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Russian Propaganda Effort Helped Spread 'Fake News' During Election, Experts Say (usatoday.com)
According to the Washington Post (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternate source), the "fake news" phenomenon that circulated thousands of phony stories during the election was aided by a sophisticated Russian propaganda effort that aimed to punish Democrat Hillary Clinton, help Republican Donald Trump and undermine faith in American democracy. Slashdot reader xtsigs shares with us an excerpt from the Washington Post's report: 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.
Just yesterday CNN was running some fake news about a researcher proposing a vote recount, and said researcher had to log a disclaimer. I suppose the Russians were behind that too. They must have also been behind all the fake news about iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Those cunning bastards! Time to call in moose and squirrel!
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Simply ruined it. The US media wouldn't have run articles about Podesta cooking with semen and fingernail clippings. That's just gross.
wow, can't believe I got first post. first first post in a long time!
I'll believe it when these sites are bought to court for fraud/libel and lose. The only sites that have gone through due process and failed seem to be on the left side (gawker)
Why isn't Snowden ever on the receiving end of left-based Red Scare tactics?
What a load of total and unadulterated crap. No one believes it because there's no evidence, they've been lied to before (Iraq, fake news?) and the 'mainstream' press have gone into a massive meltdown, looking for anyone, something, whatever, to blame apart from themselves. The fake news offensive is extremely ironic, and really quite sad.
Or Trump to undermine my faith in American democracy, thanks. None of what is freaking people out is new, people being forced to pull their heads out of the sand/clouds and see these things, is.
Enough with the Red Scare.
Paul Horner isn't a Russian and was paid $10k to write fake stories
The Macedonian kids aren't russian either.
As if HC needed help in not being trusted and being generally despised. She is literally the only candidate who could have possibly lost to Trump. The only person actually susceptible to his style of personal attacks and no content.
With the DNC actions and the trickery and deceit they used to get Clinton past Sanders, no further propaganda was necessary to demolish HC. If some imaginary russian PR agency had been tasked with invention stories that put HC into a bad light, they couldn't possibly come up with such a shit. They would've been told "come on guys, it has to be at least borderline believable".
Russia didn't need to do anything here. HC demolished her chances all by herself.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
http://www.ronpaullibertyrepor...
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
Yes, regular campaigns from 4chans /pol board aimed at 'meme magic' 'meme war' and other pepe based shilling against the candidate existed but /pol has been a lightning rod for this sort of MAD Magazine kind of crap for a while. 4chan and 9gag memes make their way into social media very readily, with or without state actors..
Please stop beating the Russian horse. Occam's Razor argues that either there is a deeply clandestine and inexplicably state backed multi-million dollar effort from Russia to sway american elections for an equally inexplicable reason, or, just maybe, hillary clinton was a turd of a candidate that rigged her own primary, had no tenable domestic or foreign policy outside the Harlem Shake, and spoke divisively against blue collar americans, and rarely if ever campaigned in their states on issues they cared about.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Independent of the misguidedness of attempting to appoint themselves the literal arbiters of reality and Ministry-Of-Truth-ing away any conflicting viewpoints or facts, it's just such a retarded phrase. It's absolutely destined to be mocked and turned around on the inventors.
It's probably the single biggest propaganda fail since "Freedom Fries". CNN needs to steal Frank Luntz from Fox; he would never have let this shit happen.
Bu-bu-but muh Russian boogeyman...
not to mention the rest of the mainstream media.
I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!!
Sometimes I think everyone took a fucking stupid pill back in 2008 and the effects are slowing beginning to kick in the world over.
This fucking Russian horseshit is fucking BULLSHIT! I know the elites have a hard on for a Cold War 2.0 but Jesus step it up people. Even the fucking Iraq War was built on more persuasive material than this.
I get all the fake news I can stand from MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, FoxNews, NYT, Washington Post, etc. etc. etc.
I believe the corporate news people are really pushing the "fake news" stories to try to discredit and/or censor legitimate news sources that they don't agree with. Just stop it already. Americans are smarter than they think, but if a few are so stupid they can't tell real news from fake news, I'd rather they not vote anyway.
I wonder if this crap is revenge for some people calling Democrat voters "low information voters".
The Washington Post is a reputable publisher, so I don't see that as a problem here. Unfortunately, Slashdot isn't nearly as credible. The barrage of fake news and anti-Trump articles makes Slashdot seem like a propaganda machine. It seems like there's a real effort to discredit a Trump presidency with the stories critical of Trump's policies, the numerous fake news stories, and the posts about hacking rigging the election for Trump. The editors have control of what gets posted and they're doing an awful job of posting a variety of diverse and interesting stories. In years past, we would have reviews of new devices being introduced for the holiday season that might interest nerds and interesting DIY projects for nerds. Those were really interesting and really appealed to nerds. Slashdot can claim that the traffic and comments are up, but it's a very different audience from the nerds that used to frequent this site.
... want to crush new media before it reaches a true competitive threat.
Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump because a large portion of middle class Whites lost faith in the Democratic Party after re-electing Obama. Obamacare premiums skyrocketed, and they feared mass unlimited Third World immigration making them poor Gringos in the Third World coming to them. That the status quo candidate lost people fundamentally averse to change (middle class people with houses and marriages and mortgages) should shock the Establishment.
Wikileaks DID cover Hillary's health problems, which are both severe and unknown in scope -- how many collapses have you had in public, or falls, or strokes? Her pay-to-play shakedown known as the Clinton Foundation and desire to fight Russia over ... SYRIA were just icing on the cake. Hardly fake news, rather stuff memory holed by Hillary's unpaid interns, the legacy media.
