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Facebook Will Share Copies of Political Ads Purchased by Russian Sources With the US Congress (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook will turn over copies of political ads purchased by Russian sources to congressional lawmakers, who are investigating the country's potential interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Initially, Facebook had only released those ads -- 3,000 of them, valued at about $100,000 -- to Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who is spearheading the government's probe into Russia's actions. Facebook had withheld those details from House and Senate leaders, citing privacy concerns. But the move drew sharp rebukes from the likes of Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has charged in recent days that Facebook may not have done enough to scan its systems for potential Russian influence and to ensure that such foreign purchases -- otherwise illegal under U.S. law -- don't happen again. "After an extensive legal and policy review, today we are announcing that we will also share these ads with congressional investigators," wrote Colin Stretch, the company's general counsel. "We believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election."
Good: can we investigate continued collusion with foreign bodies on the left?
e.g. Iran, North Korea, China, Russia
Can we also investigate e.g. antifa?
Can we also investigate left-leaning media outlets like CNN promoting stories originating from Russia Today etc?
Investigators also said OneVoice didn’t turn explicitly political until days after the grant period ended.
Evidently there was an investigation, hence investigators, at least according to the source you linked. Maybe you should stop rushing to post first and, you know, read.
media matters and david brock spent 1,000,000$ correcting the record on social media in a feeble attempt to sway perception of Hillary. does anyone believe a 50k ad buy or 100k made a difference if its true?
Mostly because the accusations against Hillary turned out to be bullshit as the investigation showed.
Mostly because the accusations against Hillary turned out to be bullshit as the investigation showed.
Which ones? The ones where the FBI plainly spelled out the illegal things she did and directly told you that anyone else would have faced legal jeopardy for the same acts? The ones where all of her staff had to be offered immunity deals before they would even talk about it? The ones where the simply broke federal law at numerous levels and looked you in the eye and lied about (and still does to this day), but assures us that her husband's private meeting with the chief law enforcement officer who would be tasked with indicting her, and who then had to recuse herself, didn't have any impact at all? Gotcha.
You're confusing "got away with it" with "didn't do it."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That they're already withholding the ads from the public is suspect.
Second, their assertion that the ads damage democracy is also suspect.
Wikileaks did not hurt democracy by revealing the corruption of the DNC and Hillary Clinton. (Debate cheating, anti-Bernie rigging, etc)
Exposing people to information about their political masters is ALWAYS GOOD. It literally cannot be bad, unless you are a hypocritical partisan shitbag more interested in protecting The Narrative than having The Truth.
Hillary and her supporters spent an estimated $1.2 Billion, roughly twice what Trump spent. And she lost. And she blames the Ruskies for her loss. Seriously?
Yeah, and the football team gained way more yards and still lost, we should change the way the game is scored.
Yeah, and the baseball team had way more runners on base and still lost, we should change the way the game is scored.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The Russian story line has reached a dead end every single direction it goes. They won't just admit that it was a fabricated narrative to try to torpedo Trump. They keep coming up with new things and all the foaming mouth never-trumpers get into a fevered pitch about it until it's revealed to be nothing of substance. That's happened with every single part of the Russian narrative from the Dossier to now.
The US' job is to figure out how much the Obama Administration was spying on its own citizens.
The Obama Administration wasn't just spying on citizens of interest, they were spying on presidential candidate of an opposing party. Even if you hate "The Orange Orangutans's" guts, this should be deeply troubling.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
You're dumb. The FBI said, "We don't think we can prosecute her because we don't think we can show that she broke the law as the law is written."
But even then, even IF the FBI had said, "We found nothing" you'd still say evaded prosecution, and even real investigating, because she's rich, famous, and Obama was running the show, because it's clear that your mind is made up before it processes information available to you.
"Old man yells at systemd"
But, if there are no Russian ads, what will the Democrats blame their next election loss on?
i think hillary trotted out a whole host of entities and people who can be blamed in her new book.
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its ironic that these politicians think they get elected by amercans voters, who can be easily manipulated by alleged fake news from few macedonians, and $ 100,000 in facebook ads.
they have zero respect for voters who they claim to represent, and who, according to them, are unable to think for themselves, even when they have huge number of sources for information, from one sided legacy media to alternate media(like wikileaks), quite apart from ads and fakes.
voters, if they have any sense, should vote them out just for that attitude. and that seems to be happening , though more fundamentally for other elitist attitudes that are in conflict with voters' interests as well.
