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Trolls Are Still Actively Trying to Influence Brexit and US Elections (go.com)
TechCrunch reports:
A major new campaign of disinformation around Brexit, designed to stir up U.K. 'Leave' voters, and distributed via Facebook, may have reached over 10 million people in the U.K., according to new research. The source of the campaign is so far unknown, and will be embarrassing to Facebook, which only this week claimed it was clamping down on "dark" political advertising on its platform. Researchers for the U.K.-based digital agency 89up allege that Mainstream Network -- which looks and reads like a "mainstream" news site but which has no contact details or reporter bylines -- is serving hyper-targeted Facebook advertisements aimed at exhorting people in Leave-voting U.K. constituencies to tell their MP to "chuck Chequers." Chequers is the name given to the U.K. Prime Ministers's proposed deal with the EU regarding the U.K.'s departure from the EU next year.
ABC News reports: When the Justice Department unsealed criminal charges detailing a yearslong effort by a Russian troll farm to "sow division and discord in the U.S. political system," it was the first federal case alleging continued foreign interference in U.S. elections. Earlier Friday, American intelligence officials released a rare public statement asserting that Russia, China, Iran and other countries are engaged in ongoing efforts to influence U.S. policy and voters in future elections. The statement didn't provide details on those efforts. That stood in contrast with the criminal charges, which provided a detailed narrative of Russian activities...
The criminal complaint provided a clear picture that there is still a hidden but powerful Russian social media effort aimed at spreading distrust for American political candidates and causing divisions on social issues such as immigration and gun control.... Court papers describe how the operatives in Friday's case would analyze U.S. news articles and decide how they would draft social media messages about those stories. They also show that Russian trolls have stepped up their efforts with a better understanding the U.S. political climate and messages that are no longer riddled with misspellings.
CNN notes that one week before America's 2016 presidential election, "one of the Kremlin-backed accounts denied that Russian meddling, saying: 'Russia's Putin says Moscow not trying to influence U.S. election.'"
ABC News reports: When the Justice Department unsealed criminal charges detailing a yearslong effort by a Russian troll farm to "sow division and discord in the U.S. political system," it was the first federal case alleging continued foreign interference in U.S. elections. Earlier Friday, American intelligence officials released a rare public statement asserting that Russia, China, Iran and other countries are engaged in ongoing efforts to influence U.S. policy and voters in future elections. The statement didn't provide details on those efforts. That stood in contrast with the criminal charges, which provided a detailed narrative of Russian activities...
The criminal complaint provided a clear picture that there is still a hidden but powerful Russian social media effort aimed at spreading distrust for American political candidates and causing divisions on social issues such as immigration and gun control.... Court papers describe how the operatives in Friday's case would analyze U.S. news articles and decide how they would draft social media messages about those stories. They also show that Russian trolls have stepped up their efforts with a better understanding the U.S. political climate and messages that are no longer riddled with misspellings.
CNN notes that one week before America's 2016 presidential election, "one of the Kremlin-backed accounts denied that Russian meddling, saying: 'Russia's Putin says Moscow not trying to influence U.S. election.'"
Hell, Obama flew over personally to threaten Britain into voting remain and no one raised a shitfit about America "influencing" a British election.
I have not posted for a few years but this one really has annoyed me enough to say something regarding these Brexit ads.
For a start there are no new elections or referendums so it's hardly trying to influence a vote, the Guardian (left wing) newspaper would love to have a second referendum and reverse the vote and is most likely why they have flagged this up.
I can see how not knowing who is paying for these ads may be a problem for some, but like I said there is no public vote coming up and therefore as far as a I know campaign financing rules do apply, besides I did not see the Guardian kick up a fuss when Soros donated £400,000 to reverse Brexit.
Finally a large chunk of Conservative (the governing party) MPs themselves have said the same thing that this advert is saying so how is this fake news?
If there was any semblance that there was democracy in the UK, it has pretty much has been laid to rest.