People could and did read for themselves Hillary telling Goldman Sachs that she had a public position, and a real, private one. That she favored ground troops and air strikes in Syria. And the fights over Rosatom's approval to buy about a third of US uranium reserves only to be ditched at the last minute after a $20 million donation to the Clinton Foundation. [The true source of Putin's hostility to her]
But fundamentally Hillary lost because her boss Obama promised affordable health care and delivered 100% premium jumps in some cases, averaging 40%. With the promise of unlimited poor non-Whites from Muslim, African,and Latin American countries moving next door (but not in Malibu or Manhattan).
Between the climate hoaxing articles and your refusal to accept election results, you're unfit for any professional position, let alone moderation on an active credible board.
No, Russian Agents Are Not Behind Every Piece of Fake News You See
article debunking the WaPo story
http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/...
There's no such thing as fake news:
http://www.womenscarereport.com/POPS/fozdt/iqcompliant.html?path=dtb&siteid=1148&campaignid=21666&placementid=45203&channel=News&subchannel=National+News&c=0.0106&sxid=bfh5ymobi5yg
Aside from them holding clandestine events with the DNC their own lawyers said they couldn't do?
Note the email subject is "WaPo party" (i.e. Washington Post) and in response to the statement "They aren't going to give us a price per ticket and do not want their party listed in any package we are selling to donors. If we let them know we have donors in town who will be at the debate, we can add them to the list for the party." we get the reply "Great - we were never going to list since the lawyers told us we cannot do it."
Also, we're totally ignoring that Hillary had her "nerd virgins" (their own words for these people) from Correct The Record doing this.
Not scare, Russia *did* hack DNC emails. It did hack a lot of election officials and election sites:
"Russians Hacked Arizona Voter Registration Database -Official"
http://time.com/4472169/russian-hackers-arizona-voter-registration/
Arizona, Illinois...
http://time.com/4471042/fbi-voter-database-breach-arizona-illinois/
And it was Russia, not just the CIA officially confirmed it was a known government hacking group, even private groups interviewing the fake Romanian found he was Russian:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/16/07/26/180204/dnc-hacker-unmasked-he-really-works-for-russia-researchers-say
Kuwaiti incubator babies
Saddam did 9/11
Nigerian yellowcake
Iraq's WMD
That's just one set of and endless series.
I don't think the US needs help getting fake news on Page 1 lede.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Thanks for the input, Comrade.
Shit better not happen!
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/lord-bell-ran-540m-covert-pr-ops-in-iraq-for-pentagon-m5js07xtr
"Lord Bell ran $540m covert PR ops in Iraq for Pentagon"
The communications agency founded by Margaret Thatcher’s PR guru Lord Bell was hired by the US military to orchestrate a huge $540m “covert” propaganda campaign in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
In what is believed to be one of the world’s most costly PR contracts, equivalent to £416m, staff from Bell’s agency were based in Baghdad to disseminate pro-coalition material across the airwaves.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Who is pushing this whole anti-"fake news" agenda? The old, slow and increasingly discredited "real" news sources. OP is exactly right, fake news has been around as long as there has been news, and is not a new or growing phenomenon. Some people are idiots and believe it (how many "Onion" articles have been picked up by legit press? A lot). It cuts both sides, but now when one side loses there is what appears to be a coordinated campaign to shutdown political discourse by citing some extreme and insignificant cases.
The difference is that people no longer trust the MSM. I doubt they pay that much attention to the memes, but the MSM pretty much burned their credibility with a lot of people so we completely ignore whatever you're saying the same way we do with the people who constantly try to sell us viagra.
I don't know why, but it might have something to do with crap like CNN lying and telling us it's illegal to read wikileaks (as a lawyer, Chris Cuomo should've known better), the DNC holding events with the Washington Post that their own lawyers disapprove of, the New York Times posting editorials in favor of pedophilia, hyper-ventillating over #fakenews and ignoring the "nerd virgins" at Correct the Record propaganda teams that are openly employed, or maybe just the absolute disgust and condescension that the average liberal online treats people from the "flyover states" with.
I mean, isn't it just the least bit odd that you have to invent Russian propaganda teams because you can't believe that people disagree with you?
The only fake news is from the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, the MSM.
...at any time. There is no evidence that Russia did anything whatsoever to influence this election, just assertions from the same people that told you that Saddam had dies to Al Queda and had a nuclear weapons program in 2002. This is asinine for two more reasons as well:
1) The idiots pushing this story tend to be the same sort of person who scream and sneer that you're a conspiracy theorist for suspecting Saudi involvement with 911, that the OWS crackdown was federally coordinated, that the DNC conspired with the Hillary campaign to ratfuck Sanders...until information is leaked that confirms those "theories". At which point STFU because it's old news.
2) The United States has been in the business of trying to spy on the communications of every person on the planet. As 911, the anthrax attacks, and the Boston Marathon bombing show, it's completely worthless in its advertised function - catching terrorist attacks before they happen. It would, however, be a great system if you want to engage in the exact sort of influencing of politics and elections that the U.S. is accusing Russia of doing.
Lets be real here. Under Obama, the United States has been willing to murder American teenagers with drones, bomb hospitals, start wars without Congressional authorization, and overthrow democracies - and you think they're just sitting on all this illicit information that could be used to discredit or blackmail people it doesn't like?
When somebody nailed a political flier to the fence-post in 1800 you couldn't fact-check it in seconds with a few clicks of the mouse like you can today. Fake stories have always been around, a few people believe them. Today, on a percentage basis I would say that those numbers are less than ever. This whole "fake news" BS that has suddenly explored in the past two weeks is the real fake news.
They consider elections to be the vulnerable moment for democracy? That suggests a very kinked view on what democracy is.
