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Senate Report Shows Russia Used Social Media To Support Trump In 2016 (bbc.co.uk)
AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Russia used every major social media platform to influence the 2016 US election, the report claims. New research says YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and PayPal -- as well as Facebook and Twitter -- were leveraged to spread propaganda. Its authors criticize the "belated and uncoordinated response" by tech firms. It is the first analysis of millions of social media posts provided by Twitter, Google and Facebook to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Russia adapted techniques from digital marketing to target audiences across multiple channels, with a particular focus on targeting conservatives with posts on immigration, race, and gun rights. There were also efforts to undermine the voting power of left-leaning African-American citizens, by spreading misinformation about the electoral process.
"What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party -- and specifically Donald Trump," the report says. "Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting."
"What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party -- and specifically Donald Trump," the report says. "Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting."
Russia attacked both sides, they had meme's that attack Both Clinton and Trump. They want people to think it was only Clinton they attacked and it was reason they lost. Last i checked Clinton didn't show up here in Michigan til Mon nov 7th's, 1 day before voting happened. It wasn't Russia that turned Michigan Red. It was Clinton's lack of doing anything to get out there to get people to vote for her on top of all the very questionable legal issues surrounding her and all the money they some how many since leaving the white house.
yes, Clinton could have won if she'd just taken Trump seriously. Also if she took notice of how badly beaten up the working class was. Her solution to everything was more education. For a woman who'd spent her entire life living large off the fruits of her education that makes sense. She's a classic left wing, elitest do gooder: she can't understand why folks don't just reach out their hands for all the money out there when it's all so easy. She's literally unable to comprehend that it's not so easy for most of us.
But all that said:
1. She still won the popular vote.
2. She lost by a razor thin margin. So thin that all she needed was to focus a bit more on the rust belt but...
3. By the same token that razor thin margin means that stuff that ordinarily shouldn't have mattered, mattered.
TL;DR; I think Clinton could have won if she tried harder, but I don't think she'd have lost without Russian interference and that last minute Oct surprise from Comey pushing Trump over the edge.
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The only people I hear bring her up are Republicans who keep going "Lock Her Up". Whether Trump worked Russia seems important because, you know, if he keeps working with Russia, that's really bad.
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The NRA owns the Republicans and apparently the Russians own the NRA thanks to the efforts of people like the Red Sparrow Butina.
It is disingenuous to say that they did not favor Trump. Yes the primary goal was to sow discord however they favored Trump because they wanted sanctions eased.
Clinton was a really bad candidate, with terrible poll numbers. .. derp derp derp.
Where does this horseshit keep coming from? You guys keep repeating it to each other so much that you think it is true. It has absolutely no basis in fact.
At the time the famous Comey letter was released Clintion was 6-8 points ahead in the polls. (source: 538) That isn't even close. That's a blowout election similar to the one we just went through in the midterms.
After the Comey letter and the media had a week or two to scream from every orifice about Weiner's laptop she took a hit of 4-5 points. That made it close enough for the Electoral College to work its magic. I have no idea what part the Russian media efforts had in that but whatever effect it has wasn't positive for Clinton. They were totally in it for Trump.
And she STILL got 3M more votes. The most terrible candidate in history.
I know this was totally useless but still..
1. Yes, there is. It's the total number of votes. It has no legal bearing, but it does exist.
Not only does it not have any legal meaning, it has no practical meaning. Nobody campaigns based on mythical "popular vote" results. If they did, then the "popular vote" results would be different.
No, the only time "popular vote" comes up is when someone LOSES and tries to justify how good they did because a meaningless sum total of the individual votes of all the states proved they should have WON! It's like a college student who flunks a 100 question test because he got only 50 questions right claiming that if the test had only 50 questions he would have gotten an A+. Yeah, if the election was different, the result would be different. So what?
Again, the electoral college is designed to dampen the effects of Democracy in order to protect the power of a landed owning ruling class.
Saying it again doesn't make it true. The electoral college was designed because the founders knew that both the people AND THE STATES had a vested interest in selecting the executive officer of the UNITED STATES. You forget -- we are not one big group of a few hundred million people, we are a confederation of fifty states and a few protectorates. That's why you are confused into thinking you can just add up all the individual votes and think it means something.
2. Yes, it is.
No, I'm sorry, but 304 to 232 is winning with 57% of the vote. That's a 14% difference. Not "razor thin" at all. Any state-level election with that kind of result would be a "landslide" or "a mandate".
Trump won a lot of electoral votes,
Yes, a lot more than Hillary did. He won. Get over it.
If you're a Russian yourself
Yes, if you cannot win an argument using facts, then claim you're being trolled by the Russians and look, come see the repression inherent in the system.
And the rest of your post demonstrates exactly that kind of nonsense. It was funny when Monty Python did it, it's just sad when real people do it.
You can stop it.
Sorry, you don't get a free pass to post nonsense just because you tell me to stop correcting you or try to claim "Russian oppression."
