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Vox: Democrats are falling for fake news about Russia

M

Makonero

Member
President Donald Trump is about to resign as a result of the Russia scandal. Bernie Sanders and Sean Hannity are Russian agents. The Russians have paid off House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz to the tune of $10 million, using Trump as a go-between. Paul Ryan is a traitor for refusing to investigate Trump’s Russia ties. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was a secret Russian agent charged with discrediting the American conservative movement.

These are all claims you can find made on a new and growing sector of the internet that functions as a fake news bubble for liberals, something I’ve dubbed the Russiasphere. The mirror image of Breitbart and InfoWars on the right, it focuses nearly exclusively on real and imagined connections between Trump and Russia. The tone is breathless: full of unnamed intelligence sources, certainty that Trump will soon be imprisoned, and fever dream factual assertions that no reputable media outlet has managed to confirm.

Twitter is the Russiasphere’s native habitat. Louise Mensch, a former right-wing British parliamentarian and romance novelist, spreads the newest, punchiest, and often most unfounded Russia gossip to her 283,000 followers on Twitter. Mensch is backed up by a handful of allies, including former NSA spook John Schindler (226,000 followers) and DC-area photographer Claude Taylor (159,000 followers).

There’s also a handful of websites, like Palmer Report, that seem devoted nearly exclusively to spreading bizarre assertions like the theory that Ryan and Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell funneled Russian money to Trump — a story that spread widely among the site’s 70,000 Facebook fans.

Beyond the numbers, the unfounded left-wing claims, like those on the right, are already seeping into the mainstream discourse. In March, the New York Times published an op-ed by Mensch instructing members of Congress as to how they should proceed with the Russia investigation (“I have some relevant experience,” she wrote). Two months prior to that, Mensch had penned a lengthy letter to Vladimir Putin titled “Dear Mr. Putin, Let’s Play Chess” — in which she claims to have discovered that Edward Snowden was part of a years-in-the-making Russian plot to discredit Hillary Clinton.
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These three — Mensch, Schindler, and Taylor — form a kind of self-reinforcing information circle, retweeting and validating one another’s work on a nearly daily basis. A quick Twitter search reveals hundreds of interactions between the three on the platform in recent months, many of which reach huge audiences on Twitter (judging by the retweet and favorite counts). They’re also reliably boosted by a few allies with large followings — conservative NeverTrumper Rick Wilson, the anonymous Twitter account Counterchekist, and financial analyst Eric Garland (best known as the “time for some game theory” tweetstormer.)

The Palmer Report, and its creator, little-known journalist Bill Palmer, is kind of a popularizer of the Russiasphere. It reports the same kind of extreme, thinly sourced stuff — for instance, a story titled “CIA now says there’s more than one tape of Donald Trump with Russian prostitutes” — often, though not always, sourced to Mensch and company. This seems to personally irk Mensch, who has occasionally suggested the Palmer Report is ripping her off.

Yet nonetheless, Palmer appears to have built up a real audience. According to Quantcast, a site that measures web traffic, the Palmer Report got around 400,000 visitors last month — more than GQ magazine’s website. The Russian prostitute story was shared more than 41,000 times on Facebook, according to a counter on Palmer’s site; another story alleging that Chaffetz was paid off by Trump and Russia got about 29,000.

This stuff is real, and there’s a huge appetite for it.
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That’s how the GOP fell for conspiracy thinking during the Obama years. There’s nothing about Democratic psychology that prevents them from doing the same — which means the burden is on Democratic elites to correct it.

Democratic partisans and liberal media outlets are the ones best positioned to push back against this kind of stuff. Rank-and-file Democrats trust them; if they’re saying this stuff is ridiculous, then ordinary liberals will start to think the same thing. Even if they just ignore it, then the Russiasphere will be denied the oxygen necessary for it to move off of Twitter and into the center of the political conversation.

“Scrutiny from trusted media sources and criticism from allied elites can help discourage this kind of behavior,” Nyhan says. “It won’t suppress it — there are always places it can go — but on the margin, allies can help limit the spread of conspiracy theorizing inside their party.”

So that’s the key question going forward: Will the mainstreaming of the Russiasphere speed up — and birth something like a Breitbart of the left? If so, it’ll create an environment where the people most willing to say the most absurd things succeed, pulling the entire Democratic Party closer to the edge — and leaving liberals trapped in the same hall of mirrors as conservatives.
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Read the rest here.

I see this stuff retweeted on twitter and then minutes later debunked. Gotta have multiple sources to stay truly informed.
 
P

Pryce

Member
I see people on here falling for it constantly. Just like Republicans (when it came against Hillary or Obama), some people are so eager for collusion they'll believe anything.
 
G

grumble

Member
Pryce said:
I see people on here falling for it constantly. Just like Republicans (when it came against Hillary or Obama), some people are so eager for collusion they'll believe anything.
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There is a seed of truth to these assertions but the big scandal is fantasy.
 
F

Foxyone

Member
Wasn't there a comparison somewhere of amount of Conservative fake news vs Liberal fake news? And it was ~twice as much Conservative fake news?
 
E

EatinOlives

Member
Twitter is the Russiasphere’s native habitat. Louise Mensch, a former right-wing British parliamentarian and romance novelist, spreads the newest, punchiest, and often most unfounded Russia gossip to her 283,000 followers on Twitter. Mensch is backed up by a handful of allies, including former NSA spook John Schindler (226,000 followers) and DC-area photographer Claude Taylor (159,000 followers).
Click to expand...

