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Newsweek: Russia also interfered with Republican & Democratic 2016 primaries
- Thread starter Tripon
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Well one will happen before the other
It was very hard to understand in the moment. For example look to the twitter of any female Hillary supporter back in like eh... March. They'll be decrying the amount of abuse they are getting from the Bernie Bros. Now certainly there are dumb bernie bros sending dickbutts, but they were probably getting hammered by bots sending links to Hillary killed Benghazi articles.
***if it was a vast coordinated conspiracy on the part of Putin, then IMO gamergate was a test run :V
jellies_two
Member
They needed advice from an American political rat fucker that knew who needed boosting and what to say and who needed destroying, and how.
There just aren't that many people who could do that AND keep quiet about it. They either would need to be paid handsomely or be ideologically devoted to Trumpism and on the inside. There aren't many people that qualify: Roger Stone, Manafort, Bannon, Sessions. I don't think Trump himself has the finesse. Alex Jones is too much of a lunatic.
It may have been a brains trust: manafort and Bannon and stone.
There's also the fact that this is a fairly new subject. For the most part, one's usually only had to worry about misinformation campaigns by domestic groups since domestic groups would be the ones with clout with news agencies. TVs and newspapers aren't the only way people get news anymore though. Everyone who gets their news from facebook, twitter, and the television agencies that report those news stories in some fashion are now able to make targets of misinformation despite what the source may be.
You're not wrong.
But nobody is saying that fake news is new to 2016. Never before have we seen fake news at such a large-scale, coordinated level with the specific intent to disrupt an election.
This was a cyber attack. That's indisputable at this point.
JordanN
Banned
Only one problem I have if Trump ever gets arrested for colluding with Russia. The alt-right nutters have already shown themselves that they want their hate to stay public.
Losing their main man in pushing their racist agenda might cause them to start forming terror cells and pull off terrorist attacks until they get another guy like him in the White House.
Losing their main man in pushing their racist agenda might cause them to start forming terror cells and pull off terrorist attacks until they get another guy like him in the White House.
They're more like an enemy state
There's a big difference between a resident citizen of Russia attacking America with Russian resources, and a resident citizen of America attacking America with Russian resources.
PantherLotus
Professional Schmuck
[x] invades Crimea;
[x] massive money laundering schemes;
[x] global hacking operations, targeting soft political targets with 'fake news', online trolls, massive twitter harassment, etc;
[x] clearly flips fired Michael Flynn way before Trump gets nomination;
[x] clearly gets Paul Manafort onto Trump's team;
[x] clearly behind massive hacks targeting DNC;
[x] clearly hacking both Rep and Dem primaries (we know now);
[x] clearly behind timely wikileaks dumps;
[ ] but fucking around with just a few voting machines in target states to flip 30K-70Kish votes? no, that's crazy.
[x] massive money laundering schemes;
[x] global hacking operations, targeting soft political targets with 'fake news', online trolls, massive twitter harassment, etc;
[x] clearly flips fired Michael Flynn way before Trump gets nomination;
[x] clearly gets Paul Manafort onto Trump's team;
[x] clearly behind massive hacks targeting DNC;
[x] clearly hacking both Rep and Dem primaries (we know now);
[x] clearly behind timely wikileaks dumps;
[ ] but fucking around with just a few voting machines in target states to flip 30K-70Kish votes? no, that's crazy.
The stats we have make it very unlikely mass rigging was going on because rural areas were showing the exact same voting trends nationwide.
jellies_two
Member
I don't buy the voting machine hacks it could be discovered too easily. It would leave a digital trail. Why hack voting machines when you can hack the Facebook addicted people voting? That's so much better. Plausibly deniable. Even if it fails it would impact the margin of a Clinton victory and damage her power. perfect.
WordAssassin
Member
If you look at the chart on google that tracked votes you can like see exactly where the timelines crossed and we slipped over.
If it comes out Russia did dick with our shit, does that... put us at war with them? Like... tampering with an election, is that an act of war?
Actually, yeah. That is a bridge too far. There's no evidence for it. Actually, evidence points to the contrary.
Of course, this helps Russia again.
Not only can you see people worshipping Trump "stand up for freedom" to a #PresidentGate or some other assertion of a conspiracy theory, but then when you mix that with those who jumped to Trump as a response from neoliberalism -- neonationalism that Trump proposes isn't any better, but people buy the "change" -- you have a culture ready to go to war with itself. In many senses, this precariat class is already now engaged in a war with the elites and any notion of a status quo that supports them. Knowing a great deal of these people are quick to get behind Trump absolutely scares me, though there are many reasons why they're behind him. Noam Chomsky and Guy Standing warned of this problem of charlatans just walking in and getting masses behind them years ago. Trump, in a sense, is a "neoliberal beast" which makes his allure more complicated than "Russian pawn."
You'll potentially see two factions stand for the same causes, much like we saw this past election. Not every Trump supporter is an alt-righter but more likely a member of the precariat, so they've already rejected and now publicly despise the status quo. What worries me is we may lack the movements to really curb these in full, especially the precariat, because it's not particularly party-based. People left behind will jump to anyone speaking to them, and this includes liars like Donald Trump, who we could arguably say talked to them most often, even if all he did was lie and exploit their suffering for gain.
