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NBC Publishes 200,000 Tweets Tied To Russian Trolls
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: NBC News is publishing its database of more than 200,000 tweets that Twitter has tied to "malicious activity" from Russia-linked accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. These accounts, working in concert as part of large networks, pushed hundreds of thousands of inflammatory tweets, from fictitious tales of Democrats practicing witchcraft to hardline posts from users masquerading as Black Lives Matter activists. Investigators have traced the accounts to a Kremlin-linked propaganda outfit founded in 2013 known as the Internet Research Association (IRA). The organization has been assessed by the U.S. Intelligence Community to be part of a Russian state-run effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential race. And they're not done. At the request of NBC News, three sources familiar with Twitter's data systems cross-referenced the partial list of names released by Congress to create a partial database of tweets that could be recovered. You can download the streamlined spreadsheet (29 mb) with just usernames, tweet and timestamps, view the full data for ten influential accounts via Google Sheets, download tweets.csv (50 mb) and users.csv with full underlying data, and/or explore a graph database in Neo4j, whose software powered the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations.
NBC News' partners at Neo4j have put together a "get started" guide to help you explore the database of Russian tweets. "To recreate a link to an individual tweet found in the spreadsheet, replace 'user_key' in https://twitter.com/user_key/status/tweet_id with the screenname from the 'user_key' field and 'tweet_id' with the number in the 'tweet_id' field," reports NBC News. "Following the links will lead to a suspended page on Twitter. But some copies of the tweets as they originally appeared, including images, can be found by entering the links on webcaches like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and archive.is."
NBC News' partners at Neo4j have put together a "get started" guide to help you explore the database of Russian tweets. "To recreate a link to an individual tweet found in the spreadsheet, replace 'user_key' in https://twitter.com/user_key/status/tweet_id with the screenname from the 'user_key' field and 'tweet_id' with the number in the 'tweet_id' field," reports NBC News. "Following the links will lead to a suspended page on Twitter. But some copies of the tweets as they originally appeared, including images, can be found by entering the links on webcaches like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and archive.is."
I'd say the Russians got a better bang for their buck.
The fact that our elections are free and open enough AND THEY KNOW they can influence them through social media meddling,.
Fixed that for ya
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
That's the trap now isn't it.
Facts start to come out after the investigation has had time, and now it's "I'm tired of this".
Shame to let facts start intruding onto our personal bubbles, isn't it?
The reality is that we're on the verge of a new cold war based on information and social media. This isn't about one election, it's about how states are choosing to behave with meddling. And I'm not suggesting we're not guilty of doing some of the same things. But it's all escalating and it'll get worse before it gets better.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
Even if it's true. Why do we need a bloody Russia post every 12 hours on this site? So people can have political fights? Seriously.
We're not all Americans here. So we're not all crazy about politics, day in, day out.
I'd say there are potentially 3 investigations:
1. Russian meddling in the election
2. Trump's team's collusion with the Russians
3. Trump's personal involvement in collusion with the Russians.
Like you say, these are quite different questions and a "yes" on one does not necessarily imply the others are true (depending on which we're talking about). #1 is pretty much settled. It occurred, and the data that NBC published is more evidence. #2 is suspicious, because you've got people like Paul Manafort who led the campaign and have been indicted for highly questionable financial activities with Russian interests. Then there's the meeting in Trump Tower with Trump's son and others. #3 is not clear at all. Trump keeps professing his innocence, and I could even believe it because it is entirely possible his campaign did collude (wittingly or unwittingly), yet still have Trump entirely oblivious. Goodness knows he's oblivious on all sorts of other things.
The thing that bothers me in all this is that Trump is utterly fixated on his own innocence. If he is innocent and was doing his job, he should be accepting #1 like everyone in the intelligence community is telling him, and *doing* something about it to protect the next election. He should be applying the sanctions that the Congress and Senate passed almost unanimously and he fricking signed into law. Instead he keeps chanting "no collusion! no collusion!" as if that is *all* that matters. No, you incompetent fool. Even if there was no collusion (which is not yet demonstrated), you need to get off your butt and lead the changes necessary to discourage attempts at it in future, because clearly the Russians *tried*.
The guy is straight up self-interested and/or incompetent even if you grant that he's innocent. Thankfully the intelligence agencies and justice department will slowly and thoroughly labor through the investigation anyway as long as they are allowed to do their job, but the guy needs to stop trying to interfere with it.
I'm not American, I live in Canada, and I certainly admit posting a lot of comments on social networks during the last US election. Worse, a lot of prominent Canadian figures made comment after comment on social networks about both Trump and Clinton. I'm sure Canadians posted more than 200,000 tweets. So why not accuse Canada of interfering with the US elections?
Or maybe you're posting it for guaranteed replies, which would just be sad.
Here's what really happened: People wanting to influence the election purchased ads through Russia, which happened to be selling for the lowest cost. Also the media, including someone who is paying Slashdot, is STILL trying to push the idea that Trump's presidency is somehow illegitimate because "Russian interference". At the same time claims are being made that Russia is somehow related to the DNC leaks. This is being done to avoid discussion of the content of the leaks. You post this on a daily basis, Slashdot, and we're ALL sick of seeing it. But I'm going to keep calling out your bullshit every time because the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Stop spreading propaganda.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
It is sort of Stuff That Matters, you know.
Why do we need a bloody Russia post every 12 hours on this site?