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in reality, this russia probe is just the visible death pangs and hysteria of a mono cultural elite(am elite more exclusive than white males they rage against ) that has been in control of the levers of power for about 50 years, and are now starting to lose them, starting with narrative control.
hopefully they will restrict themselves to sanctimonious screams like the probe, and refrain from resorting to stuff other elites who ended up in the dust bin of history used when desperate . they will regret such tactics.
Exactly. These were PUBLIC ads ostensibly purchased by Russians, that were shown to voters. Why is it we can't release them to anyone but Robert Mueller and maybe a select few congressman, when they were already public? What's the big secret here?
If NBC claimed they found out some of the ads they showed on TV during the election were paid for by Russians, but then wouldn't show them to us due to "privacy" concerns (when they'd already been plastered on TV), would you buy it? Why does anyone buy it when facebook says ads that were plastered on their site are too private to see?
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Death pangs of an elite? Are you seriously saying that Trump is not himself part of that very elite himself?
This idea that a millionaire who appointed numerous wall street people to his cabinet, and is doing his best to help the rich get tax cuts and further the benefit of large corporations is baffling to me. And before you start bashing me as a Hillary supporter, I'm not even American, and I think Hillary was an awful candidates that the democrats should have never ran. But honestly, the fact that this idea that Trump is somehow separate from, or against 'the elites' is without any basis in reality. He's a different breed of elite than Washington has typically seen in power, but he is still most certainly a member of the elite himself.
Look at how oligarchies are born. It doesn't matter if they're right-wing oligarchies like in Russia, or left-wing oligarchies like in Venezuela, the basic formula is always pretty much the same: a political movement is born, lead by a strongman who most often is a part of the wealthy elite himself. This man then declares to everyone that corruption and greed have ruined everything and that he and only he can save the people from these corrupt elites. This is then used as a reason to purge the major institutions of ideological opponents who're then replaced with a more loyal group of people, often from the close circle of the man himself. This is usually followed by the stripping of the parliament of any de-facto power, and the manning of all relevant courts with judges loyal to the party.
The end result of such movements is pretty much always worse off for the people because of course they never wanted to get rid of the elites, or the corruption, they just wanted to overthrow the elites and take their place. Venezuela has more oil than saudi-arabia but its economy is now below Zimbabwe because what Chavez created and what Maduro has continued is a system so thoroughly corrupt that billions and billions have been shoveled into the back pockets of the elites while the people are now starving. Yet they still claim that they're 'continuing the revolution for the Venezuelan people', and who do they blame on this issue that's entirely of their own creation? 'The elites' of the US and EU, without whom, according to Maduro Venezuela would be prosperous.
As I said this is not a left-right -thing. This is a liberal vs. authoritarian thing. Russia has exactly the same deal going on, where Putin has consolidated all the power to himself and his close group of allies and divided the massive fortunes of his country's raw materials to the select few and shut down any and all opposition by painting it as just malicious 'western propaganda' that seeks to destroy Russia.
What's scary to me is that traditionally Americans have been good at spotting this development when it happens in other countries, even at times supporting it covertly or openly when the new oligarchy is more pro-US than the old. But now that it looks like the exact same deal is staring in your own country, out in broad daylight, somehow myopia sets in and people fall right for it just because they dislike the status quo so much. Traditionally the thing that has kept the US resilient against such movements is the strength of American institutions and the separation of powers that has been able to keep the president in check but Trump is already hard at work at discrediting and attacking all of those institutions: the courts, the media, the FBI and so on. I still personally want to believe that the institutions will withstand these blows and america will not turn the way of Russia or Turkey because I believe there's a large enough segment of intelligent Americans who will
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
No, I think the last election demonstrated that voters are easily manipulated and not that intelligent, as Winston Churchill pointed out decades ago ("The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.").
Forget democrats for a moment. Let's just look at the republicans. You had a whole host of at least somewhat viable candidates. Then you had a narcissistic sociopath with the mental capacity of a rotting melon who has decades of history of demonstrable behavior that would certainly have made anyone a non-viable candidate.
But did the republicans choose a smart, eloquent, respectable conservative? No. They chose the real life version of Biff Tannen. Not smart, not eloquent, and certainly not respectable. The voters had many chances to chose someone else, but they didn't. So why was he selected and then elected when there were far better candidates?
No, voters in general are not smart. That's why ads work, especially attack ads. It's why despotic chants work. It's why negative smear campaigns work. It's why fake news works. It's how people like Trump can get elected.
~X~