Each major party had paid trolls flooding social media and any public comment stream almost the entire election season. The WaPo says nothing about the left leaning trolls like CTR and only focuses on conservative websites and alt-news websites (oddly enough).
This should be a wake up call to everyone, be aware that the mainstream media and alt-news is spreading misinformation to sway your opinion one way or another, but these things now can infiltrate your comment streams as well (more so than ever before).
Fortune is already calling BS on this story: http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/russian-fake-news/
As does Slashdot.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Bwaaahahahahaa!
Oh, wait...you're serious? Let me laugh even harder!
Bwaaahahahahhahaaaahahaha!
https://youtu.be/_n5E7feJHw0
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
This site is loaded with post-truthers.
"Fake but accurate", he said.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
Russian fake news deemed more credible than American fake news!
I should clarify that it's the DNC's lawyers who were against this arrangement of selling access to the WaPo party on their donor price list, not the Washington Post's.
I still haven't seen the Washington Post explain this. Please link me to it if you ever find a response.
We are 100 percent certain Saddam Hussein has acquired weapons of mass destruction.
-Propagandist Colin Powell
Believe it!
Yeah, the NSA made some comment about "a nation state" influencing the election and everyone was like "wow, NSA confirms it's Russia!". Without any evidence that it was actually Russia.
The "nerd virgins" social media shit certainly has hit this place with in the past with overt "astroturfing" (fake "grass-roots" activism) and overt product shilling by paid social media workers. I've almost given up on this place a few times when it got especially annoying.
"Nerd virgins" sounds like exactly the sort of insulting term political staffers would use for the people they employ for social media PR.
I think we're seeing the groundwork laid for an attack on news reporting on the net.
Phase 1 was identifying a problem and giving it a name: "fake news".
This has been going on for about a week, it's in the minds of the people, and we're now ready for phase 2.
Phase 2 is proving that Russia swayed the election using an army of internet trolls, botnets, and malware (such as DDS attacks). It's important because it's an attack on Democracy.
Once that's complete, we'll start to see a selection of possible changes that could fix the problem. Such as individual companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) implementing strategies to identify and weaken the effects of "fake news".
Then we'll see a lot of complaints from lesser-known news sites who lose their advertizing, or domain name, or twitter feed, or facebook feed, and whatnot. Maybe a popup from Google similar to "possible malware site" saying "Breitbart might be a fake news site".
Note that during the election reddit had an algorithm that automatically suppressed the "r/The_Donald" subreddit from appearing on the front page "hot topics" list. This became notable in October when the algorithm failed to work properly for a short time, allowing r/TheDonald to take over the front page "hot topics" list.
I've just now created a mantra we can use to help the process along: "The truth can't survive on it's own".
We need to give truth a little boost if it's to survive online.
Apart from loaning Trump a lot of money?
OK, you have a point, it's Trump, he probably won't pay that money back to the Russian banks and if he's been told to do something he won't do it, but he certainly has had a lot of direct financial support from Russia.
Without their help he couldn't have done it. That looks like some sort of influence on the election to me. This fake news thing is shaping up to look like the financial support wasn't the only help he got.
All that is happening now in the US has happened before in Europe. You need evidence? Just google "Putin far right funding" or "Putin Trolls". Here, let me give you a hand:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
http://www.businessinsider.de/...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
Putin is leading a full-scale propaganda war against the west, intended at undermining trust in our democarcies and our institutions.
Time to wake up, America.
This might also interest you in particular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They're the kings of fake and misleading news. Take this with a grain of salt.
Precisely! It's the height of chutzpah for any MSM outlet to complain about fake news, and then blame the Russians for it. It's like the argument about identifying genuine vs fake psychics
Oh, so people who oppose the DNC/Democrats are Communists now? It was always strange seeing Democrats being represented in blue and Republicans in red, but this takes the cake.
Progress with the glorious party of Lincoln comrade
If you click on the link, you'll find that "nerd virgins" is a direct quote :)
Slavs are Europeans. Russians have more in common w/ Serbs, Greeks and Bulgars than they have w/ Chinese, Japanese and Koreans
I've been reading/hearing about people wanting to gatekeep/curate the news for the masses for many years now. This latest election will push that effort into overdrive.
Educate people about what the Internet is, but don't allow greater controls on the flow of public information.
The Democrats haven't been this upset since Republicans took away their slaves. Stop whining and just accept that Trump is president elect, and no amount of bitching is going to change that fact. We put up with Obama ruining America, now it's time for change.
The main reason that not just Hilary, but the Democrats lost heavily - both in congressional and state races - was that the group and identity politics that they played finally boomeranged on them.
By spending the last couple of years pandering to BLM in order to lock the Black vote, they also managed to alienate working class non-Blacks (not just Whites), who are not anti police, not pro terrorist and not anarchists. By focusing heavily on AGW when the economy is tanking and manufacturing is all but dead, they did themselves no favors electorally. When you take the side of environmentalists in inserting a whole navy of regulations that cripple various industries, you are, maybe unwittingly, taking the side against union workers who're trying to pay their bills. Similarly, when you pander to Muslims, despite the fact that after Chattanooga and San Bernardino, a lot of Americans - regardless of race - are legitimately and genuinely scared of where the next terror attack will come from, you've pretty much stated whose side you are on. Things like a determination to take in not just Muslims (bad enough in its own right) but also Syrian refugees in the thousands makes it look like they are more determined to look generous to the rest of the world than whether or not it's safe for American citizens
How the fuck does Slashdot attract so many Trump/Putin defenders? Are all of you in shitsville middle America? No wonder so many of you bitch about your 80k sysadmin/coder jobs. Christ.
