Political discussions on Twitter are flooded by obvious bot/content farm accounts like "BaldEagleFreedom983428" shitposting memes how Hillary bought CNN to take away your gunflags. Ban this crap.
The only reason Twitter did this was to make it look like they were doing something to improve the platform. Twitter won't notice $2M from their balance sheets if it bumps their stock price a few cents, but they will notice the dollars off their stock price when they decide to stop lying about how much traffic from human beings they're actually servicing vs the massive bot infestation.
How they handled that was to back-date all the reporting. Presumably bot traffic does not generate any additional advertising value, so re-fitting the number of MAU would increase the average ad reach/user value proposition. The importance is the trend, not necessarily the overall level.
All talks about "Hillary got more in popular vote" is akin to talking that the fat slob should have won against the MMA fighter quarter of his weight had the rules been about weight competition and not about dropping the opponent.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/days-after-activ...
[1] http://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824432/if-voting-machines-w...
Smartmatic manufactures the voting machines used in 16 states last November.
The Chairman of Smartmatic, Mark Malloch-Brown, is on the board of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
It is not hacking by Russians that is the threat.
Think what you like about Soros but having major Democrat donors running the electronic voting system is asking for trouble, be it real or manufactured.
No, it was well-documented fact long before Trump was even considered a candidate aside from his abortive 2000 Reform Party effort, that came to light particularly around the 2004 election and has been intermittently in the news since.
What was (correctly) viewed as a Trump camp conspiracy theory was that there was a massive conspiracy to illegally deny him an election win, including by hacking voting machines, not the idea that it was possible to hack voting machines.
(Also, you might want to think about which party won the 2004 presidential election in which voting machine hacking became seen as a major issue, and why it's the same party whose victory in the 2016 presidential election caused it to again be seen as a major issue.)
Twitter was playing into the "Russians" PR story. Basically explaining the results of the elections as reversed by the Russian influence. Everyone talked about it for months on end. After months of investigating, it turns out Russians bought ads on Facebook and I guess were approached by Twitter to promote their version of "truth" as well for some extra cash. So now Twitter feels a bit guilty, because even though it knows the narrative is bogus, they have to go along with it.
That's the danger of the conspiracy theory mindset. Once they go down that path, it's hard to really get back out, because it would mean realizing everything that has been said or repeated so far is mostly bogus. It's really hard to fight against cognitive dissonance, both at the personal and organizational level.
However, I think it's good in general they are trying to reduce subversive influence and bring light to it. Hopefully they apply the same effort and zeal to expose and reduce the influence of other governments, corporations, political organizations and so on.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol...
Exactly. It went from Russians hacked or elections in Wisconsin. As in they logged in and changed vote counts. To piss dossier. To secret coded gestured at an official dinner between Putin and Trump. And now we are down to Milner considered "Russian influence". In this case we are in deep trouble. It means Alibaba, AirBnB, WhatsApp, Facebook, Flipkart, Zynga, Spotify are all their "pocket".
By that token Google is a "Russian" company with a Russian born founder who is now creating robots, knows everyone's search history, and spies on everyone via Android phones. Everything is lost, nowhere to run.
That's exactly how conspiracy theory works, it at the same level as contrails and lizard people.
My point is there is a lot of reasons to be suspicious about what is going on with Russia and Trump, and it’s wrong to compare this with contrail conspiracy theories.
That said, the constant state of outrage is annoying and I agree that this Twitter ad thing is probbly overblown. The bots on twitter are a much bigger problem. One thing the adds do show though is that Russia was actively looking to influence the election.
1. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/us/politics/us-tells-2... 2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/11/donald-trump...
Right, that's exactly the type of news I meant. It is worded to sound like there was kind of a major breach or votes were almost altered. Only further down in the article we see:
"Federal officials said that in most of the 21 states the targeting was preparatory activity such as scanning computer systems."
Anyone running or maintaining production systems connected to the public internet is scanned and pinged all the time by everyone from Russia, China, Europe, etc. I was running a relatively unknown service for a few clients and ended up blacklisting whole countries' IP ranges and moving ssh to non-default ports just to avoid all the log noise, from constant pinging attempted logins.
