For a Sanders-supporting outlet that once even doubted Russia hacked the DNC, it makes sense to downplay the impact of Russian interference, because Mueller found that Russia helped Bernie Sanders and targeted his opponent Hillary Clinton.

the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project and the firm New Knowledge along with Congressional testimony.

as much as Donald Trump"? "Julian Assange’s Arrest Should Worry Anyone Who Cares About Freedom of the Press"

there but extremely frequent far-left spin that requires a lot of stretching. I threw in their claim that Julian Assange was a journalist because it's indicative of how far their spin will take them.

Gosh so many newly joined and most if not all with the same preference. How amazing.

....to the first primary in an election cycle. You?

Oh what some people worry about.....SMH.

elections. They have far more to gain or lose depending on who gets elected.

The synergies of multiple messaging sources are compounded in their impact and nearly
impossible to determine in result. We should be gravely concerned how these manipulations
are deeply interfering with normally functioning democratic processes.

on an entity outside of ourselves-the other-allows those inside our country to escape scrutiny.

We can work to thwart American oligarchs like the Kochs as well as Russian ones like Oleg Deripaska.

on one inside.

We worry about outside terrorism while mainly white angry males pick off innocent people at the movies, in school or at malls.

every night talking about climate change, the fossil fuel industry and the Koch Brothers.

THAT would be awesome.

All the media is ignoring what really matters.

Example, I posted an OP on effing rednecks holding immigrants at gun point in New Mexico and got a few comments.

Meanwhile, the impeachment discussions here count in the hundreds. People drawing blood on both sides, I have had to hide 2 people because I cannot take the thought process they "have".


Meanwhile kids in elementary school are having shooter drills and when they graduate they will be hard pressed to find clean water.


Makes me sick.

...interfered in the last election in a big way?

countries elections at least since the end of WWII ostensibly to further our interests. I'm more worried about our own oligarchs and powerful business interests manipulating public opinion.

fuck putin .....

the studies cited in the OP?

For the life of me, I am struggling to understand why, with such an enormous wealth of candidate choices...sigh...nevermind.

I'm looking forward to his and Mueller's testimony.

you do realize the shear volume of posts with the number of users and postings that are made on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook? I'd say that is quite substantial for a single entity to be posting almost 20% of Instagram? Almost 10% of Facebook? You do realize how huge Facebook is, don't you? 7% from one source???? Give me "only" 7% of a billion dollars any day. I'll take that paltry amount.

and it was issued from 2 Senate commissioned reports where we now know were undermined by the Republican side Richard Burr not acting in the bipartisan manner he was acting as such. You're just mad because you found out the Russians were backing Bernie too.

in swing states to get them to vote for Drumpf, or Stein or stay home.

However in the past five or more years, she, but especially her husband Stephen F. Cohen have become, let's just say, VERY SYMPATHETIC to Russia and pushed The Nation in that direction as well, recruiting scores of writers who share that leaning. I find much reason to be skeptical--just as I am with Glenn Greenwald and other so-called progressives who have taken a very rightward turn.

of the University of Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Research Project and the firm New Knowledge along with Congressional testimony cited in the OP?

POST 17.

I take all of this as suspicious. Perhaps you need to be a bit less willing to take all these at face value as well

CREDIBLE without the presumed conclusions.

And, yes, I DO believe the findings of the FBI, Mueller, and other CI agencies over your fatuous CEO, who tried to bamboozle Alabamians to get a pedophile elected.

We all know what this is about... It is painful to admit ones favored candidate may have benefitted, however unknowingly, from the tactics of a despicable foreign government, but that IS the conclusion of Mueller and others.

I'm leaving as well, peace to you sheshe.

I was reading a piece on FAIR.org too where they published a piece by 9 Russiagate skeptics that really ignored some basic facts. It's getting hard to know what to believe any more...

I subscribed to the Nation for many years but now do not trust anything written in it. van den Heuvel has gone along with her apologist husband Cohen for too long on this. Not just Cohen but also the debunked "not enough bandwidth in Eastern Europe" to do hacking article. They need to start over wiht a new editorial staff.

to The Nation. I expected them to endorse Bernie Sanders. That is normal. But cosying up to Russia is not!

Facebook suspended five accounts for spreading misleading information during an Alabama election, including a lead social media researcher who helped the government discover fake news
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-suspends-account-of-jonathon-morgan-new-knowledge-ceo-2018-12

Yeah, I'd take all of his findings to heart. Good gawd, wake up!

"Honest, I was just doing this to show what an actual wrongdoer might do!"

and conclusions are subject to error. Particularly given few (or apparently NO) validating studies.

unless you know of any others to dispute it?

and CIA findings. No way. Even Facebook has admitted internal findings in contrast to this study. They found that the Russsian efforts profoundly influenced the ultimate election in favor of Trump and peeling off votes in favor of Sanders from HRC. Trump refuses to believe the former. You apparently refuse to believe the latter.

Your denial is incredible. I'm not blaming Sanders for the aid he received by the Russians. I DO believe Trump's minions actively sought and received it. But, if you think it helps Bernie Sanders to pin your hat on these findings, feel free. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

one link that disputes the OP and study for which it's based on.

