Cont: All things Trump + Russia Part 2

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magellan said:
Ok.
Granted.
But what is true?

And the facebook ad story has got to be the most ridiculous one yet!

At first sight: 100.000$ in facebook ads can buy you 3 states? I thought that would be a little more expensive. But alas, hillary didn't have that kind of funds to throw around.

But if you look a little closer it gets even more ridiculous:
According to facebook (https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/10/hard-questions-russian-ads-delivered-to-congress/) it's even cheaper! 56% of the impressions were after the election! 44.000$ for 3 states!

Also: best way to get people to vote against hillary: show them pictures of puppies!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/technology/facebook-russia-ads-.html?_r=0

And of course there is the whole aspect of evil russians attacking the integrity of the US vote by providing US voters with information! How dare they!
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Sorry, just to be clear, you have no problem with foreign governments buying targeted ads to influence our elections?

Never mind how successful they may have been (or not). You're keen with that?

Not really worth looking into?

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Trebuchet said:
While Pence, meanwhile, is merely an extreme danger to religious liberty in the USA.
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It's a sad state of affairs. Trump staying in office is a danger to the world from nuclear war and civil liberties in the USA. Pence in office is a danger to civil liberties in the USA but not so much nuclear war. We're less screwed with Pence in office, but screwed non-the-less.
 
These vloggers promoted Bernie & Trump on behalf of 'we, the black people.' Turns out, they were hired by the Kremlin.

According to the YouTube page for “Williams and Kalvin,” the Clintons are “serial killers who are going to rape the whole nation.” Donald Trump can’t be racist because he’s a “businessman.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign was “fund[ed] by the Muslim.”

These are a sample of the videos put together by two black video bloggers calling themselves Williams and Kalvin Johnson, whose social media pages investigators say are part of the broad Russian campaign to influence American politics. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, they purported to offer “a word of truth” to African-American audiences.

“We, the black people, we stand in one unity. We stand in one to say that Hillary Clinton is not our candidate,” one of the men says in a November video that warned Clinton “is going to stand for the Muslim. We don’t stand for her.”

Williams and Kalvin’s content was pulled from Facebook in August after it was identified as a Russian government-backed propaganda account, The Daily Beast has confirmed with multiple sources familiar with the account and the reasons for its removal. Williams and Kalvin’s account was also suspended from Twitter in August. But the YouTube page for Williams and Kalvin remains live at press time.
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More on the Russian ads:
At least one outside researcher has said that the influence of Russian disinformation on Facebook is much greater than the company has so far acknowledged and encompasses paid ads as well as posts published on Facebook pages controlled by Russian agents. The posts were shared hundreds of millions of times, said Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ght-ads-on-youtube-gmail-and-other-platforms/
 
Bob001 said:
More on the Russian ads:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ght-ads-on-youtube-gmail-and-other-platforms/
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Hundreds of millions of shares. So either everyone in America shared them or maybe the same Russian bot farms were creating a bot echo chamber (or some of both).

From early MMO gaming all the way through modern social media, most people far overestimate the impact of likes, shares, and hollow nods of agreement. The most overwhelming seeming campaigns are always contrived.

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Bob001 said:
I'm no expert on accents, but these guys are obviously not American. They sound pretty much like what you would expect from the Nigerian scammers. Clinton-haters might have eaten it up, but it's hard to believe they had any influence on undecided voters.
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I wanted to see what kind of views their YouTube videos had gotten, but the account has been removed.

Delphic Oracle said:
Hundreds of millions of shares. So either everyone in America shared them or maybe the same Russian bot farms were creating a bot echo chamber (or some of both).
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Likely more bots than actual humans, but I doubt these sorts of campaigns are concerned with legitimate "participation". They wouldn't need people to pass on the stories or ads; they just need to get into peoples' heads.

From early MMO gaming all the way through modern social media, most people far overestimate the impact of likes, shares, and hollow nods of agreement. The most overwhelming seeming campaigns are always contrived.
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Ehh. Maybe. It sounds like this was less about starting fires and more about fanning existing flames. Or maybe an avalanche metaphor is more appropriate. You may not need to exert a whole lot of influence at the start to end up with a big effect.
 
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Delphic Oracle said:
[Foreign] Government-backed propaganda accounts [intended to influence the US election are illegal under US law] not allowed on Facebook?

