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Facebook Has Identified Ongoing Political Influence Campaign (nytimes.com)
Facebook is preparing to announce that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity ahead of November's midterm elections, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three people briefed on the matter. From the report: In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week, the company told lawmakers that it detected the influence campaign as part of its investigations into election interference. It has been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two of the officials. Facebook is expected to announce its findings on Tuesday afternoon. The company has been working with the F.B.I. to investigate the activity. Like the Russian interference campaign in 2016, the recently detected campaign dealt with divisive social issues. Update: Facebook has confirmed the story, adding: Today we removed 32 Pages and accounts from Facebook and Instagram because they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior. This kind of behavior is not allowed on Facebook because we don't want people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they're doing. We're still in the very early stages of our investigation and don't have all the facts -- including who may be behind this. But we are sharing what we know today given the connection between these bad actors and protests that are planned in Washington next week. We will update this post with more details when we have them, or if the facts we have change. It's clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. We believe this could be partly due to changes we've made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder.
I have two explanations for the general reaction of some to reports of interference in the election (and in particular Russian influence).
1. Some of those rejecting the claims and evidence brought forward are indeed Russian trolls.
2. If interference and collusion are proven, it undermines the legitimacy of the Trump presidency. Since for the dedicated Trump base, that's an impossible scenario to even contemplate, outright rejection of any evidence is the only way out of the cognitive dissonance that such evidence creates.
But really, at this point, we have the President and his spokesmen outright saying "Collusion isn't illegal", so there's not even denial now, but simply trying to frame what everyone knows to be true as business as usual. So why anyone seems interested in denying it is beyond me, when Trump himself has pretty much admitted it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Simply believing what you're told, especially if it fits your personal point of view, is much easier.
That's hard for people who have been conditioned to believe what they are told from a young age. You know, like in a church...
Or a public school...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.