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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.
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.
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
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.
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".
...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?
Except it's not BS. I'm multilingual and follow some main online news publications of different European countries. What the US has witnessed now has been happening in Europe since Russia annexed Crimea. Russian government trolls are flooding discussion forums with pro-Putin and anti NATO / western propaganda, linking to phony stories on Russian news websites for "proof". They try to undermine trust in our democratic institutions spreading all kinds of wild conspiracy theories while accusing others of conspiracy theories when they are called out.
Russia is leading a full-scale propaganda war against the west, trying to change public opinion while funding far-right groups across Europe. They are basically trying to destabilize us. It's no joke:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
http://www.businessinsider.de/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
I guess Russia has recently extended its operations to the US and has been disturbingly successful. The weakest candidate - Trump - became president, and the Duma applauded and cheered:
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
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.
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.
Idiots posting nonsense in comments does very little when people post fact-based rebuttals.
Take for example China's "50 cent" party. They're well-known and rather openly mocked by the people.
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.
And there's the difference. Publishers can be held accountable. Journalists who lie can be held accountable. Dan Rather got caught lying. He lost his job and his reputation.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Interesting links. The Soviet Union and latterly Russia have maintained a strong propaganda presence in the media for decades. During the cold war the favorite channel was exceptionally attractive young women whom presumably could be trusted not to spout hateful lies whilst mellifluously catching the ear of the western strong men they were pitched at traducing. You can still hear this style of coercion in the spokespeople for Assad who are undoubtedly Russian trained. We also have the prospect of RT, the exceptionally effective television news channel which will have a video of any global event online. Most of the news is as solid as the BBC or CNN so it is probably widely watched outside the USA. The "alternative" viewpoint to the Americans is as obvious as "Al Jazzera's".
And then we come to whatever the bright young minds in the Russian secret service might have developed over the last 50 years from traditional propaganda. I for one would be surprised if they had not become aware of the internet and the possibilities of fake bloggers and news. Under Putin there has been a resurgence of military aggressiveness by the Russians and frankly it is their style to use propaganda to undermine and attack their enemies.
The Americans despite the amazing success of Hollywood appear unable to understand the concept of hearts and minds in furthering their interests, relying on brute military force and economic power. American propaganda is disorganized and unappealing, the message "I am rich and I have my boot on your neck" does not resonate. The USA in any case does not seem to understand the power of propaganda.
If the Russians truly have effected a shift in the result of the American presidential election then they are to be congratulated on their cunning. What we do about it is more problematic as it attacks a weakness of our own creation. The fact free hate propaganda of the American right has created the opening for this attack by Russian fake news. For example the question of Barack Obama's birth certificate was used to attack the president despite it being a complete lie. This has opened up a channel for malicious propaganda from any source, it would be fairly hilarious if the Russians had taken advantage of it to elect Trump.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Of course RT denies it, that is the job of RT for goodness sake. It is the reputable source of news with Russian propaganda as and when needed. You really ought to look at the history of propaganda through the cold war. News sources are always used to put the party line because their general truthiness is used to mask the necessary lies used to undermine the enemy. Duh!
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Idiots posting nonsense in comments does very little when people post fact-based rebuttals.
That's just flat out wishful thinking. Screw politics: just look at any one of the ludicrous EM drive threads that's come up recently. It isn't politics, it's physics. There are actual verifiable facts. You can go check them yourselves. You can read about them on hundreds of different books, websites, forums and so on. You can check all the maths from first principles too if you like.
And yet, people still believe the nonsense comments, and nonsense articles. Once people Believe no amount of fact based rebuttals will shift them.
And that's about physics. It's way worse when it comes to anything remotely political.
SJW n. One who posts facts.