Because it's the nerds who enabled this new kind of targeted enabling to happen.
Noticed about 2012 how the Internet seems to change. Lots more ranty right-wing stuff, lots of unhinged SJW posts, outburst of trolling designed to annoy or piss off.
I like looking at conspiracy sites for fun. Similarly around 2012 there's a big change from the usual Ron Paul stuff & general government distrust to progressively more extreme right-wing material. Lots of posts trying to rehabilitate uncle Adolf, lots more racism, not much in the way of conspiracies - RedIce being an obvious example. At the same time many sites suddenly decided they love Putin (Godlikeproductions Putin obsession was particularly egregious) and thousands of memes spew out which contrasted wimpy Obama with manly bear-riding Putin.
Hmmm. Bit odd that. The Obama hate gets ever more demented. The racism gets worse. Posters with moderate opinions are pushed away.
The chan sites get ever more crazy and neo-nazi. Meanwhile in real-world politics all of a sudden lots of strange little separatist/right wing movements start getting lots of funding thrown at them. Weird shit like Brexit's main funder being married to a Russian and boasting about meeting the KGB is glossed over in the media.
Something is going on here.
Back to conspiracy sites... Donald eventually announces a run. The conspiracy sites which by now are politically to the right of Mussolini LOVE Donald. They create their own North Korean-style personality cult surrounding the orange one. Sites that a few years before were promoting UFOs or alternative remedies for sore asses go full out on the paranoia. JADE HELM!! MUSLIMS!!! SJW FEMINISTS FUCKING BLACK GUYS WHO DINDU NUFFIN ARE KILLING THE WHITE RACE!!!!
Then this stuff leaks out onto the wider Internet making discussions even worse than they were previously. Sites like IMDB's message boards become unreadable (and are eventually killed), extreme politics is the 'in' thing. Slashdot goes from nerd paradise to alt-right-troll-cave. Newspaper and movie sites comments look like something from 1930s Germany - assuming 1930s Germans couldn't spell and had mental health issues.
Where did this shit come from? Am guessing the far-right in the US and other countries decided to work together and with the help of some shady money men successfully managed to fuck up discussions on the Internet. Funding of extreme political movements helped fuck up political discussions in real life as well. Russia was clearly a part of that which can easily be seen in the amount of 'conservative' websites that seemingly worship the place. Contrast also with the number of said conservatives who believe Obama is a Muslim but think the idea of state-sponsored cyberwar from Russia is silly - i.e. most of the posts on here or Reddit today.
Add in characters whose agendas are somewhat confusing (Assange, Snowden) and we're currently in this clusterfuck of a mess where democracy is on its last legs and the world is being run by dickheads.
The only thing that amuses me about all this is that if we do end up going full fascist the first people to get put before a firing squad will be the unemployed autists whose contribution to Western society so far has been frog memes and a fascinating with MLP porn. Karma, you little shits.
However, being somewhat of a moderate and in the unlikely event of any FBI agents or non-hack journalists reading this, I'd going to give you a bit of advice. Devote some time to looking at the conspiracy sites and the alt-media political hangouts. Note how at the same time as traditional conspiracy interest was declining (911, Peak Oil, Roswell etc.) and the New Age craziness falling apart (no Mayan apocalypse) these sites started to rapidly expand. I don't believe for one second that Alex Jones is funding a multimillion dollar empire via Youtube money and the sale of shady vitamins to idiots. Check out this guy. Check out Henrik at Red Ice. Check out the cretin who runs Natural News. Find out who actually runs Godlike productions and similar.
You'll discover lots of interesting connections no doubt many involving our friends from Eastern Europe and their cut-outs in the US.
The thing that bothers me in all this is that Trump is utterly fixated on his own innocence
Wouldn't you be, too, if all day long the mainstream media and vitriolic political opponents were screeching non-stop about how you're a traitor? He has work to do, and has been doing a great deal of it, despite this phony relentlessness from the Clinton camp and her supporters. No, I'm sure that if you had CNN calling you a traitor 24 hours a day, you'd just clam up and let them lie about you, right? Sure, of course.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Which means that the Clinton campaign and the DNC are guilty of at least as much, by paying a foreign entity to influence the election. Looking forward to THAT basket of indictments. Hope it comes soon.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
And I suspect that's why Twitter, Facebook, Google and the rest are going to have to start putting some serious efforts into preventing these Russian troll farms from using their platforms in the future. France already has some rules that basically limited the Russians from offering the Front National too much aid and comfort in the final lead up to the French presidential election, and the warnings are going up in many Western countries "Regulate your platforms or governments will regulate you."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No, it's not complicated. FusionGPS, the oppo-research firm, was no longer doing any work with any Republican candidates when the Clinton/DNC machine started paying them to buy Steele's artistic writing skills under the guise of "legal services" through their law firm.
And no, the two aren't equivalent, you're right. The business with Steele lying, the Clinton machine hiding their hand and payments, and the use of Steele's phony narrative (and phony self-corroboration) in order to facilitate an in-power political party's ability to listen in on the campaign of their opponents through a nonsense court petition is: much, much worse than the ineffective Russian trolling project.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I know about the edit accusations. They released two versions, a long form unedited and a version that trimmed out dead time and irrelevant info.
The propaganda mills that wanted to downplay and discredit Project Veritas simply pointed at the trimmed one and kept yelling "edited!" While pretending the other wasn't also available.
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