Slashdot Mirror
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.
They're the kings of fake and misleading news. Take this with a grain of salt.
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.
Get over it.
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!
The difficulty in understanding the Russian is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European, but an Asiatic, and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinese or a Japanese, and from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. In addition to his other amiable characteristics, the Russian has no regard for human life and they are all out sons-of-bitches, barbarians, and chronic drunks
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.
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".
She didn't lose by voters despising her, she got 2 million more vote, despite stuff like the "Clinton has FBI agent killed" stuff. Or the endless trolls selectively quoting from emails and hoping we don't read the full email.
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.
But the biggest issue is the hacks of election registration databases in swing states. Putin didn't just hack the DNC emails, he didn't just build plausible but false propaganda around those emails, he also had his hacker hack actual election related data and one voting machine manufacturer.
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.
So if Putin invades a country could we trust the US to follow its agreed defense pacts? With Trump in charge? The man who won't even pay contractor bills, will suddenly follow international agreements against his buddy?
... 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/...
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
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!
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/...
If you click on the link, you'll find that "nerd virgins" is a direct quote :)
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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
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.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/11/24/npr-finds-fake-news-company-run-liberal-democrat/
Preparing for fake comments from the propagandots. In Soviet Russia, Dots Slash You!
remotely controlled by Putin.
(Captcha bot says "planted" -- impressive again!)
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.
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.
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/...
)
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.
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?