If that scanning + the Russians buying Facebook ads, and then got pitched by Twitter to advertise there as well is all there is, it's just not enough compared to the amount of money and time spent talking about for months on end.
> Trump did fire the head of the FBI who was leading the investigation into his campaigns ties with Russia, and then admitted that he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he did it.[2]
Indeed. So I was on /r/politics and we were discussing how finally Comey was testifying on Thursday and we should all watch. It was finally the end of Trump. Comey will lay the cards on the table and tell us all about the Russian interference. I never bought into the "Russians" story as is, I always thought it was clever PR trick and all, but I was excited about Comey's testimony. Except nothing happened. He said that Trump was mean to him basically.
> There is even a special counsel investigating Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. Mueller has been investigating the dossier so we will see if any parts of it were accurate.
I don't believe they have anything substantial to justify the hysteria so far. At this point with the amount of talk and time spent on this, it would have to be something like a blackmail file or literally Russian hackers in the bushes in Wisconsin twiddling vote counts on the machines. If any of those things had happened, I have no doubt it would have leaked to the press by now and media and everyone would be talking about. People involved are invested enough in getting rid of Trump that they wouldn't be waiting for a year if there was anything juicy there.
One dangerous thing that I see happening is that there is an opportunity cost. Every minute or time spend on this Russia thing, is a minute not spent on seeing how to organize better politically, maybe clean up the DNC, form a new party. Just yelling "Trump is stupid" and "Russia" and having protests over and over will ensure another re-election for him.
I agree with you here, the headline is over the top. I do think there is too much hype about anything Russian-related. However, I think you are misrepresenting what the article actually says. This preparatory activity seems like more than just scanning port 22. A few sentences later:
"Officials said there were some attempts to compromise networks, but most were unsuccessful. Only Illinois reported that hackers had succeeded in breaching its voter systems." And "The Wisconsin Election Commission, for example, said the state’s systems were targeted by “Russian government cyber actors.”
So the Russian government was trying to break into US election infrastructure. Does this justify the breathless coverage of the "Russia Scandal" on the news? Maybe not (but 24/7 news is always outraged about something). But does this mean the Russia thing is on the level of crop-dusting conspiracies? No, and it's wrong to suggest that.
> He said that Trump was mean to him basically.
This sentence seems a bit dishonest. Sure, Trump may have been mean to Comey. But we are talking about the President of the United States firing the head of the investigative body of the Department of Justice, not some playground bully. Comey detailed several instances where he felt Trump was pressuring him to end an investigation into members of his campaign. Trump then fired Comey when he didn't stop the investigations, and said that he was thinking about the Russian investigation when he fired him. Maybe this is mean, but there is clearly something here that should be investigated.
> Every minute or time spend on this Russia thing, is a minute not spent on seeing how to organize better politically, maybe clean up the DNC, form a new party.
These would all be good things. The biggest impact of the Russia coverage, IMO, is that it insures the Mueller investigation is carried out to its completion and Trump can't silently make it go away. We already know Trump would try to fire the leader of the investigation, he's done it once. I'm not convinced that the investigation will find anything, but there is enough evidence to justify a full investigation into the Trump campaign's Russian connections.
There is very little about Russia in it though. It was mostly when he represented Ukraine and all the corruption and payments he received from that.
> Only Illinois reported that hackers had succeeded in breaching its voter systems. [...] So the Russian government was trying to break into US election infrastructure.
They stole 200k registration records. Was it the Russian government though? Russia and whole Eastern Europe is the origin of a lot of such attacks. Did they alter any votes? I imagine if the system was not secured, the Chinese, and anyone else out the would have eventually found and got the records. If they contain SSNs it would be useful for identify theft.
If that's the only evidence of "collusion", it's pretty flimsy and certainly doesn't warrant all the time and effort put into it. The OPM hack which lead a lot of intimate details about the lives of millions of US govt workers which hold clearances, was many orders of magnitude worse. Yet, the media and everyone else seems to have largely forgotten about. Nobody talks about Chinese running our government or blackmail dossiers. Even though it would be a lot more plausible given the successful attack there.
