
Like Mitch, I almost don't have the energy to care.
Did you read this article by the Washington Post? This only verifies our concerns, and to me it is terrifying. Another country worked tirelessly to impact our election, and it worked.
Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.
“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”
Watts’s report on this work, with colleagues Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, appeared on the national security online magazine War on the Rocks this month under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” Another group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns.
The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.
PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.
Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.
The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.
Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their reports, the researchers say. On other occasions, RT, Sputnik and other Russian sites used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as “trending” topics that sometimes prompted coverage from mainstream American news organizations.
The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience. Some of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York, for example, came from Russian botnets and trolls, researchers found. (She was treated for pneumonia and returned to the campaign trail a few days later.)
This followed a spate of other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times. But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.
This propaganda machinery also helped push the phony story that an anti-Trump protester was paid thousands of dollars to participate in demonstrations, an allegation initially made by a self-described satirist and later repeated publicly by the Trump campaign. Researchers from both groups traced a variety of other false stories — fake reports of a coup launched at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey and stories about how the United States was going to conduct a military attack and blame it on Russia — to Russian propaganda efforts.
“The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,” said the executive director of PropOrNot, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers. “It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”
He and other researchers expressed concern that the U.S. government has few tools for detecting or combating foreign propaganda. They expressed hope that their research detailing the power of Russian propaganda would spur official action.
A former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul, said he was struck by the overt support that Sputnik expressed for Trump during the campaign, even using the #CrookedHillary hashtag pushed by the candidate.
McFaul said Russian propaganda typically is aimed at weakening opponents and critics. Trump’s victory, though reportedly celebrated by Putin and his allies in Moscow, may have been an unexpected benefit of an operation that already had fueled division in the United States. “They don’t try to win the argument,” said McFaul, now director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “It’s to make everything seem relative. It’s kind of an appeal to cynicism.”
The same tactics, researchers said, helped Russia shape international opinions about its 2014 annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in Syria, which started last year. Russian propaganda operations also worked to promote the “Brexit” departure of Britain from the European Union.
Another crucial moment, several researchers say, came in 2011 when the party of Russian President Vladimir Putin was accused of rigging elections, sparking protests that Putin blamed the Obama administration — and then-Secretary of State Clinton — for instigating.
Full Article:
Re: US Politics Thread
misterID wrote:Jill Stein is leading the recount in all the swing states and she's just about raised the money to do it. Here's a great idea, how about she not run a race she can't possibly win and only serve to take votes away from the democrat in the first place?
I'm really not a conspiracy but, but if Russia was behind the Clinton/DNC email hacks, behind wikileaks, and behind all the fake news Trump supporters were spreading (some of that lazy, sack of shit news even made it into this thread) I wouldn't be surprised they hacked voter programs. They really wanted Trump president.
Like Mitch, I almost don't have the energy to care.
Did you read this article by the Washington Post? This only verifies our concerns, and to me it is terrifying. Another country worked tirelessly to impact our election, and it worked.
Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.
“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”
Watts’s report on this work, with colleagues Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, appeared on the national security online magazine War on the Rocks this month under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” Another group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns.
The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.
PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.
Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.
The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.
Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their reports, the researchers say. On other occasions, RT, Sputnik and other Russian sites used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as “trending” topics that sometimes prompted coverage from mainstream American news organizations.
The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience. Some of the first and most alarming tweets after Clinton fell ill at a Sept. 11 memorial event in New York, for example, came from Russian botnets and trolls, researchers found. (She was treated for pneumonia and returned to the campaign trail a few days later.)
This followed a spate of other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times. But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.
This propaganda machinery also helped push the phony story that an anti-Trump protester was paid thousands of dollars to participate in demonstrations, an allegation initially made by a self-described satirist and later repeated publicly by the Trump campaign. Researchers from both groups traced a variety of other false stories — fake reports of a coup launched at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey and stories about how the United States was going to conduct a military attack and blame it on Russia — to Russian propaganda efforts.
“The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,” said the executive director of PropOrNot, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers. “It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”
He and other researchers expressed concern that the U.S. government has few tools for detecting or combating foreign propaganda. They expressed hope that their research detailing the power of Russian propaganda would spur official action.
A former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul, said he was struck by the overt support that Sputnik expressed for Trump during the campaign, even using the #CrookedHillary hashtag pushed by the candidate.