Which apparently is currently funding Slashdot.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
American news outlets helped spread fake propoganda about Republican candidate Trump. Chiefly among them the Washington Post and New York Times. Remember the story about the flight attendant that was supposedly fondled by Trump? Yeah...until she mentioned lifting the armrest in 1st class....except seats in 1st class don't have a movable armrest....and she claimed to be flying on a plane that was not in that airlines fleet - then or ever.
In other words, the whole story was made up and once it was discovered was never retracted by either "news" outlet.
As far as I'm concerned the Washington Post has absolutely no credibility when it comes to news reporting. They are on par with the National Enquirer.
Before 2000 it was the other way around, color wise.
I've long thought it interesting just how much the American right learned from Soviet propaganda techniques. I mean, the Heritage Foundations "Accuracy in Media" group was responsible for promoting the myth of "the liberal media". It was a blatant propaganda campaign that was at one time available to read on their website. And then we have Fox's "fair and balanced" news. They took that straight out of the Communist play book. The Soviet Union named their propaganda newspaper Truth.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Actually, in elections, since 1992, all the networks represented the Dems in blue, and the GOP in red. I have no idea what they did in 1988 or 1984, since I came to the US in 1991.
There is nothing legitimate about the major two parties, and anyway nobody really know how big an idiot any president is going to be until they start a war I'm the middle east based on fake news, or push through world's worst government health care plan.
Seriously, a president can just sit in white house 4 years and do NOTHING and with that perform a better service to the nation.
Unfortunately, Trump not likely to sit idle, so we are fucked. But He Is NOT An INSURGENT. Fake news.
Uh, Truth is something different from either fair or balanced. Truth is an absolute, whereas fair or balanced strives to be relative. But what is interesting is that you do have political commentators who openly concede/proclaim that they are right wing - be it Rush Limbaugh, Debbie Schlussel, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity et al, who do not claim to be fair or balanced or any of that. But on the Left, people just don't want to describe themselves as Liberal or Socialist or Communist, ever.
... to how they approached the disinformation war when the Ukraine conflict was underway, you could have seen this from miles away.
Open societies are vulnerable to this kind of attack, and other Western countries like Germany, with an upcoming election are ramping up their counter-intelligence efforts to not be rolled like the US.
Wha...?? The media isn't liberal? Are you delusional? Did the whole world not see the US media drop any pretense at journalism and and became people who had a conclusion that they reached, and then searched for facts to show that Hillary Clinton was a winner. That didn't happen in your world? FUCKING SERIOUSLY?
OK, sorry. Let's back up and provide a citation. " "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is."
--Source: New York Times
Of course, this isn't good enough, it never is. This eight minute video (faster if you play at 1.5 speed) has a great supporter and friend of the liberal media calling them out on their ridiculous liberal bias. That's not good enough either, but I gotta run.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
So just because the US has been doing it you think the Russians will not?
Propaganda is as old as warfare itself.
Russia has been running a disinformation campaign 24/7 since the Ukraine war started.
Just because the US knows how to snoope and spy doesn't mean the Russians unlearned that trade since the cold war. And you can be assured the NSA had nothing on KGB and Stasi.
Yes I know, I had to search for it in that long document and what I wrote relates to that segment.
In that context it does very much look like exactly the sort of insulting term political staffers would use for the people they employ for social media PR.
Ah yes, the Washington Post, perhaps the most virulent and rabid anti-Trump publication, eclipsing even CNN in the vitriol and shameless bias it displayed in its coverage.
The prosecution fucking rests.
I think every professor of philosophy just rolled over in their graves.
they're scientists. And scientists very, very rarely want to 100% commit to something without disclaimers. There are entire books that exist to prove 1+1=2.
The public at large _hates_ all the uncertainty in real science. It makes science appear weak, and leaves it vulnerable to attack. This is why climate science is so easy to 'debunk'...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There are thousands of radio stations, television stations, newspapers and magazines published in the US. The fact that the New York Times leans liberal does not mean all media in the US are liberal. I could claim the opposite because Fox News exists. Either claim would be absurd.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Truth is not absolute.
Scenario: Dad asks child if mom gave permission to have a friend over. Child says yes, but doesn't tell dad that mom changed her mind after the child got in trouble. Did the child tell the truth?
This is exactly the type of manipulation that Fox News uses all day every day. Just look at the scrolling news alerts. How many are questions that imply an answer?
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
There's a left in the USA?
I forgot to mention. I don't mind when commentators advocate for conservative positions. In fact I think it's critically important that they do. I do however mind when someone like Rush Limbaugh takes no responsibility for telling the truth. He has been confronted time and again for making false statements. His answer is that he's an entertainer and not a reporter.
Also, people on the left don't describe themselves as socialist or communist because they are not either. They shy away from the liberal label because it has come to imply a more radical position than most on the left hold. The fact is that the most radical left wing politician today is to the right of the most conservative Republicans of the 1970's. How many people remember when Republicans were voting for welfare and public housing? When is the last time you heard a Democrat argue for welfare? Bernie Sander's is the first politician in 25 years to openly support socialism. Did you see the party rally around him? No, the Blue Dog Democrats smashed him like a bug.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Obama in 2013 signed in a bill that among other things, allows the use of propaganda on US citizens. That includes fake news. So whether or not the Russians did fake stories, our government allowed that sort of stuff to be used against us.
Be seeing you...
The funny thing is that to anyone who has seen the Russian pro-government online news, it's obvious that the West just got pwned by those same very people in that same exact way. We know, because we've seen it work in the same way to suppress opposition to Putin in Russia itself before. Now they have simply broadened the scope.
LOL. I see this got modded down. Sometimes those mods have to be taken with pride :-)
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
It is not Just US.
