Did Russia fake black activism on Facebook to sow division in the US?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
- CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/media/facebook-black-lives-m...
- Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o...
- CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/russian-facebook-ads-targete...
- The Hill: http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/technology/352780-russian...
This guy Heber Brown should be feeling pretty good right now. He even has a screen-cap of him reputing the Russian agent. [1]
My one question here -- where was the NSA/CIA on this? If Russian is running such an incredibly nuanced misinformation campaign to incite riots in America, why the fuck didn't they identify it while it was happening, expose it, and stop it?
What we have here is either (a) insignificant, or (b) a glaring failure on the part of US intelligence. But my better guess is that the story completely falls apart at some point. These always start out so exciting and then utterly fizzle.
Did you notice the quick turn of phrase? It's no longer Russians influencing the election, now it's Russian influencing politics. When Russian agents are trying to rally protests in Baltimore, and they are doing it publically on Twitter and Facebook, let's see all the data and expose it, right now. If it's actually happening, it should be shockingly easy to detect.
[1] - https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154097683603610&se...
Great question. Why isn't the NSA working to secure the systems of Americans and our companies? Instead, it seems like they are devoting most of their resources to inserting back doors into commonly used software and generally subverting secure systems. Oh, and letting people like Snowden steal it all and give it to Russia. Very frustrating to watch the incompetence, indifference, or whatever is going on.
Where the Russians penetrated actual systems -- eg, the DNC hack -- the NSA was there alerting people and discussing attacks on the systems during the election. They intentionally didn't mention the possible collusion between Trump and Russian during the election, not to be seen as trying to influence it, but they were anything but silent about Russia attacking US computer systems.
Combating mechanized state propaganda inside the US isn't really anyone's job, thought it could fall under the FBI counterintelligence mandate. The openness with which the US conducts its society operates against it here -- the government doesn't directly manage propaganda and doesn't have a division tasked with disabling foreign propaganda under the banner of protecting first amendment freedoms. (After all, how you determine propaganda from funding people who just happen to think that way in a free society?) There are numerous reasons that experts in the field avoided collaborating with the government post Snowden, compounding the ineffectiveness of the US here.
This is a real challenge posed to democracy -- how do we stabilize a national identity and discourse with open memetic borders and having both a past that contains some really nasty business and a society divided on pressing social topics that can be used as wedge issues?
I don't think it's constructive to whine that the government didn't just solve it for us -- they shouldn't, in a free society. The price of democracy is that we, as citizens, need to maintain vigilance on constantly be discussing how to collectively deal with these hard issues.
The sites themselves(Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc) could change the algorithms to emphasize local community formation instead of focusing on more national news, but if that doesn't maximize revenue for them, then they likely wouldn't do it. Plus propaganda could still be spread on a more local scale. On top of that, the idea of these social media corporations manipulating whose stories and meetings can and can't be spread is off-putting to me.
I believe this issue is here to stay. If anything is to be done, then maybe the government should be transparent about the issue and try to emphasize social harmony.
Or perhaps the whole Russia pivot is just an attempt to push people into social harmony. I personally haven't seen any direct proof of Russia's involvement. It's just the government that claims it's occurring.
[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
I don't care either way, but I don't really think that either possibility is far from probable -- and the barrier to entry for this kind of trickery is just obscenely low as far as nation-state bickering goes.
The idea that this is proof of Russian meddling in the election is laughable.
0: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe...
It doesn't matter what entity instigated it. This is a problem irrespective of source.
The questions are: how pervasive is this and how do we deal with it?
However, I don't think it's a bad thing. Despite our issues, civil war would be a terrible, horrid occurrence.
That isn't really true, though. You could argue that our allies were just doing our bidding, but other countries definitely saw this meddling both in the 2016 POTUS election and other elections.[1] I also think statements like "US is much closer to civil war than most realize" needs some quantification or support.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/07/russia-us-el...
That's why I said "I believe," I don't have any evidence. I just find it incredibly interesting how at the same time we have a growing number of protests and most are experiencing a declining quality of life, food and gas prices are incredibly low. To me it seems like the government is trying to stabilize the population.