McFaul said Russian propaganda typically is aimed at weakening opponents and critics. Trump’s victory, though reportedly celebrated by Putin and his allies in Moscow, may have been an unexpected benefit of an operation that already had fueled division in the United States. “They don’t try to win the argument,” said McFaul, now director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “It’s to make everything seem relative. It’s kind of an appeal to cynicism.”
The same tactics, researchers said, helped Russia shape international opinions about its 2014 annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in Syria, which started last year. Russian propaganda operations also worked to promote the “Brexit” departure of Britain from the European Union.
Another crucial moment, several researchers say, came in 2011 when the party of Russian President Vladimir Putin was accused of rigging elections, sparking protests that Putin blamed the Obama administration — and then-Secretary of State Clinton — for instigating.
Full Article:
Ya know what makes me think they could have been involved, slc?
If there's anything Russia is good at....it's propaganda - and I'll be god damned if I didn't fall for that click bait.
I consider myself a pretty good at skepticism - but those articles were so finely crafted....they didn't waste a single letter
Re: US Politics Thread
Yeah, I just caught some news that Russia was behind the fake news. I know for the last two weeks people were claiming the fake news had an impact. And Russia said they had a direct link to the Trump campaign, so I'm inclined that it was a full court press to get him elected. And like you said, the scary thing is that it worked.
- Randall Flagg
- Rep: 139
Re: US Politics Thread
Yea, it's Russia's fault Clinton used a private server and ordered her aides to remove classification markings. It's their fault she was a shit candidate who hid from the media and used Beyoncé and Katy Perry as surrogates.
The FBI and even Obama have commented our election systems weren't compromised. Anything to avoid admitting identity politics is a farce and Trump won because the left refers to anything not on the coast as "fly over" country. Why am I not surprised the same folks who believed 9/11 was an inside job and once touted Alex Jones and Wikileaks as heroes are now going along with the latest conspiracy theory.
Re: US Politics Thread
Really, the email server was no big deal, no matter how people try to paint it.
Yes, FBI feeding Trump campaign info, Comey releasing the letter, Assange timing leaks to do maximum damage, Russia hacking files and giving them to wikileaks, Russia flooding fake news on the rubes. Yeah, all that had zero effect.
And Hilary still won by 2 million votes.
Re: US Politics Thread
Yea, it's Russia's fault Clinton used a private server and ordered her aides to remove classification markings. It's their fault she was a shit candidate who hid from the media and used Beyoncé and Katy Perry as surrogates.
The FBI and even Obama have commented our election systems weren't compromised. Anything to avoid admitting identity politics is a farce and Trump won because the left refers to anything not on the coast as "fly over" country. Why am I not surprised the same folks who believed 9/11 was an inside job and once touted Alex Jones and Wikileaks as heroes are now going along with the latest conspiracy theory.
RF...I have learned to truly respect your opinion over the past few months....but I have to say....
WHO GIVES A FUCK ABOUT HILLARY'S E-MAILS????
I mean what a fucking joke......
- Randall Flagg
- Rep: 139
Re: US Politics Thread
I care. A sailor was sent to Leavenworth because he took photos of classified systems for his own gratification. Petraeus was forced to resign in disgrace because he shared info with his lover who also had a Top Secret clearance. I'm not saying what any of these people did was right, but no one can accuse them of malice or intent to harm the US.
Meanwhile Clinton was loose with the law, ordered her aides to violate said law. Then they destroy evidence and try to wipe the server after a subpoena. Did the GOP have a hard on for her? Yep. Did Clinton intend to harm our country or lose classified information? Nope.
But if you don't think the people who voted for Trump took notice that the left was trying to sweep Clinton's violation of the law under the rug, if not insult the intelligence of every American, we'll have to agree to disagree.
And if you don't think a large chunk of Democrats stayed home because they wouldn't support someone who actively worked to rig the primary in her favor, going so far as to have both heads of the DNC be caught red handed feeding Clinton information, again we'll have to agree to disagree.
Clinton was accurately portrayed as the Washington insider who didn't think the rules or law applied to her. Yes, Comey should resign for how he handled that last letter he sent to Congress. But if Clinton didn't try to bend or break every rule to obtain ultimate power, none of this would have been an issue.
It's like catching your wife fucking another dude, and everyone blaming you for coming home from work early.
Re: US Politics Thread
Hillary didn't do anything like that. Total false equivalency. She wasn't trying to bend or break the rules, she took the advice of an advisor who said it was okay. There was never any seriously classified material. There was never ever a smoking gun. Nothing close to what you mentioned. No wife fucking.