They have been doing it in several other countries and already succeeded with Brexit or Polish election
If the Russians needed a strategy to influence the US election and control the next President, consider 2 choices. Which one is easier to implement and more reliable?
1. Use negative propaganda to knock down a candidate who is blatantly supported by the mainstream media -- in the hope of electing a billionaire who is (a) notoriously unpredictable and (b) difficult to bribe because he doesn't need the money. It may not be possible to add enough propaganda to overwhelm the lapdog media shills.
2. Write a check to the Clinton Foundation and send email to hrod17@clintonemail.com with instructions. If necessary, threaten to dump the entire email archive after she's elected. What's Hillary gong to do at that point? Call Putin's bluff and hope for the best? The beauty of the blackmail strategy is that the Russians don't actually need the emails. The mere threat would be sufficient.
Washington is filled with people who solicit checks from donors and follow instructions. The Clintons have been doing this on a grand scale for a long time. If you can wire transfer enough money, the Clintons are easily transformed into political muppets. Controlling them is a lot easier than defeating them.
She didn't lose by voters despising her, she got 2 million more vote,
From what I could gather over here, basically half the people who voted for HC actually voted against Trump and would have preferred any other option if there had been one.
Fake news and propaganda built around the emails certainly helped. We'd regularly read selective misleading quotes here from her emails, hoping nobody actually would go read the full email.
I never read even one of the quotes, because the scandal is not in what the emails contained, the scandal is that a high ranking official breaks the rules in a way that would have landed a soldier or a low ranking official in jail.
he also had his hacker hack actual election related data and one voting machine manufacturer.
So why were these things hackable in the first place? If you can't run your election securely, you have no business running an election. Use paper ballots and hand-counting like the rest of the civilized world does for good reasons.
It's time to get real about elections. There's no point in having a large wall of security around the US, if a foreign power can rig an election and stick a puppet into power to control security. Now you Trump lot insist he's not Putin's puppet, but he certainly did provide political cover for those hacks, he certainly repeated Putin's false propaganda about Aleppo, and he certainly has strong business links to Russia.
Wow so much in there.
a) not everyone who points out what a corrupt person HC is automatically is a "Trump lot"
b) Aleppo is full of propaganda from all sides. European media, for example, regularily uses the word "Syrian rebels", conveniently ignoring that there are non non-islamist fighters left in Aleppo. They also use the word "civilians", conveniently ignoring that even respectable NGOs point out that for all we know, the only civilians left in Aleppos rebel controlled areas are the families of the islamist fighters, who are paid by Daesh to stay there.
c) If a foreign power can rig an election, your election system is fucked up and needs wholesale replacement
d) Your claim that Trump is a puppet, much less Putins puppet, is just words. You are entitled to your opinion, just make it obvious that it's only an opinion.
e) Russia is a huge country with 144 million people. If you're into international business, chances are good you have some business links to Russia. Pretty much all of Wall Street has, for example, but I've not heard anyone call Wall Street "Pro-Putin".
f) if you were really concerned so much about Trump, why you didn't prevent the DNC putting up literally the only imaginable candidate who could possibly lose against him in the election?
So if Putin invades a country could we trust the US to follow its agreed defense pacts?
Because Russia is such an aggressor... Wake up to your own countries propaganda, dude.
There is an answer on Yahoo Answers listing 5 countries that Russia invaded between 1890 and 2008, compared to 50 countries invaded or subject of military interventions by the USA in the same time period.
This list of countries invaded by Russia covers a longer time period, and again shows comparatively low aggression compared to most western countries.
this list shows 5 countries in the last 20 years invaded by Russia. A similar list for the USA would have at least 15-20 countries listed.
If you really still believe the tall tale of the Russian aggressiveness, you shouldn't talk about propaganda. You're a textbook example of a propaganda victim.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is incorrect. Up until the 2000 election, networks were highly inconsistent in how they colored the parties, but there was a general pattern that blue was republican and red was democrat. The change was unusual - the network's got together and actually synchronized on it for some unknown reason prior to the election, although they deny it now and claim it was a post-election development (it wasn't; I was there).
See the section on origins of these colors, which also mentions that the 2000 presidential election was the source of this.
That's a purely rhetorical question, of course.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The major mass media groups are quite strongly skewed to left-wing positions and report according with a heavy bias in that direction. This election was proof of that.
I'm not sure why they'd be considered "liberal", though, as liberalism has nothing to do with their positions (which appear closer aligned with socialism and totalitarianism, which is common to both major parties in the US and antithetical to liberalism).
There are true liberal news sources, including a number on the "fake news" list. They did oppose Hillary due to her positions. The fact Trump was incoherent and inconsistent made him a difficult target, but he was similarly disliked. I will admit that he was the least-fought candidate I've seen in these circles, but that's probably more an effect of the extreme repulsiveness of Hillary to actual liberals than any implied support of Trump.
2) The United States has been in the business of trying to spy on the communications of every person on the planet.
And to quote Arlo Guthrie:
And that's a great thing about America. I mean, this is the only
country in the world...l mean, well, it's not the only country
in the world that could find stuff out in two minutes, but it's
the only country in the world that would take two minutes
for that guy.
Other countries would say "Hey, he's the last guy...screw
him", you know? But in America, there is no discrimination,
and there is no hypocrisy,'cause they'll get anybody. And that's
a wonderful thing about America.
emphasis all mine.
Fuller context:
Arlo Guthrie: The Pause of Mr Clause
And to think he wrote that about 50 years ago.
It does remind me of the way I couldn't even comprehend what I was seeing when Hillary openly described people that opposed her for valid reasons as "deplorables". This person wants to be the president of the United States?! If anything, Hillary's picture should be added to every definition of hubris on the internet.