"The Blacktivist Facebook account was among the 470 Russian-linked accounts identified by the social media network and disclosed to Congress earlier this month, the sources said. The matching Twitter account was among the roughly 200 accounts Twitter identified with links to those found by Facebook.
Facebook shared its findings about the accounts with Twitter, enabling Twitter to identify 22 matching accounts and an additional 179 accounts that linked back to those accounts, the sources said. This matching process went beyond public-facing similarities and included private information that could link the accounts.
All of the ads handed over by Facebook were linked to the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy company that U.S. military intelligence has described as "a state-funded organization that blogs and tweets on behalf of the Kremlin." A senior Kremlin spokesman said last week that Russia did not buy ads on Facebook to influence the election."
The more popular anti-establishment rhetoric becomes, the more that rhetoric will be adopted by those who wish to use it toward their own ends. Be wary of what you assume to be true.
I'm thinking of the dual parties purpetrating this specifically, but no blind eye should be turned to /any/ outside influences.
I actually have had trouble finding a first citation of it happening, because every reference I've ever found to it (dating back a few thousand BCE) treats it as an old and established problem to social order.
The newness is in the mechanization of that attack via social networks to amplify your damage-per-cost and impact several groups at once from across the globe, but that's merely the industrialization of an old and established strategy.
This is what warfare between nations looks like. It's what it's always looked like.
Clinton didn't lose because of Russia. She lost because she was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign.
This is intellectually lazy. There’s a difference between normal, ethical, legal influence and malicious psychological warfare.
Much like computers amplified the issues with gerrymandering, computers are amplifying the effects of these kinds of efforts.
For example, applying machine learning to figure out how to "trigger" people is new.
At this point, the right wing in the US has been under a sustained information warfare onslaught for years in order to increase divisiveness. The left wing is now becoming a similar target.
The fact that the source is Murdoch, for profit, or Putin, for destabilization, or the US government, for control, is now irrelevant.
The issue is how to counteract this. Period.
Nah, they included a question mark in the title, so that makes it alright /s
1) she took millions of dollars in personal bribe money to give oppressive regime (Morocco) weapons during her tenure at department of state? (#9 on the list),
2) took million dollars in personal bribe money to give oppressive regime (Qatar) weapons during her tenure at department of state (#15 on the list),
3) paid people to start riots at Trump rallys (#5 on the list),
4) Obama had his cabinet picked by the chairman of Citigroup (#100 on the list),
5) mainstream media collusion with Hillary campaign (#37, #50, #58, #71, #81, #86, #90, #95, #97 on the list),
etc etc
The thing that makes me really upset though is that people on HN doubt this. Get a Twitter API key and spend a couple of hours looking at it yourself. Look at the DailyBeast story before the election about the Turkish airbase, trace the accounts there and see how some of them magically switch to pro-Trump or pro-Stein. It's completely obvious, and just what you'd expect from a troll factory.
This wasn't some deep secret FSB operation. They (the Internet Research Group or whatever the St Petersburg group is named) advertised for people to do it as a college job.
So in this case. First it was FB telling everyone how someone in Russia bought ads on Facebook for election. Reddit's /r/politics happily started a thread how this is finally the evidence that proves all these allegations. So ok, let's wait to see what's there. Expected some alt-right, KKK, white supremacist ads, but ended being pro-Hillary and Black activism instead. But of course, that didn't phase the political analysts so now this is also an evil cunning plan to overthrow democracy here and so on and there are Russians hiding in the bushes pulling strings. Heck, it could have been ads about eating more potatoes and political analysts at these news organization would have found a way to turn that into a conspiracy story just as well.
How much was spent on these adds, how many hundreds of millions? Oh just $100k. Given the importance of US elections, I would expect every country which has money to spare to try to influence the results in some way to benefit itself. Did the Chinese buy ads, the French? I'd say they'd be silly not to.
