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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!
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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.
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
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".
Our fake news said Hillary had a 99% chance of winning the election.
We don't need Russians for fake news. The US can do pretty well making its own.
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.
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!
...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?
Down the list AC:
http://time.com/4472169/russia...
" did not say whether the hackers were working for the Russian government"
http://time.com/4471042/fbi-vo...
"It's unclear who targeted the databases"
"Cyber Division did not identify the intruders or the two states targeted"
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Fortune is already calling BS on this story: http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/russian-fake-news/
"Fake but accurate", he said.
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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.
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.
Slavs are Europeans. Russians have more in common w/ Serbs, Greeks and Bulgars than they have w/ Chinese, Japanese and Koreans
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
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 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.