The Proud American Bald Eagles, white males each with his own Gun (straight from the Amendment) are just bots in a vast Russian sponsored botnet.
The idea so so hilarious that it made my day :-D
Oh come off it. Trump has made numerous inflammatory statements that if put into practice could cause the end of civilization as we know it and the replacement is terrifying to many people. Deporting 13 million Mexicans for a start would change the place of America in the world forever. So there is extreme sensitivity to anything he actually does do. Hopefully he just suckered the voting public with his rhetoric and as a "business tactic" was expressing the most hard-line position possible from which he will row back from and "make a deal". But it is not a given that this is the case. The man is more of a religious leader than a politician so we are obviously worried about what he might choose to try and do.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Hillary is an ass-hat for not clarifying that statement. Anyone who thinks that deporting 13 Million Mexicans in cattle trucks is indeed a deplorable and needs calling out. You do not seriously think that US trading would face some problems after the world watches the biggest ethnic cleansing event in history? Don't be surprised if Trump dumps the deplorables now he has been elected, even he must realize that you cannot actually implement the deportation of 13 Million people.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Of that I have no doubt. (And I really, really wish I did.)
Every time I hear anything blamed on Russians these days, I just tune out. It's bullshit after bullshit. Obama blamed Russia for everything and most of it came without any real evidence. I get that Obama got punked by Putin with Snowden, Ukraine, and Syria, but if Obama wants to retaliate, he needs something more substantial than modern day McCarthysim.
I hope things get back to normal with Trump. I'm not holding my breath, but the way things were headed under Obama and Clinton, it looked like nuclear holocaust was inevitable. I'm not ready to die because some egomaniac war criminal with a Nobel Prize on his neck is butthurt he's not so exceptional any more.
A convenient conspiracy theory supported by faux experts. What is next in their agenda of excuses? Will they say chemtrails exist and are a Russian scheme too?
These articles about how the "Russians" spread disinformation appear more like a post election "Wag the Dog" style damage control.
Which seems a more likely scenario: 1) The Russians did it, even though evidence has not been provided; or 2) Oh crap! The people see how we tried to rig the primaries, and how a totally corrupt and biased the mainstream news media is. We have to reframe the scenario so that we can gain control of what the plebs think. If we do not, we will never be able to manipulate an election again where we the DNC and mainstream media pick the winners of an U.S. election.
Greeks are not Slavs. Bulgarians are half-Slavs, half-Asian. Poles, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Czechs -- they are Slavs.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/11/24/npr-finds-fake-news-company-run-liberal-democrat/
The US is not going to deport 13 million Mexicans. The US will deport 13 million illegal aliens. They broke the law, and subvert justice.
And here you can see why the fake news managed to work.
The media in general burned itself to death when they picked a side instead of being impartial.
Even if they didn't did anything wrong, you burn your credibility down when you say something along the lines of "look, we're here all cheering for hillary, but we promise to deliver the news impartially, k?"
Preparing for fake comments from the propagandots. In Soviet Russia, Dots Slash You!
remotely controlled by Putin.
(Captcha bot says "planted" -- impressive again!)
And not only will the US be frowned upon, to say the least, by many countries for that, its economy will also be shaken because of it.
-- Cheers!
Fuck you ivan
All you putin bots can go suck tiny russian cock
Will people please stop posting this nonsense. We know that this story is just propaganda, and what the agenda of the Washington Post is. Slashdot should not be a place for extremist propaganda like this.
Too bad our Slavic brothers in the Kremlin don't treat us Europeans as anything but enemies, or cattle to be subjugated and exploited.
Kuwaiti incubator babies Saddam did 9/11 Nigerian yellowcake Iraq's WMD That's just one set of and endless series.
It's true that they and others got some major stories wrong. It is also true that they have gotten the vast majority of their stories right. Please let me know when you've found an outlet with a better track record.
I have mixed feelings about what they are doing; but, their actions do expose flaws in our perception, reasoning skills and in our election process in the US. Just like a hacker exploits a bug, we patch it and hope we make a better system. That's what we have to do. I know, good luck with that :)
There was some organized effort on the part of our eastern brethren to affect the election.
There might have been 2 or 3 drunk teenagers "Hey lets screw with Hillary!"
My take is it is all imaginary and blown out of proportion comments relating to the Donald's joke that the Russkies might be able to supply the missing 30,000 emails.
The Left wing Libtard Media misquoted and twisted this joke to fit their own agenda and ran with it, then others played off that to make their own fraudulent claims.
The more it gets repeated, the more "relevance" it seems to gain. And thus the repeated lie becomes truth.....
This and other fornications of the news has led me to not listen to any of it, because it keeps blowing the needle off my BS detector!
Rick B.
"Just say it's true even though its not lol" is not a strategy that you have to copy from anyone.
You're a fucking moron. You believed the propaganda you were served about the Soviet Union to start with. Just totally unguarded belief of some vague memory of something you heard about the Soviet Union 20+ years ago. And then you assume that because you see a similarity between the two you assume one derives from the other when there is no evidence of any connection at all, not to mention ITS NOT THAT FUCKING COMPLICATED.
Meanwhile you're stroking yourself, thinking you can see and understand how things are working in this 'dangerous age of propaganda', being very satisfied that you're so far above the masses that fall for that stuff.
When in reality you're practically retarded with little or any capacity for rational thought.
caught out two 'trending' sites on facebook. tacked them down through domain history and using the internet archive. turned out to be fake news sites being run from a PR company in washington.
the sites were purely anti-trump anti-wikileaks propaganda.
dropped a message onto the facebook page of one of the sites with all the information i had compiled and they disappeared shortly after.