Without hypotheticals, here is Qatar giving a $1M birthday "gift" to Bill Clinton:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8396
Now that's some interesting foreign influence worth talking about
But I think it's highly likely that Russia actively engaged in an influence campaign in the US election, and I think that's an opinion shared by many people with direct Russian foreign policy knowledge. It's a modus-operandi of the Russian intelligence apparatus (there's a great interview on NPR's Fresh Air last month with John Le Carré who talks about this).
> Now that's some interesting foreign influence worth talking about
Why? Bill Clinton's not in power, last time I checked? Whereas the founder of the Donald J. Tump Foundation, another charitable endeavor with even more suspicious looking finances, is. Almost the entire Wikipedia page for the foundation is taken up with "Legal & Ethical Controversies".
I think there's room for a reasoned debate of the effect and impact of Russian influence in this past election. Who knew about it? Was it small-scale, or a massive operation? Did it actually have any impact? Going "but look at the Clintons!" rather undermines the discussion.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Trump_Foundation
And neither is his wife.
One does wonder though if the same standards of foreign nations interfering in a U.S. election would have applied to Hillary if she'd been elected.
If memory serves me correctly however, anyone mentioning such things before the election was told that the U.S. election can't be rigged/influenced and to suggest so was an attempt to undermine democracy.
That's exactly my point. That overreaction is what's derailed it. There have been nothing but empty promises for "that's it, it is just around the corner, we have the smoking gun" and then digging deeper, there is not much to go on there.
> It's a modus-operandi of the Russian intelligence apparatus
I believe that. KGB has been doing that since it was formed. Technically they might not have been sophisticated but they were good at planting stories and spinning narratives. I remember the "US govt created AIDS to kill all the black people" fake news.
> Was it small-scale, or a massive operation?
The investigation has been going for a quite a while, I don't believe there is any evidence of meaningful interference at this point. Mostly it is about fatigue listening to empty promises. There is an opportunity cost here. The more effort is spend here, the less time, effort and attention is left for more important things.
But I also believe that any country out there with enough resources would trying to influence US officials. I gave an example of a Qatar handing out a $1M birthday gift to the husband of the US Secretary of State.
> Why? Bill Clinton's not in power, last time I checked?
His wife was in power. Who also later ran for President. Thought it was an interesting connection there.
> Almost the entire Wikipedia page for the foundation is taken up with "Legal & Ethical Controversies".
Exactly. Let's talk about that, there seems to be more there to go on than Russia.
> Going "but look at the Clintons!" rather undermines the discussion.
As I mentioned, that was more about the scale of what kind of evidence is expected given the allegation made, and the energy and time put into this topic. $100k worth of ads for Black Activism don't fall near that.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/supreme-court-opens-mom...
Then that meeting in the tower with Trump J., was also shady. Those are good to investigate and find out what's going on. But I wish media would back away and do something else instead of insinuating the smoking gun is right around the corner.
Because so far, I don't see that meeting or the Black activism ads influencing election results in a major away, and definitely not to the level of overturning them.
I think the Russians but also other countries try to influence US elections. US is world power and who runs for office here affects other countries. Yes, Putin in particular didn't like Clinton, since she criticized his election results (and rightly so, there were some out of whack results like 103% of voters voting for him from what I remember), so Russia probably tried harder. But to me from the beginning, focusing on Russia seemed like a PR campaign more than anything.
I gave an example with $1M gift to show the level of evidence, that would be good to see. Imagine we found a copy of a $100M check to the RNC which allowed them to canvass 10x the neighborhoods that the Democrats could or buy more air time or FB ads and so on. That would be more believable.
I can't decide if this is a good thing or not. The winners won't be a real left party, they'll be mainstream Democrats (centrist-liberal establishment capitalists) assuming impeachment doesn't start a civil war. On the other hand, we'll be bereft an authoritarian racist that is diminishing this country each day he is in office as he dismantles social programs and blows up the climate.
I am all for shedding light and investigating things. We've had enough corruption, anything that leads to less corruption is good in my book.