Why was it wrong for Russia to try to influence the election in 2016? The reason I arrive at is because Russians aren't allowed to vote in our election, so it's wrong for them to try to influence it.
But by that same reasoning, isn't it also wrong for the two political parties to influence elections for Senators and Congresscritters by shifting money to candidate's campaign that has been raised outside the state or district the candidate is running in? After all, that's money donated by someone who can't vote in that election being used to try to influence it.
So if you carry this outrage over Russian interference to its logical conclusion, you end up with a ban on political parties' unrestricted use of donations. No using money raised in New York to try to influence a Congressional race in Arizona. Money raised in New York has to be used in New York. Only money raised in that Arizona congressional district can be used to influence the race there.
Somehow I suspect the political parties aren't going to see it that way. And their stance is going to be that it's wrong for other people to try to influence races they can't vote in, but it's OK for them to do it.
You are not a member of the elite.
Most of the people who vote (R) aren't doing so because they believe themselves to be part of the privileged few. They believe the Democrats are going to take more of what little they do earn, and give it to people who (in their view) don't deserve it.
Even though I support the lesser of the evils in our two party system, I'm not blind to the idiocy which frequently comes from the left almost as often as it does from the right. A few examples:
Cash for clunkers - Didn't benefit me at all, because the vehicle I wanted to trade in was 1 MPG too efficient to qualify, even though the vehicle I wanted to purchase (a compact economy car) would've resulted in a larger net benefit to the environment, versus the hypothetical situation of someone trading in a vehicle which did qualify, towards the purchase of another gas guzzling SUV. The program didn't take into account fuel efficiency gains of what you intended to purchase, only the inefficiency of your trade-in.
Solar tax rebates - A nice handout to the rich who could afford to have photovoltaics installed on their home.
EV tax rebates - Another handout to the rich. The average hard working American can't afford this shit, with or without the rebate.
The ACA (Obamacare) - Crony capitalism meets healthcare. It is absolutely abhorrent to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize the cost of private insurance, and penalizing people on their taxes if they refused to purchase what is essentially a commercial product truly is unconstitutional. This would be like the RIAA getting a law passed requiring a penalty be paid if you're not subscribed to Spotify/Apple Music/Pandora/etc., because their business model can only work if everyone pays!
Now here's the part where I say despite all this, I still hold my nose and vote (D), because the Republican party's disregard for the environment, moronic trade policies, and pandering to the "religious right" bothers me much more than misuse of my tax dollars (which the Republican party is presently doing in true "hold my beer!" style, anyway).
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Maybe you can read it the third and fourth time I say it:
>> Only one, Donald Trump, could lose to Clinton, according to polling during the primaries. Trump was also a pretty crappy candidate - the only one who didn't poll better than Clinton during the primaries.
"Oh that's bullshit, Clinton polled better than Trump", you say. Which is exactly what I said - twice. Derp derp indeed.
As I said, during the primary season (February and March), Ted Cruz beat into by 3-5% in the RCP average.
Marco Rubio had her beat 47% to 43%
https://www.realclearpolitics....
Kasich beat Clinton 48% to 41% - a whopping 7.4% lead
https://www.realclearpolitics....
Again, (for the fifth time) Republicans chose the only candidate who had a shot at losing to Clinton.
Yeah, if the election was different, the result would be different. So what?
So what, you ask? If the popular vote result and the electoral college vote result are wildly different, then people may choose to infer that the electoral college vote is no longer fair. That is what is happening. Obviously. Disagree away with their inference, but it's stupid not to acknowledge the importance of questions about whether the voting system is fair and can be improved.
Don't reduce this to a "Hillary vs Trump" fight. The Russians influenced more than the last American elections: for instance, they facilitated Brexit in Britain, and supported Salvini in Italy. I don't think you should reduce the problem to a "Hillary vs Trump" fight. The problem is people being convinced by incendiary propaganda on social networks, and the control of this mechanism by malicious actors. And in this case it was the Russians, but in the future it could very well be others to take advantage of it.
Russia attacked both sides, they had meme's that attack Both Clinton and Trump.
Yes they did. It has been reported on and was detailed in the Cambridge Analytica investigation.
They targeted not just "both" side but many sides and found out that they got the most bang for the buck by riling up the right-wingers against Clinton.
> They supported both Clinton and Trump.
The summary states the exact opposite. I'm not sure where you got this from. At best there were a handful of example supporting Hilary to create division compared to hundreds of thousands in support of Trump.
> Trump's popularity on the other hand doesn't drop for a very simple reason. Political smear jobs based on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and lies have to take out their target quickly.
This doesn't make sense as most of the attacks on Trump (such as his rapey comments) were factual, whilst the attacks on Hillary and the Dems (PizzaGate) were lies, so it doesn't explain how Trump survives, but Hillary didn't. If what you said was true then Hillary would be in the whitehouse because the smears against her were often lies, whereas those against Trump were factual (and continuously prove to be so).
