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Twitter Suspends Hundreds of Accounts Linked To Russian Operatives (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: Twitter says it found some 200 accounts linked to the same Russian groups that bought $100,000 worth of ads on Facebook to sow political unrest and manipulate U.S. voters during the presidential election. The Twitter accounts, which were taken down over the last month, were linked to 470 accounts and pages that Facebook traced to the International Research Agency, a Russian troll farm. According to a blog post released by Twitter Thursday after briefing staffers on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, the groups on Facebook had 22 Twitter accounts. Twitter found an additional 179 accounts connected to those 22. Twitter also shared information on Russian news outlet Russia Today, or RT, which has ties to the Kremlin, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.
It's like McCarthy is back to switch the lights on and the cockroaches are running for cover. We've got to find and exterminate the Russians!
Are we SURE we want to do this folks? This kind of thing really doesn't work out so well... The Salem witch trials, McCarthy's search for communists, they all turned into blots on our history. If we are really out there shaming anybody and everybody who has any kind of real or imagined connection to the Russians, we will find that anybody and everybody will be subject to scrutiny. Is that where you want to go?
Also, be warned that this is how the Nazi's got started politically and turned the whole "protect us from the Russians" idea into a cottage industry that brought us into WW2. Think long and hard about the politics in play here and who keeps pushing this. We are on dangerous ground when Twitter and Facebook feel it necessary to do this kind of thing to save face.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Okay. Am I prohibited from purchasing ads from US media companies? If so, why?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Unfortunately, as dollars have been ripped away from historical news organizations where educated professionals vetted sources, researched stories and were held accountable; we now throw billions at the immediate gratification "like" without a clue to what's true and false - only what "feels good". Critical reasoning is for the most part a thing of the past...wait, who predicted this?
oh, ya... this was written in 1995 - 32 years ago:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
---Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Do we really want our democracies decided by memes and whoever trolls the hardest?
It's nothing new of course, politics has always been dominated by ignorance, prejudice and bullshit. It's just so much more efficient now.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Contributing to a campaign is not the same as expressing an opinion or taking out ads on how a US citizen should vote. Indeed it is hard to see how you can prevent the latter given freedom of speech since ads are really nothing more than a megaphone: they allow your opinion to travel further and reach more people.
It might be unwelcome involvement but then so was Obama's intervention in the Brexit referendum (which backfired spectacularly, unfortunately) so you can hardly blame other countries for the same behaviour as your former president.
The Russians did nothing different from what Obama did with getting involved in the Brexit referendum.
ORLY?
So Obama secretively bought a bunch of ads to try to influence the referendum?
Brexiteers made direct claims about the US, and the US via Obama responded directly through public channels. That is more or less exactly not what happened with Russia in the presidetial election.
SJW n. One who posts facts.