> The winners won't be a real left party, they'll be mainstream Democrats (centrist-liberal establishment capitalists)
That's the deeper loss here. The opportunity cost talking about Russia and how many scoops of ice-cream Trump had. What happened to those people who voted for Bernie Sanders. He was mostly unknown before the election started and then mobilized a huge amount of followers even while the media was blacking him out. Sure most voted for Hillary but what happened to that energy and enthusiasm. I think we are missing out on creating a new party or at least unseating the old guard at the DNC.
We should be cautious of these narratives, especially when they can lead to hostility between nations.
We know some level of covert intervention is attempted all the time. Ironically, we are some of the leaders in doing this to other nations. If we put this microscope on all other nations I'm sure we would find incidents there as well.
You don't have to buy any "narratives". It may be better to simply take stock of the chain of events of what actually happened.
In this case - was there, in fact, something like a high-level, coordinated effort on their part to conduct various covert social media shenanigans (as opposed to open campaigns, like buying ads) in the U.S., for whatever purpose? Maybe the effort was ultimately futile and wasteful (like the "Illegals Program" a few years back -- but the more important question - was there such an effort?
Available evidence increasingly indicates that, in fact, there was.
How much was spent on these adds, how many hundreds of millions? Oh just $100k.
No idea where you're pulling those numbers from. But the overall scope easily suggest a budget >> $100k.
Did the Chinese buy ads, the French?
Wide-scale social media trolling != "buying ads".
Without hypotheticals, here is Qatar giving a $1M birthday "gift" to Bill Clinton
It's worth noting that they gave the money to the Clinton Foundation[1], not to some nefarious personal account.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-foundation/c...
You're free to believe whatever you want, but please drop charade. You have a very obvious agenda and you're doing a disservice to the rest of HN with your bullshit implication that you "stopped buying the Russia narrative".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13797023
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12793971
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973995
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12200173
[5] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...
In the meantime please re-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post only civil, substantive comments from now on.
Please just go ahead and ban me. This is completely ridiculous and you're part of the goddamn problem.
What was your source? My comment history? You didn't even dig enough to see that I am not Russian. So you're throwing allegations around. Yes I speak Russian and a few other languages and I lived in the ex-Soviet Union. Not sure you had to go back 340 days to see that. I mention that about every week here.
Why throw a fit that everyone else is not supporting your political candidate and doesn't share your opinions. Why not provide a counter argument which leads to discussion. You can see I responded to some comments which didn't start with "let's dig in your history". Sure, it's a bit flattering but as I mentioned in another comment, also kinda creepy.
You can disagree with the original comment. You can downvote the initial comment. You can flag the initial comment. Hell, you could even engage and reply to the initial comment.
But I don't want to see the personal attack.
Oh wow you found my post from 340 ago. I am kind of flattered, but also kind of creeped out, also saddened a tiny bit. Mostly because you see shills and spies hiding in the bushes.
No I am not Russian, but yes I speak Russian. There is a puzzle for ya, dig deeper friend. I also speak 3 other languages (not including computer languages), not sure if that' s a good hint or not. You can also maybe find exactly where I live. Should I put a chair against my bedroom door, just in case, ...
> of being vehemently anti-Clinton [5].
Oh we have to like Clinton here on Hacker News, sorry didn't know about that.
> but that you've also been dismissive of the "Russia narrative"
It smelled bad from the very beginning and I think the more time passes the more it gets validated. Well, thanks for finding those links, now I can say "yap I was right". Comey's advice not to prosecute bit being extremely fishy, and that the whole Russia narrative was a mostly a PR campaign. Do I get armchair HN political analyst brownie points?
> You have a very obvious agenda and you're doing a disservice to the rest of HN with your bullshit implication that you "stopped buying the Russia narrative".
What's the agenda? Yeah I stopped buying the Russia narrative after I saw that Crowdstrike's report was the only evidence for it. I didn't just stopped buying today, I stopped buying since it came up. Yet every time I see news with grand promises I think "ah well maybe this is it, let's see what's there" and there nothing.