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Twitter Notifies 1.4 Million Users of Interaction With Russian Accounts (recode.net)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: At least 1.4 million people on Twitter engaged with content created by Russian trolls during the 2016 presidential election, the company revealed on Wednesday. That's more than double the amount that Twitter initially identified -- and perhaps still just a fraction of the full universe of users who may have witnessed Kremlin propaganda over that period. In announcing the new data in a blog post, Twitter also said it had notified all 1.4 million affected users that they saw election disinformation. That fulfilled a pledge that the company previously made to members of Congress who are investigating Russia's tactics on social media. Notified users included those that followed one of the roughly 3,000 accounts belonging to the Internet Research Agency, the troll army tied to the Russian government, as well as users who retweeted, replied, liked or mentioned those IRA accounts in their tweets. But Twitter did not alert users who merely saw Russian troll tweets in their feeds but did not interact with the content. Nor did it reach out to users who saw tweets from the roughly 50,000 Russian bots that tweeted election-related content around November 2016.
Trump refused to implement the sanctions law, claiming the mere threat of sanctions was working.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-sanctions/trump-administration-holds-off-on-new-russia-sanctions-despite-law-idUSKBN1FI2V7
However his CIA chief says Russia has not let up attacking the USA and expects Russia to interfere in the US Midterm elections:
http://time.com/5124313/cia-mike-pompeo-russia-midterm-elections/
Republicans should clean house, Nunes is blowing a smoke screen to hide Russian attacks on the US elections, and you can't have the Republican head of the Intelligence oversight committee giving cover for a *foreign* intelligence agency to attack the US.
Put a flag icon of the accounts country of origin over their tweets. That way you can see where it's coming from.
When it comes to trolling, I will be most grateful if anyone presents clear-cut example(s) of what Russians are alleged to have exposed to us.
I have a feeling it's not that different when compared to what the US agencies do themselves.
So folks, spit out some examples.
Exactly!
The liberals are pushing the idea of globalism and acceptance of other people, but they are critical of each and every person that has even the slightest interaction with somebody from Russia.
Which should beg the question: What's the difference between foreign political trolling and domestic political campaigning? We already allow corporations and any domestic actor to express their political opinions, constructively and not. Is it somehow different when it's a foreign actor?
"... commit myself to defend ... the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic ..."
There was a claim, [possibly made by Vlado himself,] that many of the Russian IPv4's interacting with Twitter traffic were due to TOR exit servers based in Russia.
So we are back to a verifiable {micro-sized airborne particles of combustion origin and planar reflective surfaces} situation
how many users engaged with content created by american trolls?
Wonder who they were targeting...
In fact, it's pretty clear that they were targeting America in general.
Despite the popular thinking, all the evidence is that they weren't actually trying to help one political party over another-- their intent was just to disrupt American society, and the democratic process, any way that they could.
(and not just America-- they wanted to disrupt western European countries as well. And, of course, it all stems from their attempts to destabilize Ukraine.)
I haven't seen any evidence that Russia ever attacked us in any way,
Depends on what you mean by "attacked". What they did was spread disruptive messages primarily through social media, with the apparent intent of sowing discord and animosity. If you "haven't seen evidence", I take it to mean that you haven't actually looked at any of the evidence.
I will point out, however, that what they seem to have done here is not actually illegal. They posted messages. Turns out it's legal to post messages of almost any sort. (They may have violated terms of service by using a bot army to do a lot of this... but it's not clear that violating terms of service is actually a crime).
Except for the part about breaking into the DNC email system. That part actually was illegal.
nor that they hacked our elections,
Depends on what you mean by "hacked our elections". There's no evidence, for example, that they ever successfully broke into voting machines to change votes (although there is some evidence that they did some probing). What they did was use their army of bots to spread disruptive messages. Is that "hacking an election?" Well, if social hacking is "hacking."
something Obama and Clinton said could not happen when it was them being accused of it before the election.
Interesting, but, no, neither one of them ever said that it's impossible to hack an election. They did not say this.
When it comes to trolling, I will be most grateful if anyone presents clear-cut example(s) of what Russians are alleged to have exposed to us.
So, I take it you didn't follow any of the links in the summary, like say this one https://www.theverge.com/2018/... or this one https://blog.twitter.com/offic...
Why are you bothering to comment if you aren't even interested enough to follow the links?
you could have tried a google search, too: https://www.google.com/search?...
Ya... nothing in the links specifically talk about how they identify that an account was opened by a "Russian"
They use terms like, "Linked with" and other vague phrases. But nothing that says they can prove an account was opened in this location by some individual. If I were in Southern CA and opened an account and posted material similar to what they claim are Russian accounts, they'd likely claim I was a Russian.
More likely they are simply choosing what accounts to claim are Russian based solely on their content.
If you have a better explanation, I'm listening.
BTW, calling someone a Russian simply because you don't like their messages is pretty much the bottom of the barrel when it comes to any kind of discussion. Conceptually, it's no different than scoffing at someone and dismissing them as a N*ger or K*ke, or any other racist pejorative. It is pure intellectually laziness and an explicit admission that you have lost the argument.
Russia wants the U.S. to be divided politically.
This has been the historical norm.
the last Presidential election was divisive. Regardless of who won, bipartisanship is, if not at an all time low, pretty close to it's all time low.
I honestly do not believe that if Clinton had won we would have the same merry-go-round circus shit-show we have now. Sure, many GOP would do obstruct with like Obama but that is hardly new and not the same level of divisiveness.
Part of the issue is cognitive dissonance on the left after Trump won. Because the rhetoric was "literally Hitler" they had to accept the fact that people disagree with them and try to figure out why or double down and find any excuse to validate their belief no matter how faulty or weak the evidence. Saying "The country is more racist than I thought.[1] Russians stole the election.[2] Trump only won because collusion with Russia[3]" etc is easier than to admit your were wrong or that the media that influenced your belief was wrong. There is no evidence as it stands for any of those things. If Clinton had won it would have been a "sigh of relief that we avoided disaster " and "avoided literally Hitler" and they could continue to believe what they already believed without having to face disagreement or that they might be wrong.
Honestly, given the State of the Union address and the Democrats sitting on their hands for literally anything said, I am not sure how you can get any bipartisan agreement. I am curious how the opposition party reaction during the State of the Union can predict future agreements. Did the GOP sit for everything said by Obama or only for things they don't like? Were they able to make progress on the things they agreed on errr stand up for?
1) The only evidence was a statistic that had hate crimes rise a little and if you break down the numbers most of the increase was attributed to more hate crimes against white men.
2) There is no evidence that Russia changed a single vote or hacked a single voting machine.
3) There is an investigation but as it stands now there is no evidence. Anyone claiming otherwise before the evidence is out is only looking for things to confirm their per-existing belief.
Traitors.