This is a terrible time for all of this to unfold. We're now a culture that hates experts, so we're quick to fall for emotional ploys..
The voting machine thing seems unlikely. Exit polls, non-electronic polling stations, voter trends, survey data, recount results all were consistent with electronic results from articles I read following the election.
SJurgenson
Banned
That is true, but there is an angle on all this that has not been sufficiently described, in my opinion.
Where the actual technical mechanisms of the election fair? Absolutely. There's no evidence of any votes being changed, or voting machines / vote databases being hacked.
But that's not the only way to 'hack' / affect an election.
An election is the sum total of all votes by citizens (plus some nonsensical process involving an Electoral College). The totaling was fair, and the Electoral College acted fairly/within the rules. So, no effect, right? No. You need to take a step further back, at look from another angle.
What is a vote? It's a rational decision a person makes, based on their beliefs, and influences by the information they have. If you wanted to influence an election, you would need to directly change the value of at least one of those variables:
- Voter rationality -- It's not easy to make people act irrationally
- Voter beliefs -- Not particularly easy, as people's core beliefs don't change much on their own.
- Available information -- Now this is comparatively easy to affect
You cannot easily affect the actual counting of votes. You cannot make a mass number of voters irrational. You cannot change a voter's core beliefs easily, either.
But what you can do is affect the information available to a voter.
That's what the accusation of Russian election 'hacking' has been all about -- the large misinformation/disinformation, and selected leaking campaigns that occurred.
If you haven't go watch both sessions of the Senate hearings yesterday. They were very enlightening on this subject.
kame-sennin
Member
Our IC is incompetent and was routinely clowned by the Russians during the Cold War.
Unfortunately there's no evidence of that last one, probably because it's too hard to actually do. The affected states aren't digital yet so there's no place to hack it, rigging those ballots would require boots on the ground and a paper trail a mile long. That'd be the one thing that would be impossible to cover up, we'd have known within a week.
They totally fucked with both sides of the election though, that much we can say for sure. There's too much smoke to say otherwise.
Despite how it may feel, the alt-right is still a fringe group. Restoring to violence would get them stamped out, which is why they'll likely stick to cyber warfare.
It hasn't resulted in far right extremist (aka terrorist) groups from getting stamped out before. Unfortunately the US allows a bit more leeway when it comes to homegrown political terrorists.
kame-sennin
Member
this is silly
Yeah, I believe a lot of the people speaking to the senate wanted to say that.
SJurgenson
Banned
There's no reason to hack the actual physical voting infrastructure -- and nobody is seriously claiming that is what happened.
What the Russians discovered, and what we did not consider, is that is is so much cheaper and easier to affect the election results by affecting the information available to the voters.
People on this forum love to talk about how deep the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2 was, myself included. This is that world the Patriot's described.
People make their choices (such as who to vote for) based on their internal beliefs, and the information they have. The Patriots didn't engineer a system to enforce specific choices on people. They didn't engineer a system to directly change people's beliefs. They instead engineered a system to modify the information people had access to.
'Swing voters' in key states didn't flip to Trump because they were irrational, or that they were acting directly against their self interests -- they flipped because the totality of the information deluged upon them by November 8th was enough that, when filtered through their rational beliefs, they choice to vote Trump.
Their logic did not change, and their sanity did not change -- the information they used to come to their conclusion did, and the vast majority of that information was from Russian active-measure campaigns.
It's not only Twitter but Facebook and Reddit too. It's not only that they allowed this to happen, it's that they allow a platform for hate speech to propagate and prosper. There's a reason Reddit is a haven of the alt-right and NeoGAF isn't.
Oh, I agree. I was just explaining that the last point he made never happened and didn't need to.
People basically hacked themselves. It's like Russia gave them a thumbdrive with a virus marked "virus" and people just put it into their computers.
Brawly Likes to Brawl
Member
Well, duh. Republicans would have to be stupid to assume that everything was fine just because it seemed like only Democrats were in danger.
SJurgenson
Banned
Is it? How is it really that hard to believe that the the hailstorm of negative information 'Hillary is sick!' and 'Podesta Email #252522' that swirled around this election was enough to swing the votes?
Because then a bunch of people on the left need to admit that they're just as susceptible to the fake news bullshit that's destroying the right. Of course Alternet and USUNCUT aren't the same as Breitbart and the Blaze! The former tell us the truth we want to hear and the latter are just lies!
I should note how funny it is that USUNCUT disappeared right after the election ended. It's literally gone. Almost as if it fulfilled the purpose for which it was created.
SJurgenson
Banned
I don't disagree, that was a big lesson this election -- everybody is susceptible to actual fake news/misinformation. Nobody has the time to dig into every source of every claim they hear.
This is not a partisan issue any longer, it's a civic issue.