China, Russia and Iran could hire teams of people to write news articles with bylines and promote them overtly, that's fine. China Daily, RT, Tehran times, are good examples.
Trolls aren't concerned with even writing news articles, not even slanted, biased news articles, the truth is immaterial to their objective, and certain truths run contrary to their objective. The trolls themselves pretend to be somebody else to disrupt conversations, recruit followers and expand their influence. They focus not on informing people, but on polarization and division. They're paid to do this, for this purpose.
https://tinyurl.com/y9dby46f
The Remain campaigners lied repeatedly, aggressively and in a coordinated way, far more so than the Leave campaign did. It was partly the sight of the relentless lying that caused me to study the arguments for Leave more closely and eventually conclude Leave was right. They are still right.
Here are a few lies told by the government alone in the course of the Remain campaign, let alone other campaigners:
If you vote Leave we (Osbourne and Cameron) will punish you by passing a massive 'emergency tax'. Literally, vote wrong and we'll take all your money. A big deal for pensioners and poorer people who were more inclined to vote out. But no emergency tax happened.
This lie wouldn't have been credible without another lie - that Cameron would stay on if he lost the vote. Cameron insisted he wouldn't resign and therefore that Osbourne and his emergency tax were guaranteed. He was lying the whole time - he resigned hours after losing.
The tax lie was itself justified by another lie - the supposedly guaranteed recession that voting leave would trigger, due to the "uncertainty" created by the two year negotiation period. The Treasury knew they were lying, that's why they refused to show its models or how it measured "uncertainty". We know this was a lie because two years after the vote the economy is booming. There was no "uncertainty hit" at all.
The recession lie was supported by yet another lie - the supposed cast iron consensus amongst economists that Brexit = Insta-Recession. No such consensus existed: before the vote economists like Patrick Minford were highlighting how absurd the claims where and immediately after the vote, the Bank of England's chief economist stated that the reputation of economics was in tatters. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman stated the idea of an uncertainty triggered employment bloodbath was "motivated reasoning" and Mervyn King (former head of the BoE) said the government had been talking nonsense.
Notice a pattern here - the Remain campaign built a tower of lies that all supported each other and which have all been disproven in the years since. I'm not even getting into all the other stupid claims they made and are still making today. Just the basics were enough to seriously tilt things in their favour.
Finally, your own post is itself a lie. The Leave campaigners haven't "admitted they'd been lying all along".
Taking yourself out of a free trade block with your most significant trading partners is bad is lying?
The UK in the EU is a major player, on its own it is just a small country is lying?
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
We haven't actually left need you moron.
Voting leave isn't the same as actually leaving.
Nonetheless our economy has been growing at a much slower rate than all comparable countries in Europe, the £350 million a week has vanished and the current government are still talking about raising taxes to make up for the missing money when we do leave.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'd have to say that Hillary Clinton was one of the most qualified candidates I've every seen with experience in all sectors of the federal government. There are aspects to her politics that I don't particularly like but compared to Trump there is no comparison. And yes she isn't a particularly inspiring campaigner and made mistakes in assuming some states were safely for her when they weren't
But then there are people who spent the last 25 years consuming the Republicans demonization of all things Clinton (I'm looking at you Cmdln Daco). Geez, you'd think if there was anything there that after spending $100s of millions of federal dollars investigating they would have come up with something serious to pin on her. I guess they think it was good spending of the money though because they ended up getting what they wanted.
You have to keep pro-Brexit Facebook ads in perspective:
This level of gaming the system clearly dwarfs a few Facebook ads
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Hell, Obama flew over personally to threaten Britain into voting remain and no one raised a shitfit about America "influencing" a British election.
He went over as himself and argued for his ideas. This is different. Russian posing as a Brit is different than the American President coming over as the American President. Obama making his pitch is him trying to win an argument. These Russion propogandists don't care about any side of the argument, they're trying to create division and sow misinformation. Is it really that hard to see the difference?