> it's genuinely hard at this point to take any critique of Trump without reacting "ok, show me the full context of this claim you have".
Right, but that's not because of the reason you give, that's simply because you're a well known Trump supporter on Slashdot and are incredibly partisan. You won't believe negative news about Trump because you'll support him regardless. You're one of those supporters that would support him if, in his own words "I could shoot somebody and I wouldnâ(TM)t lose any voters".
> Which is why you should be genuinely afraid of Trump if you're against his agenda. Not because of the contents of his agenda, or because of any of the smears. You should be afraid of him because there's one thing on which Bannon was completely correct in that Munk debate. Trump is the paradigm shift, where disenfranchised people actually found franchise, and where there are now too many people who have been disenfranchised by the globalist trend. To the point where it's not limited to the continent - Yellow Jackets was a part of the exact same paradigm shift in a country that is about as different as a country could be to US while still remaining a part of "Western" umbrella. Utterly different court system, literal codification of anti-theism into all government functions, very socialist policies. And yet, France had protests that literally showed that Trump's paradigm shift clearly happened in France too, and it reached a point where it cannot be simply dismissed as "those deplorable people that are beneath us that we will call names and dismiss as if they're irrelevant".
An alternative world view is that we should be scared of Putin, because we thought we'd won the cold war in the early 90s and turned our backs and started to focus on sideshows like the Taliban and ISIS. Meanwhile, Putin spent 20+ years building up his intelligence apparatus to infiltrate Western society left and right, hence why people like Arron Banks in the UK have a wife who was exposed as a Russian spy, and who is also the person who illegally funded Brexit way beyond campaign spending laws with money that can't be traced back to his actual business because it comes from Russia. We saw the St Petersberg convention, where Russia hosted all of Europe's far right, and they all came away with millions of pounds in funding, some of it overt (France's NF) and some of it covert but now exposed (UKIP). In the UK we're seeing the same pattern repeat now with Tommy Robinson having Russian propaganda support on social media, and we've seen it across Europe with Hungary's Jobbik, Italy's Five Star, Greece's Golden Dawn, Germany's AfD, and so on. That's not to say it's restricted to the far right, though that's Russia's preference as it's the orthodoxy it now follows at home, but if no convenient far right actor exists, or is unlikely to succeed Russia will support the far left too (Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece for example).
It's not some weird coincidence that Russia hosted all these parties and/or their key figures, and that clear links to Russia keep getting exposed to their financing and online propaganda support. It's not some conspi
Exactly. Russia is trying to beat the US, not Clinton. They want us fighting with each other instead of beating them at whatever. We just got new confirmation that Russia was running Black Lives Matter ads. Whatever gets Americans fighting Americans, whatever divides us.
Well this really is the issue. Whether there are Clinton people using it as an excuse for the election or not doesn't really matter and it's beside the point if it was SIGNIFICANT enough to change the election (really, it was just 70,000 votes in 3 midwest states that tipped the electoral college). The issue is that Trump is accused of colluding with Russian agents for their help (whether it was good or not) to effect the election and they were offering help with the Magninsky act and perhaps other things. We also have money traveling from Russia to the NRA to the Republican party. While Putin is trying to divide the nation -- he is getting aided by the Republicans and that's where the problem lies.
And that's not getting to all the other crimes of the administration. Whether his machinations to pay off porn stars or get help from Chinese or Russian agents or if he made a profit on renting his hotels to people buying influence -- do we really need to allow this? It was poor judgement and a lack of ethics regardless on whether it was beneficial or not. We shouldn't have to go to trial to get tax returns or to get a President to divest themselves of conflicts of interests. This guy didn't have to be President. Why do we have to prove crimes beyond a reasonable doubt when we can't find any LEGAL way he covered billions of dollars in debts without any US banks loaning him the money and we can't PROVE that he's a Russian agent but we have little reason to suspect otherwise.
We can't even prove that Trump knows how to read. Why do we have to put up with this as a people? The divisiveness in this nation is because a sizeable percentage want to troll the rest of us.
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Wow, the Russians even traveled through time and got us to enact a second amendment. They are powerful!
At this moment, on Slashdot, a comment that completely misses the entire point of the prior comment is at labelled "(Score:4, Insightful)". The problem with America is that there are people who are just content to be wrong. And proud of it. And they cheer each other on. They support Trump not because they believe a damn thing he says -- but because he pisses off half the country. They have given up on fixing anything and are waiting for supply side Jesus to take them to Heaven during the Rapture and meanwhile they just want someone who can piss off Liberals. The important thing is pissing of Liberals.
There was absolutely nothing in the prior comment about guns, gun rights, or anything about your rights. It was about a foreign country influencing a private group to influence our politics. But again, some people are OK with that because the Russians are better than the Liberals. These are people who have given up on solving problems after all and just want to stick it to those know-it-alls.
Slashdot has been infected by cancer because your comment was labelled as insightful when they damn well know it wasn't. You didn't come for a discussion or friendship.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"