The Russian Propaganda Campaign

frandie2b said:
Every mainstream media is a propaganda machine.
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No, it's not.

American mainstream media has an ethnocentric and distinctly corporate hue, but major outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Associated Press, CNN, etc. are no where near "propaganda machines" in the way that Breitbart, Fox News, and Occupy Democrats are.

RT of course is controled by the Kremlin, but the big mainstream medias in France and US for example are either owned by corporations or banks. So what's worse, I don't know.
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Control by a political bodies is worse.

When they are owned by corporations/banks, you know exactly what lean you need to sniff out and what types of movements and figures they will be hostile to. For American major media, you know they will likely skew towards deregulation, privatism, and corporate-friendly policies.

When they are owned by political entities, the skew is necessarily multifarious and harder to pinpoint.
 
VivaRevolution said:
@HomerThompson @Anung Un Rama @Trotsky @Cuzcatlan @luckyshot

How A Twitter Fight Over Bernie Sanders Revealed A Network Of Fake Accounts

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KACPER PEMPEL / REUTERS
Someone automated dozens of accounts to amplify anti-Trump, anti-Sanders and pro-Democratic Party content.
When Russians at the Internet Research Agency interfered in U.S. politics, they created false online personas and fake political groups to amplify divisive messages that already had a homegrown American audience. It’s not too far from what some U.S. political consultants are doing themselves.

Take Sally Albright, a Democratic Party communications consultant who backed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. Unsurprisingly, Albright is vocally opposed to President Donald Trump and a big supporter of the resistance to his administration. She is also one of the loudest, most divisive voices attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Clinton’s onetime Democratic primary opponent, and his left-wing supporters.

Well after the primary, Albright continues to claim that Sanders is a fraud, a liar, racist and corrupt, among many other things. In one instance she declared that the policy idea of free college, as promoted by Sanders, was racist. This provoked Sanders supporters to argue back.

Trevor, a Sanders supporter who declined to provide his last name for fear of being doxxed, but goes by @likingonline on Twitter, noticed a strange pattern of behavior when Albright responded to him. Her tweets addressing him were rapidly retweeted by the same series of accounts. This created a barrage of notifications making it look as though there was an avalanche of opposition to everything he said.


But as Trevor discovered, after an extensive amount of research that he posted online, these were not normal accounts. They appeared to be bots ― automated accounts masked as real people being used to amplify a particular political message. Who is really pulling the strings, however, remains a mystery.

Albright told HuffPost that the accounts were voluntarily handed over by their original users to an unnamed client of hers to be automated in “an analytics program.” She said she was bound by a non-disclosure agreement and could not disclose who was collecting and automating these accounts or for what purpose.

But like her, these accounts were all pro-Clinton, anti-Trump and anti-Sanders.


Twitter allows users to automate their accounts, includingsetting up automatic retweeting and liking of other accounts. This increases activity on the platform, something Twitter obviously wants to do, and allows busy users to promote messages or businesses that they support. Presumably Twitter did not anticipate that users would simply hand their accounts over to another person or campaign to artificially spread the latter’s tweets.

The ability to swamp a debate with automated messages is a problem for political discourse around the world. Twitter is a vital platform for political debate. Automating Twitter accounts to retweet or otherwise promote specific messages thus becomes a tactic to silence political debate and squelch free speech.

In Mexico, allies of President Enrique Peña Nieto have deployed swarms of Twitter bots to overwhelm and effectively shut down online debates. Journalists in the U.S. experienced a similar flood during the 2016 election from pro-Trump, neo-Nazi sock-puppet accounts posting anti-Semitic death threats. Often instead of suppressing speech it doesn’t like, the Chinese government these days drowns it on local social media platforms with a flood of pro-government content. University of North Carolina scholar Zeynep Tufecki has labeled this tactic a new form of censorship.

What the automated accounts deployed by Albright’s unnamed client did was similar.


Over the course of the last year or so, Albright was their favorite account to retweet ― almost always as a group. The fake accounts also retweeted people who responded to Albright’s tweets ― again, usually as a group, and often while in a debate with other users.

The writers at Shareblue, a pro-Democratic Party news site that supported Clinton in the primary and general elections, were also frequently retweeted by the network of fake accounts, particularly when the Shareblue folks had something negative to say about Sanders. A spokeswoman for Shareblue told HuffPost that the company does not create sock-puppet accounts and has never worked with Albright.

These accounts also liked #resistance celebrities like liberal conspiracy theorist Eric Garland (“Time for some game theory”) and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. And they were often deployed in intra-Democratic Party battles.

When Albright led a Twitter campaign to attack a 2017 women’s conference for inviting Sanders to speak ― after Clinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) had turned them down ― the automated account network deployed to retweet her and any positive responses to her tweets.


Albright probably didn’t need those retweets, as there were actual people opposing the conference’s decision. Still, someone questioned her campaign to block Sanders from speaking, describing it as similar to “Russian division strategy.” She wrote back, “Nyet. I am not Russian.”

Then over a dozen fake accounts retweeted her.

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INSTAGRAM/TWITTER
The original image from skater Sara Hurtado's Instagram account (left) and the image used on the fake Twitter account named Iris Winter.
Within this pro-Albright Twitter force, many of the accounts have taken on false personas with stolen photographs ― just like the Russian trolls that tried to interfere in the 2016 election.


The account named for Iris Winter, which is temporarily suspended, uses a picture of Spanish ice dancer Sara Hurtado. Minnie Casera’s supposed picture comes from the Facebook account of Martina Painter, an Alaskan who died on Jan. 11, 2017. The picture used by Georgia Miles is actually Deja Farrior-Quinones, a New Jersey woman who was killed in September 2016 by a car involved in a high-speed police chase. Maggie Campell’s picture is one of Deb Solsrud, a Florida woman who died in a plane crash in December 2016. Madeleine Ware’s photo is really Mary Knowlton, a retired librarian who was killed in August 2016 by a police officer in a practice drill.