I hope we can stop freely posting Mensch/Taylor/Schindler trash on GAF. It's really not helping matters when threads get derailed for pages at a time with people arguing that no man, these are totes legit sources, just don't pay attention to the fact that they haven't had the time to corroborate anything before posting it!
 
G

gutshot

Member
Even Keith Olbermann has been retweeting Mensch and Taylor's stuff of late. I really hope this kind of stuff doesn't become common place amongst the progressives on Twitter.
 
F

FZZ

Banned
Yeah nah

there isn't a democrat subreddit filled with hundreds of thousands of people actively putting their hands over their ears refusing to believe news coming out about the orange fuckstick while grasping at conspiracy theories that have no value

Vox is reaching
 
S

Stopdoor

Member
You can post on GAF with an explosive headline but more subtle details in the actual source like the "Trump is under criminal investigation" one, and at least half the comments will just be equivalents of "BOOM!". I'm not so surprised now how "fake news" is effective, really.
 
K

KingK

Member
NexusCell said:
Lol, the moment I read the title I knew this article would be about them.
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Yup. Getting tired of people posting from those idiots on Twitter in all the Russia threads. Honestly, I hate people citing Twitter as news in general.

Really, I think I just hate Twitter
 
C

Cymbal Head

Banned
Despite what smug Democrats will tell you about the rubes on the other side, everybody's vulnerable to the lure of tribalism and cognitive bias.
 
L

lazygecko

Member
I don't really see this kind of fake news as some hyper-partisan conspiracy mongering so much as at being part of a wider trend of super cynical cash-grabs mutated out of the click-based ad revenue industry. Doubt the kind of people writing these stories, like those Macedonian kids, really have any ideological drive behind it rather than just brazenly exploiting hot topics that have been proven to rapidly generate traffic.
 
V

Viewt

Member
Yeah, sometimes I see people post shit on Facebook, and I'm like, "Holy shit, did I miss something?" And then I read the URL and it's "TROONOOS.NET" or some shit. For fuck's sake, people. Have we really learned nothing from the election?
 
V

Veitsev

Member
Well yeah and I hope at least on GAF people stop posting the trash that people like Mensch spew.

Still absolutely no comparison to what is going on with the right. A few people on twitter and a handful of websites isn't Fox News, Breitbart, and right wing radio.

Call me when liberals shoot up a pizza place falsely accused of a child sex ring involving Clinton in a basement that doesn't exist on this plane of reality.
 
T

TheBryanJZX90

Member
If you want to feel superior because you're​ educated and you voted for the candidate that got more votes from educated people, you gotta act like it.
 
H

Hindl

Member
This one goes out to all the people in the various Comey threads saying "Well Mensch and Taylor broke some things ahead of mainstream news! Why can't we take them seriously?"
 
D

Dirca

Member
The other threads on the investigation have exceeded toxic levels of hopium. Trump, Pence, et. al. have been found guilty, tried, and convicted by many on gaf based off of "people" and "sources" found in various news outlets. I'm not saying that there isn't something going on, but I refuse to jump to conclusions like everyone else has. It's all speculation at this point. I believe the IC won't be able to pin anything on Trump, just a gut feeling. Do I think shenanigans have taken place? Yes, I think so, but I'm not going to start making accusations yet.
 
A

Astral/H3X

Member
Oh thank God, that means I'm not one of the crazy ones.

Always gotta wonder if you're the one falling for stupid shit, but seeing this, I'm good.
 
J

Jenov

Member
President Donald Trump is about to resign as a result of the Russia scandal. Bernie Sanders and Sean Hannity are Russian agents. The Russians have paid off House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz to the tune of $10 million, using Trump as a go-between. Paul Ryan is a traitor for refusing to investigate Trump's Russia ties. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was a secret Russian agent charged with discrediting the American conservative movement.

Er, I haven't seen a single one of those mentioned here on GAF or my FB. So I'm thinking it's not nearly as widespread as the right wing crazy conspiracies.
 
D

Dyle

Member
It amazes me that anyone takes any of these sources at face value when there are so many bombs coming out of the NYT and WaPo and other credible organizations. I've had to block a couple friends on Facebook due to them spamming stuff from Occupy Democrats, Coffee Party, etc.
 
R

Ran rp

Member
President Donald Trump is about to resign as a result of the Russia scandal. Bernie Sanders and Sean Hannity are Russian agents. The Russians have paid off House Oversight Chair Jason Chaffetz to the tune of $10 million, using Trump as a go-between. Paul Ryan is a traitor for refusing to investigate Trump’s Russia ties. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand was a secret Russian agent charged with discrediting the American conservative movement.
Click to expand...

Not once have I heard of these and I've been following this thing closely.
 
K

Kaban

Member
I've been thinking about this recently, how receptive each side is to 'fake news' as long as it follows their narrative. Always check your sources. It happened last week with that stupid "Sean Spicer wore two different shoes" story. Even NYT, which I respect in general, mislead readers with those Super Bowl attendance photos, though at least they issued a correction.
 
V

Veitsev

Member
Facebook has nearly 2 billion active users.

Yet nonetheless, Palmer appears to have built up a real audience. According to Quantcast, a site that measures web traffic, the Palmer Report got around 400,000 visitors last month — more than GQ magazine’s website. The Russian prostitute story was shared more than 41,000 times on Facebook, according to a counter on Palmer’s site; another story alleging that Chaffetz was paid off by Trump and Russia got about 29,000.

This stuff is real, and there’s a huge appetite for it.
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41,000 and 29,000 shares is a huge appetite?
 
D

def sim

Member
It's made reading some of the threads here difficult. Especially since they've become incredibly indignant towards anybody not wanting that nonsense here.
 
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