In continuing to misunderstand or mis-frame the problem, this article has little useful to offer. But it does capture one truth: "one of two things has to be true: either Democratic “political operatives” are incredibly bad at what they do, or else they are feigning amazement in order to get themselves off the hook for the lousy job they did in 2016. "
It was never about the actual ads the Russians ran. It was absolutely about how they crawled the internet, sowing rancor and discord, making any discussion/exchange of information unpleasant. We had them before the election, right here. We have them now. :shrug:
Hmm, I think the article nailed it. Or at least nailed all around it.
What part of the Russian activity bothers you? That they did it at all? Get over it. They're going to do it. They have their own geopolitical aims and they're going to pursue them.
That it was Russians instead of, say, Portuguese? Why?
That it wasn't out-in-the-open propaganda, with a statement at the end:"I'm Vladimir Putin and I endorsed this message"? Get over it. Every political operative will speak thru proxies, trying to have their message come from a familiar face.
That it was aimed at your faction? Maybe we're onto something.
The ads/fake news/posts themselves were incredibly ham-fisted. They appeared in dark, dank, claustrophobic echo chambers. They weren't targeting persuadable people, they were feeding prejudices so strong that the owners would believe anything—pizzagate, Vincent Foster murder conspiracies, CNN slipping Hillary debate questions (no wait, that one actually happened, but you get my drift)—that aligned with them. A Hillary ad in Think Progress was wasted money (at least after the nomination); a Trump troll was preaching to the choir on Red State.
We've lived thru wave after wave of partisan propaganda, much of it vile and dishonest—and transparently so. Remember the GW Bush years? It tended to come from the left then. The only people convinced by it were people predisposed to believe anything negative about someone they hated. Did that massive effort (and I do mean massive: look at the resources that poured into, say, the 9/11 conspiracy industry and compare that with the Russian troll bot effort) result in a change in electoral outcomes? A hint: Bush's second margin of victory was bigger than his first.
Finally I want anyone hyperbabulating about this to answer a simple question: what do you propose to do about it?
Be specific. Nothing vague like "Stop them!" I want serious, implementable proposals. Actual things someone (the combined executive and legislative branches of the federal government, say) could actually do to stop a foreign power from engaging in propaganda.
And no, I don't mean short of actual war. The hyperbole among the chattering classes has equated Facebook posts with an act of war, among other things. If you actually believe that breathless tripe you need to be prepared to put troops (and nukes?) where your mouths are.
I'll leave for later the follow-up simple question: Assuming whatever you proposed is successful and those responsible are still alive (remember, Seal Team 6 is on the table) how will you know they've stopped? When will we be safe from the terrible menace of people telling us things?
In continuing to misunderstand or mis-frame the problem, this article has little useful to offer. But it does capture one truth: "one of two things has to be true: either Democratic “political operatives” are incredibly bad at what they do, or else they are feigning amazement in order to get themselves off the hook for the lousy job they did in 2016. "
It was never about the actual ads the Russians ran. It was absolutely about how they crawled the internet, sowing rancor and discord, making any discussion/exchange of information unpleasant. We had them before the election, right here. We have them now. :shrug:
Pundits and Democrats ascribe to a handful of bargain-basement Russian trolls all manner of ability – including orchestrating a coup d’etat
In continuing to misunderstand or mis-frame the problem, this article has little useful to offer. But it does capture one truth: "one of two things has to be true: either Democratic “political operatives” are incredibly bad at what they do, or else they are feigning amazement in order to get themselves off the hook for the lousy job they did in 2016. "
It was never about the actual ads the Russians ran. It was absolutely about how they crawled the internet, sowing rancor and discord, making any discussion/exchange of information unpleasant. We had them before the election, right here. We have them now. :shrug:
Pundits and Democrats ascribe to a handful of bargain-basement Russian trolls all manner of ability – including orchestrating a coup d’etat
he grand total for all political ad spending in the 2016 election cycle, according to Advertising Age, was $9.8bn. The ads allegedly produced by inmates of a Russian troll farm, which have made up this week’s ration of horror and panic in the halls of the American punditburo, cost about $100,000 to place on Facebook.
A few months ago, when I first described those Russian ads in this space, I invited readers to laugh at them. They were “low-budget stuff, ugly, loud and stupid”, I wrote. They interested me because they cast the paranoid right, instead of the left, as dupes of a foreign power. And yet, I wrote, the American commentariat had largely overlooked them.
Now that Robert Mueller’s office has indicted the Russian actors who are allegedly behind the ads, however, all that has changed. American pundits have gone from zero to 60 on this matter in no time at all – from ignoring the Facebook posts to outright hysteria over them.
What the Russian trolls allegedly did was “an act of war ... a sneak attack using 21st-century methods”, wrote the columnist Karen Tumulty. “Our democracy is in serious danger,” declared America’s star thought-leader Thomas Friedman on Sunday, raging against the weakling Trump for not getting tough with these trolls and their sponsors. “Protecting our democracy obviously concerns Trump not at all,” agreed columnist Eugene Robinson on Tuesday.
The ads themselves are now thought to have been the product of highly advanced political intelligence. So effective were the troll-works, wrote Robert Kuttner on Monday, that we can say Trump “literally became president in a Russia-sponsored coup d’etat”.
For thoughts on the finely tuned calculations behind this propaganda campaign, the Washington Post on Saturday turned to Brian Fallon, a former Hillary Clinton press secretary, who referred to the alleged Russian effort as follows: “It seems like the creative instincts and the sophistication exceeds a lot of the US political operatives who do this for a living.”
Of what, specifically, did this sophistication consist? In what startling insights was this creativity made manifest? “Fallon said it was stunning to realize that the Russians understood how Trump was trying to woo disaffected (Bernie) Sanders supporters ...”
The Post added a few suspicious examples of its own. The Russian trolls figured out that battleground states were important. And: they tried to enlist disgruntled blue-collar voters in what the paper called the “rust belt”.
Okay, stop here. Since when is it a marker of political sophistication to know that some states are more persuadable than others? Or to understand that blue-collar voters are an important demographic these days? (...)
i've posted some stuff about levin's work before too
it's sad and mind-blowing at the same time
and what is stunning is that people can look at this, look at the level of our govt's participation, the actual "russian" info put out there and still hold the beliefs that they do
and almost all news, esp cable news has little or no credibility
i've posted some stuff about levin's work before too
it's sad and mind-blowing at the same time
and what is stunning is that people can look at this, look at the level of our govt's participation, the actual "russian" info put out there and still hold the beliefs that they do
and almost all news, esp cable news has little or no credibility
Yeah the article I linked isn't the one I heard this morning; the others don't have transcripts up yet. But it addressed the ballot tampering threat, not twitter trolls.
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Threat being the key word and yes anyone on a computer is under threat anywhere at any time so of course there should be due diligence to prevent out and out hacking no question about that. I would reiterate though the rest of the world is under more threat from us then Russia or even China regarding election meddling mostly through the CIA.