> Comey detailed several instances where he felt Trump was pressuring him to end an investigation into members of his campaign. Trump then fired Comey when he didn't stop the investigations
What if Trump didn't collude with Russia. We have to consider that possibility. Yes he was constantly being accused of it. It would get got annoying after a while. Imagine you're the CEO and one of your subordinates is investigating you for something you didn't do. You might let them do it for a while, so they convince themselves there is nothing there. But after some time enough and enough and if they just seem to waste their time, they'd be let go.
They why wouldn't Comey come clean and say exactly what the collusion was and lay everyone on the table so speak. He had nothing to lose, here he was fired for it it was his chance to prove to the world where the collusion was.
> Mueller investigation is carried out to its completion and Trump can't silently make it go away.
It does go on. So that's good news, and there are nice results already. Another corrupt lobbyist and Republican campaign manager behind bars is a good thing in book.
They're only sorry because they think this helped someone they don't like ascend to the presidency. Nothing else.
I've also got news for you: most conservatives had strong aversions to Hillary Clinton to begin with. As far as I can tell, most of the surprise in the vote turnouts came from senior citizens who were hardly part of polls and open political discourse in the run-up. These people aren't glued to Twitter all day. Yes, Donald Trump was an unrealistic, silly choice and I too thought there was no chance he was going to win: but that's exactly what I thought when I saw how much the DNC was backing Hillary.
What about physical rallies organized by Russia on Facebook? [0]. Or the failed "Miners for Trump" in Philly [1]
I guess it cracks you up when its your guy in the house :)
[0] http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/20/russian_fa...
[1] http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/the-crazy...
Dozens!
People aren't smart. They grasp to whatever narrative already enforces the beliefs they hold. If you believe RT hacked the elections, then the ad is an admission of guilt. If you believe they didn't, then its satire. There's no truth anywhere here; its just dumb discourse for likes and views.
Social media is pure garbage. Its supposed to break down walls, but it just creates echo chambers. Its supposed to connect humanity, but it just spreads fear and disinformation. All of these platforms should be shut down; humanity is not better off for them. Jack and Mark should be ashamed of what they created, but they probably sleep well at night knowing that if they hadn't, someone else would have, in the same way a drug dealer knows that if they don't deal, someone else will.
[1] https://twitter.com/MManningIEI/status/920542851515240448
Absolutely.
>> As far as I can tell, most of the surprise in the vote turnouts came from senior citizens who were hardly part of polls and open political discourse in the run-up.
That's part of it, but a large part of the surprise is that voter turnout in key states had some big swings. A lot of people didn't show up for various reasons, and additional showed up that didn't normally.
From what some of the reporting has turned up, some of the Russian propaganda effort was aimed at voter suppression of democratic voters. How effective were those efforts on social media is unknown at this point but there is a decent chance that at least some people involved in that effort committed crimes.
Bots exactly misrepresent the will of the public.
Of course, reddit doesn't do that either nowadays. But the point stands: Blocking bot behavior does not necessarily mean blocking real users.
Also, what's wrong with pushing an agenda exactly? Are we to ban politicians and opinion writers?
President Trump is the greatest president of all time. In the future, the U.S. will be so great that our history will be taught as 'before Trump' and 'after Trump'.
Thank you, President Trump, for fighting for all that is right and good for America. I'm so sorry the liberals and media can't see the truth. Millions of us support and respect you. We are praying daily for your safety and health.
Many of my real-life contacts push meme-like propaganda all the time on facebook. I don't think they're paid to do it. Banning that stuff through automation is likely prone to error.
http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/
The velocity, timing, and similarity among links in these tweets are not organic at all.
> Accounts likely controlled by Russian government influence operations.
> Accounts for “patriotic” pro-Russia users that are loosely connected or unconnected to the Russian government, but which amplify themes promoted by Russian government media.
> Accounts for users who have been influenced by the first two groups and who are extremely active in amplifying Russian media themes. These users may or may not understand themselves to be part of a pro-Russian social network.
So, not bots? Maybe organic right wingers?
Looking at the advisory council of that group and seeing Bill Kristol along with a bunch of Obama staffers and hawkish neolibs/neocons is setting off my "disinfo via appeal to dataviz" alarm.