Of course the Mueller Report is heavily redacted except the parts that Barr wanted everyone to see.

were doing

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/us/politics/doug-jones-social-media.html

A social media expert involved in the project, Jonathon Morgan, said in a statement that it was designed to “better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation,” not to influence the election. But the internal report portrayed it differently — as an aggressive effort to divide conservatives, suppress Republican turnout and drive Democrats to the polls.

The effort, financed by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, is unlikely to have had a significant effect on the outcome, given its modest budget. It cost $100,000, out of $51 million spent on the entire race, including the primaries.

snip


Reid Hoffman

Politics

Since 2011 Hoffman is a member of the Bilderberg Group, which gathers 120-150 North American and European "political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media"[73] for an annual invitation-only closed-door conference. Since then he has attended every year with the exception of 2013.[74][75] Hoffman is also listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, to which he was elected in 2015.[76][77]

In April 2013, a pro-immigration lobbying group called FWD.us was launched, with Reid Hoffman listed as one of the founders.[78] In 2014, Hoffman donated $150,000 to the Mayday PAC.[79] Also in 2014, Hoffman contributed $500,000 toward David Chiu's State Assembly campaign by funding an independent expenditure committee devoted to negative campaigning against his opponent: San Franciscans to Hold Campos Accountable — Vote No for Campos for State Assembly 2014.[80]

In 2016, Hoffman contributed $220,000 in support of Democratic candidate for Vermont governor Matt Dunne, according to a mass-media disclosure filed at the Vermont Secretary of State's Office.[81]

In 2016, Hoffman created Trumped Up Cards, a card game modeled after Cards Against Humanity intended to poke fun at US presidential candidate Donald Trump.[82] In December 2018, the New York Times broke a story alleging that Hoffman had "put $100,000 into an experiment that adopted Russia-inspired political disinformation tactics on Facebook" during the 2017 special Senate race in Alabama, which allegedly targeted Roy Moore voters. Hoffman did not immediately respond.[83] He apologized later that month, also stating he was unaware what the non-profit—Washington, D.C., based American Engagement Technologies, or AET—had been doing.

snip


He did post this, denying he knew anything that AET was doing

Truth and Politics

A series of articles in the New York Times describes an alleged operation to spread misinformation during the 2017 Alabama Senate race. Because I’m referenced in these articles, I want to address them.

The most disturbing aspect of this coverage is its description of how fake Twitter accounts with Russian-sounding names were created to follow Roy Moore, in what the Times suggested was either an experiment or a deliberate “false flag” attempt to discredit Moore.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I had never even heard of this project before reading about it in the Times’ coverage. The Times articles imply that I had knowledge of it and that I endorsed its tactics.

Let me be absolutely clear: I do not. I categorically disavow the use of misinformation to sway an election. In fact, I have deliberately funded multiple organizations trying to re-establish civic, truth-focused discourse in the US. I would not have knowingly funded a project planning to use such tactics, and would have refused to invest in any organization that I knew might conduct such a project.

Nevertheless, I do have an apology to make and have learned a lesson here.

snip

where Russian interference could have made a difference?

all the way back to 2012.

So we know that Manafort gave Kilimnik proprietary polling data, and we don't know what Kilimnik did with it. But it is certainly plausible that the Russians used it to more effectively target their social media campaign than the scattershot approach that this report documents.

that were entered into the system, so they couldn't count the ballots at all. And we're stuck just trusting the Trump administration that, while the Russians hacked into the election systems in all 50 states, they didn't alter registration or do anything to alter the tallies.

Having said that do you have a link in which Russians hacked into the election systems of all fifty states?

This article raises more questions than it answers. I need to know more. Would be nice to have a president that cared about the realities of Russian propaganda efforts online and such that he would plainly tell the public how concerned we should be, what he's doing about it, but wait, no ... He benefited from it and has done his best to exonerate himself away from any floaters.

I am shocked by the low numbers of ads in key states. If the online ad targeting is indeed of significantly lower effect, than say, the DNC hacking and Comey's reveal of investigation into Clinton, well, okay... I'm ready to accept that. I'll keep reading til I'm satisfied with what's being reported here.

Until I get to the bottom of it, I still will know that Hannity and Co have been dumping bags of manure in the deep end for years.

From the study itself

this thread. I need a life.

They're basically saying the valuation of Facebook is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on Wall Street.

Facebook is so expensive because incredibly cheap advertising demonstrably changes human behavior.

married to a Russia scholar who is so far up Putin’s ass he can see out of Putin’s mouth!

The scholar is heavily invested in the supposition that Russia did not interfere in our election; the publisher wife wouldn’t dare print a narrative about Russia that undermines her husband’s worldview

which the article was based on?

If you can’t acknowledge this, then I question whose country’s side you are on. Furthermore, the study you cite is propaganda from Putinistas.

is a Putinista now?

If so, I think it was effective in making the Democratic primary more competitive and last longer.

And as a disclaimer, I voted for Bernie in the Illinois primary...so I am admitting I might have been influenced. I also enthusiastically voted for Hillary in the general election.