Just sounds like more fake propaganda from Hillary fans that are still pissy that they couldn't force everyone else to buy into their brainwashing and SJW agenda.
(USA Today have themselves declared that they are politically biassed:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
)
Yeah. Last 8 years, it was led by someone named Obama. Now, it stands to be taken over by the likes of Sanders, Warren and Ellison
Oh, he did get a good portion of the vote, and won a number of states - more than Ted Cruz did. It was the super-delegates that sunk him. Had the Dems had someone like Reince, instead of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, he'd probably have trounced Clinton in the primaries, and then trumped Trump in the general
I didn't claim that Greeks or Bulgars are Slavs: I just said that the Russians have more in common w/ them than they have w/ the Chinese or Japanese, which is what the GP AC claimed
WaPo has never been particularly honest or reputable, it just had a reputation on the left for pushing left-friendly stories.
They publicly admitted they assigned 20+ reporters in the 2016 cycle to dig up dirt on Trump and try to defeat him - no such anti-Clinton effort.
Have you even READ this insanely whacko article of theirs??
Their "expert researchers" are anonymous with a website that is is a joke. WaPo will not say who these experts are, will not identify who is funding them, etc. For all we know, these "experts" are Hillary people, or angry liberal WaPo reporters, or Putin stooges, or soon-to-need-new-jobs Obama staffers.... Without knowing who these "experts" are and who is funding them, they have ZERO credibility and the WaPo shows it has no credibility by publishing such a completely unsubstantiated fake news story.
Hillary is an ass-hat for not clarifying that statement. Anyone who thinks that deporting 13 Million Mexicans in cattle trucks is indeed a deplorable and needs calling out. You do not seriously think that US trading would face some problems after the world watches the biggest ethnic cleansing event in history? Don't be surprised if Trump dumps the deplorables now he has been elected, even he must realize that you cannot actually implement the deportation of 13 Million people.
Cattle trucks? Railway boxcars are more efficient transportation for 13 million illegal aliens to their homeland, Mexico.
We have a democratically elected republic.
"American Democracy" isn't a thing.
How many stories did Wikileaks publish that made Russia or Putin look bad? Zero. How do you explain that? Because nothing scandalous ever happens in Russia... ?
Whether from its inception or just over time, by now Wikileaks is just a Russian propaganda outlet that was used with extreme effectiveness for the character assassination of HRC. Yeah, I too thought at one point that Wikileaks was impartial. Silly me.
Compared to Trump, Putin suddenly looks smarter, wiser, more youthful, more diplomatic, less decadent, and less like a nepotistic oligarch, than he ever did before. Meanwhile, America looks 100% like a Jerry Springer show, with Oligarch Trump for president. It could even spell the end of US military and economic leadership - Trump basically declared this as one of his policy goals, like leaving NATO, WTO, and similar global partnerships.
This is the greatest propaganda coup of the 21st century. Well played, Mr. Putin, well played.
Fuck you, American Exceptionalist. On its very best day, the United States is a thousand times worse than the worst caricature of Russia you mindless red baiting sycophants can imagine.
Putin isn't drone bombing entire extended families to death with robot planes on the other side of the world from him, in Costa Rica, the way America has in the Middle East for bullshit reasons.
Putin didn't maintain a worldwide kidnapping and torture program that beat at least 100 people to death and continues to keep others imprisoned a decade after they've been cleared for release, the the way America has with Gitmo.
Putin hasn't overthrown two democracies in his (longer) time in office the way Obama has.
I could go on all day, as the worst terrorist state in the world, and the word's worst purveyor and provocateur of violence, is the United States of America.
You mean the western-backed coup against Ukraine's elected government, which was launched when the western, IMF austerity coalition couldn't win at the ballot box and decided to make common cause with neo-nazis? What about it?
Could be worse...could be the sycophantic U.S. media. Which, as Howard Zinn noted, would be envied by any dictatorship for its reverence to bullshit storylines put forth by the state.
Yeah, I can see that you totally understand all sides of the conflict, and are not just buying into the Russian narrative.
By who? Eurotrash? Fuck what they think.
To paraphrase NDT, the great thing about facts is they remain true, whether or not American Exceptionalists believe in them.
It's a fact that the assistant SoS, Victoria Nuland, is on video bragging about spending billions to "bring Ukraine the future it deserves." In front of a big Chevron banner - and then you AE's whine and project about Russia trying to influence the presidential election.
It's a fact that the impeachment vote didn't have the number of votes required to remove Yanukovych from office under their constitution. A vote that was pushed through despite Yanukovych agreeing to early elections. Which also means that it was a coup of cowards, if they didn't believe they could beat him at the ballot box.
Neat thing is that you can throw this inconvenient fact in the face of Western Exceptionalists, no matter if your hack lapel pin has an elephant or a donkey on it. The two parties have traded control of Congress and the White House, so each of the last five presidents have ended their terms in office with the opposite party in charge of the House and the Senate. Now imagine that it's May 2016 (or May 2008, 2000, 1992, 1988) and the party in Congress doesn't think it can win that year's presidential election. So they impeach the president with a majority vote, but fall short of the 67 required by the Constitution to remove Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama from office. The opposition DGAF, and have armed mobs of supporters attack government buildings and force R/B/C/B/O to flee or risk getting the Gaddafi treatment. Now, also imagine that Russia immediately recognizes that the junta as the legitimate government - after they've spent billions supporting the opposition party, in front of banners for Russian energy companies.
Would you call that a coup? Of course you would. So maybe you need to check your narratives, American Exceptionalist.
In return for uranium? Oh wait, that was Obama and Hillary.
