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Pro-Clinton Super PAC Caught Spending $1 Million On Social Media Trolls (usuncut.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from US Uncut: A Super PAC headed by a longtime Clinton operative is spending $1 million to hire online trolls to "correct" Bernie Sanders' supporters on social media. Correct The Record (CTR), which is operated by Clinton attack dog and new owner of Blue Nation Review David Brock, launched a new initiative this week called "Barrier Breakers 2016" for the purpose of debating supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders -- or "Bernie Bros," as they're referred to in Correct the Record's press official release -- on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms. The "Barrier Breakers" will also publicly thank Hillary Clinton's superdelegates and fans for supporting her campaign. The paid trolls are professional communicators, coming from public relations and media backgrounds. "The task force staff's backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize," CTR stated.
There does need to be some kind of reform when it comes to campaigns and financing and all of that, but it is very difficult to do. See, we have this thing called the First Amendment. Finding the right set of rules that respect the First Amendment, and yet helps prevent money from completely dominating an election cycle, is not an easy thing.
That said...
I would like to note that Bernie Sanders (note that I am not endorsing him) doesn't have a war chest even close to what Clinton has, and if it weren't for the super delegate system, he would be very close to winning the nomination. Or what about Trump (also not endorsing him)? Sure, he's rich, but he hasn't spent much money at all on ads or these kinds of organizations - he doesn't need to, he gets more free news coverage than anyone else, by far.
So it seems that money isn't everything if you have a popular message. Maybe we don't need these rules and laws which spawn these special organizations after all. Maybe all of these campaign finance laws are just there to stop the outsider types from having as good a chance.
Maybe.
It isn't an easy problem to solve and you'll never make everyone happy.
Love sees no species.
>> Only $1 million?
That was kind of my thought too. On the other hand, that's probably $1M more than her camp thought they'd be spending in the primaries a year ago. (A year ago, I if someone told me that some white guy would run up a 42% vote against the coronation candidate in her "home" state during the Democratic primary I would have either called them nuts or predicted the guy was Cuomo.)
Hillary is far and away the worst choice in the entire race. She has a very public track record of lies, corruption, and elitism. She is closely followed by Ted Cruz for the same reasons. It's astonishing to me that more people simply don't pay attention to the past.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Not to say that real ones don't exist, but I've long been skeptical about the super-misogynistic Bernie Bros and (without getting overly conspiratorial) they've just felt false-flag to me.
Reading this makes me wonder if I wasn't just being silly thinking that.
Regardless of that and whether or not it has anything to do with the story, I follow a few pro-Clinton people who seem to have an almost clinical compulsion to attacking Bernie (ironically typically about how negative he and his supporters are)
Pitch it to the Sunlight Foundation. I think they'd give you a grant and a lot of better-structured data to start with.
I completely disagree, but with caveats.
The problem with forums like Slashdot is that they allow completely anonymous postings, rather than pseudo-anonymous posting (the "Anonymous Coward"). Anyone can post as AC here, any time. The system tries to limit this to an extent with time delays, but that only helps so much.
Any forum that allows anonymous posting has this problem: paid shills can post there any there's no way to tell they're a shill.
*True* pseudo-anonymous forums are a little different. They require you to have an account, and better ones allow you to see how old that account is. On Slashdot, we can infer this from the UID number: the lower it is, the older the account is. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you explicitly how old the account it, like some forums do. Over on HackerNews, there's two notifications for this: you can click on a username and see a page that says exactly how old that account is, and also if the account is new (I'm not sure what the threshold is), that username will show up in green in the comment section. With a system like that, you can tell quickly who's more likely to be a shill. Someone with a 6-year-old account is not likely to be a shill for some current political candidate or issue.
On a lot of more general forums (like Disqus forums powering many regular blogs and news sites), there doesn't appear to be any way to tell how old an account is, so those are likely filled with paid shills.