Allison Rowe’s account uses the picture of Dr. Roberta Guilizzoni, an Italian physicist who works at the National Physical Laboratory in London. Baylee Allmon’s picture is actually the Bosnian model Nejla Hadzic. The account of Callie Calloway uses a picture of Kelsey Lundy, a lobbyist in Arizona for Compass Strategies. Cameron Gibson offers an image of the freelance travel writer Sarah Gordon that appeared in the Daily Mail. Francie McCormack has taken her picture from the Twitter account of Callie Maries. The photo of Lena Robinson is actually Ashlynn Sparks, an Alabama teenager who was shot to death in 2016.

The account of Gwen Barstow is temporarily restricted, probably because it used an image of Meaghan Delcourt, an Ottawa woman who was in the local news in 2015 after her apartment balcony collapsed underneath her

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5aa2f548e4b07047bec68023/amp
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Platforms like Twitter, Facebook etc need to get a handle on this or they will lose credibility

Interesting piece
 
AnGrYcRoW said:
Platforms like Twitter, Facebook etc need to get a handle on this or they will lose credibility

Interesting piece
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What I find hilarious, is that this is basically the sum of what the alphabet agencies have presented evidence of, in Russian meddling in the election.

The exact thing, this article shows Clinton was guilty of.

Some may argue that it is different if a foreign nation, or a candidate does it, but I don't see it. It is psychological warfare and disinformation when anyone does it.

Either it should be allowed, or it shouldn't be.
 
VivaRevolution said:
What I find hilarious, is that this is basically the sum of what the alphabet agencies have presented evidence of, in Russian meddling in the election.

The exact thing, this article shows Clinton was guilty of.

Some may argue that it is different if a foreign nation, or a candidate does it, but I don't see it. It is psychological warfare and disinformation when anyone does it.

Either it should be allowed, or it shouldn't be.
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It's shady as fuck but it clearly a different animal when a hostile foreign government orchestrates it
 
VivaRevolution said:
What I find hilarious, is that this is basically the sum of what the alphabet agencies have presented evidence of, in Russian meddling in the election.

The exact thing, this article shows Clinton was guilty of.

Some may argue that it is different if a foreign nation, or a candidate does it, but I don't see it. It is psychological warfare and disinformation when anyone does it.

Either it should be allowed, or it shouldn't be.
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Do you think it's more likely that our "alphabet agencies" have more intimate and concrete sources of information on the Russian efforts against the United States, say in the form of double agents like Mr. Skripal or they're just making it all up?
 
Rational Poster said:
Do you think it's more likely that our "alphabet agencies" have more intimate and concrete sources of information on the Russian efforts against the United States, say in the form of double agents like Mr. Skripal or they're just making it all up?
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I don't give a shit if they do.

Trump has more credibility then the alphabet agencies do.

They can provide their evidence, and I will adjust my opinion accordingly, or I will assume they are full of shit.
 
VivaRevolution said:
I don't give a shit if they do.

Trump has more credibility then the alphabet agencies do.

They can provide their evidence, and I will adjust my opinion accordingly, or I will assume they are full of shit.
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That wasn't the question though.
 
VivaRevolution said:
Why?

Go watch Oliver stones untold history of the United States on Netflix and get back to me.

We have always been the aggressors.
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Seen it , also watched the Putin interviews with Stone which were extremely enlightening
 
Rational Poster said:
That wasn't the question though.
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No, I don't think they do, or they would release it.

It isn't even that I don't trust the alphabet agencies, it is more that they are in the profession of disinformation. I'm not surprised when I go to an NBA game and see someone dunk a basketball, in fact I expect it. Just as I expect professional spooks to lie, like fish swim.
 
VivaRevolution said:
I don't give a shit if they do.

Trump has more credibility then the alphabet agencies do.

They can provide their evidence, and I will adjust my opinion accordingly, or I will assume they are full of shit.
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You'r going off the deep end fyi
 
VivaRevolution said:
No, I don't think they do, or they would release it.

It isn't even that I don't trust the alphabet agencies, it is more that they are in the profession of disinformation. I'm not surprised when I go to an NBA game and see someone dunk a basketball, in fact I expect it. Just as I expect professional spooks to lie, like fish swim.
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So you think if the CIA had double agents feeding them intelligence directly from Putin's office they should tell everyone?

Are you sure you understand how spying works?
 
AnGrYcRoW said:
Seen it , also watched the Putin interviews with Stone which were extremely enlightening
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You have to see what I am getting at then.

To this day, I think we fear a German-Russian alliance as if Nazi's and ISIS became night walkers.
 
Rational Poster said:
So you think if the CIA had double agents feeding them intelligence directly from Putin's office they should tell everyone?

Are you sure you understand how spying works?
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When the stakes are convincing the American people we face an immediate threat, yes.

Pull the assets out, and lay your cards on the table.
 
VivaRevolution said:
When the stakes are convincing the American people we face an immediate threat, yes.

Pull the assets out, and lay your cards on the table.
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Even at the expense of those assets?

Did you see what happened to Mr. Skripal? He wasn't even in Russia.

Do you think it would be advantageous to us to show Putin our hand? If so, why?
 
Rational Poster said:
Even at the expense of those assets?

Did you see what happened to Mr. Skripal? He wasn't even in Russia.

Do you think it would be advantageous to us to show Putin our hand? If so, why?
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I didn't say burn your assets, I said pull them out.

Yes, you lose valuable intelligence. You gain a unified home front against an external enemy.
 
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