Chaos2Frozen
Member
As Vince McMahon once said- "All of you were made fools of!"
jellies_two
Member
I think the correlation between falling for fake news and voter type, is educational level. All the surveys show the strongest correlation between lack of higher education and tendency to vote trump.
The fake news I am most familiar with - because my wife enjoys for some weird reason, belonging to Facebook groups that disseminate it so she can troll them - is the dumbest stuff you can imagine.
They only care about the headline
They barely click through
If they do they are besieged with adverts
They don't recognize photoshop jobs or edited videos
They don't know the difference between authoritative sources and random people and have no clue how to check.
They don't discuss the news. Just cheer it or boo it.
(I could go on)
There is a cognitive dissonance thing at work on the extreme left as well but it doesn't represent THAT many people, but the poorly educated who mostly know how to switch on Facebook are there in bulk, and they are predominately misled by false voices on the right telling them PC culture is sick and global warming is a hoax and you can't trust anything that isn't pro trump etc etc.
There has always been conspiracies that people fall into on both sides but what tilted this election is an artificially high number have sprouted in almost all right wing media, from fox onwards. Instead of conservatives trying to parse what Bill Kristol says or whatever they have stopped thinking and chased the easier but hollow ideas that confirm their prejudices, fears and so on.
There's plenty of smart people on the left who fell for the fake news shit. Hell, there's plenty of people on this very forum who fell for it. A lot of people on the left, for whatever reason, also embraced some of the conspiracy theories from the right because it suited their politics.
Both sides aren't equally affected, but both sides need to take the exact same steps to try and kill the problem. The primary was filled with fake news and I'm not talking about the Republican one. If we can't admit that basic fact then we've got no hope going forward.
jellies_two
Member
No argument that "plenty of people" fell for various kinds of fake news but i think history will show the amount of fake news and the numbers of people impacted were dramatically tilted to promote trump, destroy his enemies, and impact Hillary. It was weaponized by an uneasy alliance of Murdoch, putin, mercers etc. and Putin is trying the same thing in Europe as well.
The only thing ultimately to fix it is better education. Until then, social media can be rebuilt to help people filter information so that a story from credible people with a good track record is not placed on the same level as a guy monetizing a headline he made up over breakfast.
nephilimdj
Member
This is the same thing has the "damning evidence" in the buzzfeed leak, its just blaming RT.
Its no different to China being upset washington newspapers endlessly post anti-china stories paid by lobby groups
Its no different to China being upset washington newspapers endlessly post anti-china stories paid by lobby groups
BlastProcessing
Member
It's actually quite different. An organized army of tens of thousands of bots, a network of shady news sites that are either explicitly on the Russian payroll or based in the Baltics with mysterious funding, organized state sponsored hacking and thousands of people paid to post and disrupt social media conversations. That is significantly fucking different from an Washington Post OpEd citing a think tank.
The Buzzfeed leak according the British Intel etc. has been mostly confirmed as accurate.
There is a world of difference between Intel gathered by Actual Intel assets and Random twitter bots in the tens of thousands that spam fake articles and create groupthink behind completely fake news.
hydragonwarrior
Member
Wow, this is pretty insane news. I would have never thought Trump needed Russia to get votes during the Republican primary... but I'm assuming that makes sense too. He was never that signficant to anyone in that race yet here we are now.
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I'm not leaping to start Cold War 2, but I'm not ready to absolve them yet either. I say drain the Trump swinmming pool and see what kind of alligators and shit are in there. If the alligators are Russian, so be it.
In the other thread someone is comparing people who voted for Trump via Russia's disinformation campaign to Native Americans who were killed by guns and disease.
Looks like everybody's got their own take lol. If Trump voters can play victim, I've seen it fucking all.
nephilimdj
Member
I read the article and watched both videos, clearly referencing the Macedonian story and blaming RT (and its bots)
Macedonian story is what 6months old now, USA heavily meddles in that country and most likely monitored and reviewed by intel officers long ago
Of course there were attempts. Presidential elections are a widely reported event after all. "Two attempts" made me laugh a bit tho. Every decently big company has to ward off thousands of attempts every single day. Granted, Industrial Espionage has a more tangible reward than hacking Rubio's campaign, but still.
ErasureAcer
Banned
Hey another thread with sweeping Bernie fan generalities. Im hardcore Bernie and I despise Clinton...yet I still voted for her rotten ass in the general. I didnt get "played."
During the hearings it has been mentioned they used Bernie Bros without their knowledge
#NotAllBernieBros
I mean, what they're talking about here probably happens in every election right? I mean, in the latest Hardcore History it talks about Krushchev doing everything he could to influence the 1960 election in favour of Kennedy because he was seen as a rookie in geopolitics compared to Nixon.
The problem with Trump is the alleged collusion (and the hacking, which is a step further). But Russian media and sympathisers pushing narratives for their preferred candidate probably happens all the time.
The problem with Trump is the alleged collusion (and the hacking, which is a step further). But Russian media and sympathisers pushing narratives for their preferred candidate probably happens all the time.
The Internet makes a massive difference in pushing narratives. Ask Twitter Donald. Or Breitbart Bannon.
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