She gave them uranium and proposed the "Russian reset", so why would they do this to our empress in waiting? This sounds like the sort of fake news the mainstream media is whining about, yet approves of when it supports their view of the world.
To make a short story short:
The US meddled in the Ukraine conflict exploiting existing social fractures and feelings of disenfranchisement.
The Russian having been pushed hard in the Ukraine retaliated by meddling in the US election by exploiting existing social fractures and feelings of disenfranchisement.
BTW I am not particular ticked at Russia, they do what they think is best in their national interest, but people like you, who are blind on one eye and refuse to see the whole picture. And just to be clear IMHO America is, not now, nor ever was particular exceptional.
From the place that gave us "creative" as a noun I should have expected this shit. If you don't know what it means why get angry about it?
Fake news will be used as an excuse to suppress any dissenting views, not in line with managed corporate media. In short, if you have a different take on an event, you will be branded fake and suppressed. they will use it to suppress bloggers too, net neutrality and freedom of speech are a threat to corporate media control of dissemination of propaganda to the masses and the continued manipulation and control of the population. Trump is against net neutrality and killing net neutrality will be as corrosive to freedom on the net as china's great firewall...
"Conspiracy theorists" are the right wing equivalents of "Experts". The change in title is courtesy of the MSM.
In this case I think the "experts" are the less credible of the two.
Serious question: Why would Trump need to borrow money from Russian banks? Also, where is literally any proof of that at all?
I won't hold my breath on the latter question
I want the libs to think most Americans are really on board with the 2% growth, dysfunctioning healthcare system, open borders but weren't able to really speak because of some oddities in the system and hacking.
... but they should look beyond all that to make it easier for the GOP in 2020.
I want the libs to run another candidate just like Hillary. Maybe Warren. Or Sanders. Next time the weirdness won't happen, guys. It's right around the corner!
Obama told Hillary to concede, and she did
One slight difference - that's not an undisputed fact, like the U.S. spending years and billions of your taxpayer dollars to undermine another democracy. That's a conspiracy theory on the level of chem trails, Obama's birth certificates, and the CIA planting timed explosives on the WTC as there is not one shred of evidence only assertions from the same sort of people that lied to you about Saddam's WMD's and ties to Al Queda. But if there's one thing about American Exceptionalists, there's nothing more they love than to get fooled and fooled again by the MIC.
And even if you were right, that was more than made up for by the entire U.S. media establishment shitting on Trump 25/8 (yes, it was that often, with even Fox getting in on it). It does nothing to change the fact that you and your tax dollars are in the business of outright overthrowing democracies, when manipulating elections isn't enough.
What picture. The one where the U.S. has overthrown two democracies just in Obama's term in office? Who had a worldwide torture and kidnapping program - Putin or Bush? Is Bush blowing up kids in Costa Rica with robot planes for bullshit reasons the way Obama is in Afghanistan? Has Putin been trying to spy on the electronic communications of every single person on the planet?
Howard Zinn has a nice quote, to the effect that any dictatorship in the world would be envious of the syncophantic media. We can extend that quote to the willfully blind.
One slight difference - that's not an undisputed fact
Just as the Soviet and East German clandestine work was not an undisputed fact until the wall came down. For god's sake Putin worked as KGB agent in East Germany (Dresden to be precise), and we have a pretty clear idea how much he spends on disinformation.
To put this in the same league as chem trail brain-fuckery is beyond naive. Don't expect Russia to advertise their capabilities. Unfortunately, there is little hope for the equivalent to a Russian Snowden.
And to the extend that Russia ain't that bad, it is mostly that their reach is far shorter, and they can't afford the intelligence and military apparatus the US has. But go and talk to some Chechens to get a reality check.
Yes, the US does a lot of very bad things. And I'd wish more Americans would be aware of it, but that doesn't mean that outside countries don't try to fuck with you.
Your assertions are nothing but ass-backwards American exceptionalism. There is nothing exceptional about the US. It's neither exceptionally good nor bad.
Again with the hand waiving. It's the United States that has been busted for trying to spy on everyone in the world, not Russia. You're still in chem trail territory here, sorry.
That's exactly where you are until proven otherwise. You have evidence that Russia has been busy tapping under sea cables, wiring taps directly into the communication centers of telecom giants like AT&T, and spying on the personal cell phones of it's closest allies the way the U.S. has with AT&T and Merkel - put up or STFU.
Who's beaten 100 people to death under said program (that we know of) - Russia or the United States.
Who's allowing boy fucking on their military bases - Russia or the United States. Your tax dollars make you complicit in fucking teen and preteen boys in the ass. Over and over again, right now. Can you say the same of Russian taxpayers?
Who's overthrown two democracies since he took office - Obama or Putin?
I could go on all day, American Exceptionalist. You're firing stones from a glass house surrounding a mountain, at a molehill.
You first. But do explain why Russia is horrible for bombing opposing Muslims on Russia's doorstep in one country, while the U.S. is a saint for bombing Muslims on the other side of the planet from them in almost a dozen countries. Muslims who had zero chance of being a threat to your American Exceptionalist ass.
Exceptional bullshit. The U.S. is the greatest terrorist state, and the greatest instigator of instability and violence than the rest of the world combined. You might want to clean the entrails of an entire extended family wiped out by a single Obama drone strike of a wedding before you dare shake it in someone else's direction, boy-fucker.
Dude you clearly did not live through the cold war. The only think Americans are exceptional at is being exceptionally bad at clandestine operations.
Enjoy your comfortable black and white world.
(BTW just for the record I am not American).
Okay, I'll bite. To appeal to you, would a candidate have to (or even be able to) say "I'm a dirtbag, so you should vote for me" ? Are there any objectively moral high grounds?