Hold on, I've got some pages to report...

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FTFY

Whether FB is liable or just the people that placed the ads depends on the yet to be determined if FB is a media company or a tech platform company.
 
Delphic Oracle said:
Hundreds of millions of shares. So either everyone in America shared them or maybe the same Russian bot farms were creating a bot echo chamber (or some of both).

From early MMO gaming all the way through modern social media, most people far overestimate the impact of likes, shares, and hollow nods of agreement. The most overwhelming seeming campaigns are always contrived.
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It is possible to share something with people who someone else already shared it with. It is possible people shared it more than once and are being counted as multiple different shares.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
It is possible to share something with people who someone else already shared it with. It is possible people shared it more than once and are being counted as multiple different shares.
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The reference is to "posts published on Facebook pages controlled by Russian agents", not just one particular item. What with that and the multiplier effect you mention the significance of "hundreds of millions" is impossible to judge.
 
Emily's Cat said:
Why would FaceBook be held liable? I'm not following the reasoning on this.
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I suppose it might be similar to a gun store being held liable in some capacity for a shooting if it was found they sold the weapon used in the shooting to the shooter when there were clear signs that they should not have done so.

Pretty hard to prove, though, I would think.
 
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Organizers behind armed white supremacist protest in Houston revealed as Russian
"It really gives an indication of the extent to which there must be a major Russian apparatus."

As CNN reported last week, the protest was put together by the “Heart of Texas” Facebook page – a page that was revealed last month as one of the fake accounts operated out of Russia. Unlike the November anti-Hillary Clinton, pro-secession rallies the page attempted to organize across Texas, the May protest not only brought armed protesters, but a raft of counter-protesters to face down those calling for “white power!”
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“What’s relevant about the Russia thing is it absolutely validates the concern that people have that the Russians were putting out completely fabricated stories,” Faisal Shah, a lawyer for the Islamic center, told ThinkProgress. Or as Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of CAIR Texas, told Houston’s ABC affiliate, “This stuff where we see the Russians instigating – you know, that’s crazy.”
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“What’s kind of remarkable is that a Russian agent would be burrowing down that deep in the weeds to find a story that’s that local, and cooking up something, fabricating something, at such a small picture, such a detailed picture,” Shah added. “It really gives an indication of the extent to which there must be a major Russian apparatus, that they’re willing to put the kind of resources to drill down that deep. So I’m actually kind of fascinated by just the depth of fake news.”
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It seems Russian twitter bots are still supporting Trump

http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org

Between September 30 and October 6, we examined 62 unique URLs that were promoted by Kremlin-oriented Twitter accounts. As with past weeks, promoted content fit within two broad categories: social and political content of interest to Americans, and Kremlin-friendly views of issues of interest to Russia. Unsurprisingly, over 25% of the URLs examined featured stories on the mass shooting in Las Vegas. Of those stories, roughly two-thirds promoted various conspiracy theories and/or targeted the left for their individual or collective response to the tragedy. Seven stories (11%) focused on hurricane relief in Puerto Rico, all with the primary theme of either discrediting San Juan Mayor Yulin Cruz or accusing the media of spreading “fake news.” Additionally, there were seven stories that broadly fit into an anti-protest bucket, and three stories that highlighted the Obama administration’s use of pricey, non-commercial planes (a tactic known as “whataboutism”). As usual, Syria was the most prominent geopolitical topic (six stories). The other geopolitical content promoted by the network revealed a wide range of Kremlin interests, with individual stories focusing on Hungary, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Across all stories, the most prominent themes were mistrust for the “deep state” (10%), anti-Americanism (11%), and Russia-as-a-victim of the West (11%).
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Does anybody happen to have any info on whether Russia is alone in this approach, or if there are other countries that have engaged in similar tactics with respect to our last election?
 
Emily's Cat said:
Does anybody happen to have any info on whether Russia is alone in this approach, or if there are other countries that have engaged in similar tactics with respect to our last election?
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By what I've seen, the closest thing in the news has been about money-seeking non-government Macedonian fake news producers. Other governments did seek to influence the 2016 elections, but there's been no news that I've seen about any that would make their attempts remotely equatable to Russia's. The Ukrainian government backing a US citizen's investigation of Manafort isn't remotely equatable, for example.
 
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