> [Facebook colluded] with Russia to influence a presidential election and install a puppet president.
This is a conspiracy theory, and really diminishes the level of the conversation here.
This is a conspiracy theory, and really diminishes the level of the conversation here.
Money is pooled into massive organizations called 'PACs' that are used to fund campaigns that get folks into government, then offer them sweet high paying jobs afterwards as long as they do their bidding while they work there. It's not corruption, that's lobbying.
It gets tiresome calling things what they are when there are dozens of definitions that the corrupt use to alter the nature of what they do with language. Corruption and propaganda are rampant, but once they can all be called 'marketing', or whatever the people with the power to influence via the media want to call them, that's the language that we use, and truly harmful things become easy to defend.
Russia spent $100k on FB in total, and they ran ads on controversial issues from both sides, not just Trump (and also organized "resist" protests after Trump won). For comparison, Trump's campaign alone spent $100 _million_. I don't know off the top of my head how much the Clinton campaign spent, but it did have 2x the money advantage, so it probably spent twice as much. If we assume the total FB spend of $300M for both campaigns, Russian money represented 0.033% of ad spend, and they likely used far less sophisticated targeting than the campaigns, and riled up both sides.
Tell me again how this could have altered the outcome.
Their goal seemed to be to sow discord, not to elect a particular candidate. I believe that's still their goal, and you, HN poster, is a great help to that end. They could not imagine a better outcome than Trump (or Clinton) getting mired in controversy and partisan gridlock, and unable to do anything about anything.
If you're going to talk about foreign influence, there are countries that are much more influential in US politics than Russia. No US president can even win a primary without pledging allegiance to Israel, for example. Clinton Global Initiative accepted millions from all over the world (donations dropped massively once Hillary lost, suggesting influence peddling). When it comes to hacking, China hacks the US far more than Russia ever will.
I don't quite get this raging hard-on for Russia that the mainstream media has manufactured. If it's outrage you want, there are far better targets.
I admit that these groups pushed both Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, Anti-Vaxx and Pro-Vaxx groups, etc., etc. I'm suggesting that the problem is that we have corporations that are apparently 'US' corporations that make money from the process and have a perverse incentive to push it, as it creates increased activity from certain users. It's this 'sharing' economy in propaganda that groups during the election took advantage of, and once set up it's almost free and self-expanding.
I agree: Israel, China, SA, Europe, and other groups and nations have a lot more impact here. My anger is not towards them for what they are doing here in this country. My anger is directed towards the regulatory and corporate structures in the United States that make propagandizing the populace possible in the first place, while also being legal and producing profit.
Are you going to tell me that given all these blatant propaganda forces at play Russia still had any effect on the election? I understand this meme looms large in US liberal psyche, but I'm struggling to understand why anyone would rationally believe this.
As to the Mueller investigation: no US person has been charged with _anything whatsoever_ related to collusion thus far. It's all "tax evasion" or process crimes. And he can charge anybody he wants in absentia: it's no secret that governments spy on each other and wage psy-ops campaigns all the time. Heck, Obama even listened in on Merkel's phone calls. Russia is not unique in that regard. In fact it's somewhat unique in how _little_ it interferes in affairs of other countries it has no common borders with.
For a bit of a historical aside to give some color to my perspective, consider that the US helped to re-elect Yeltsin in broad daylight in 1996 (he would have lost to a communist if it wasn't for the US), and was heavily involved in getting Poroshenko elected in Ukraine, also in broad daylight just a few years ago. US influence in Ukraine predates Poroshenko, though: see e.g. Manafort.
So to sum up: I do believe that there was "interference" to the extent proven by concrete evidence such as Facebook spend. I do also believe that such interference is part and parcel of international affairs: the US itself interferes all the time, often in a rather heavy-handed way. I have seen no evidence thus far that the DNC hack was indeed a hack, and not a leak. I believe about 0% of what Crowdstrike says, given its affiliations. I don't really believe in "alleged intrusions in voter registration systems" in absence of independent evidence. As far as I can tell it's fake news.
Note that I did not say that there wasn't an influence campaign - evidence suggests otherwise. I merely said none of the candidates colluded to benefit. If they had, something would have leaked already, and/or collusion-related indictments would have been made against the people involved (note however, that indictment is once again not a proof of wrongdoing).
The "meme" I was referring to is that Putin is this omnipotent evil mastermind who has the capability to decide who gets elected in the US. He's just a thief and not much more. You're de-facto putting him on a pedestal he does not deserve to be on.
And stop the histrionics, will you? Challenging a point of view is not "dangerous". Neither of us has any verifiable evidence either way, so it's a faith-based argument.
I'm not sure what source you're quoting, or what the original text was that you're attempting to simplify.
EDIT: missed the quote when reading the message above somehow - sorry.
In the context of an argument about why Facebook is a more dangerous monopoly than Ma Bell, this implies that Facebook did collude with Russia.
But what looms larger in my mind is the fact that FB was egregiously negligent in allowing the manipulation of their platform to take place to the extent that it did --- both in the context of that fiasco, and in much worse situations, e.g. in regard to the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar.
Russia has been playing both sides to destabilize the country, and the left's selective hysteria is playing right into the strategy, straight out of the KGB playbook.
The easiest man to fool is the one who thinks he cannot be fooled.