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Comment by rhino369 | Hacker News Reader

Foreign interference is a big deal and shouldn't be overlooked.

But I just don't think its plausible that the identified Russian activities swung the election. The Russian fake news trolls were a drop in the ocean of social media/news. The russia spend on facebook was 0.05 percent of the candidates (not even going to mention the free posting by individual supporters). FB estimated that 1 out of ~20 thousand pieces of "content" it served related to the election was russian.

In order to believe they had an impact, you have to believe russia ads/fake news are almost infinitely more persuasive than other propaganda, ads, news, etc.

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Asking whether they "swung" the election is an unnecessarily high bar. The question is whether they influenced the election, and the answer is a pretty clear yes. Russian hacks of the DNC and John Podesta, and the ensuing leaks, drove front-page headlines and cable news coverage for weeks in aggregate, if not more.

The DNC came out with the story about the Russian hack very quickly; they can't possibly have known it was them with any accuracy.

It could easily have been a leak, and the Russia story was simply to deflect from the content of the leak.

No, it was definitely the Russians. In addition to the clear and definitive attribution by federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies, there was significant work by private industry to support the attribution. For example the phishing email that got Podesta was included in the leak of his inbox, and traced back to phishing infrastructure that had previously (i.e. before the DNC and Podesta hacks happened) been attributed to one of the Russian APTs.

If the DNC leak impacted the election, should the blame be on leaker or on the people responsible. The DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned over the content of the emails, and the DNC issued a formal apology to Bernie Sanders and his supporters over the conduct during the election.

It seems a bit like blaming the NBCUniversal for leaking the audio tape of trumps lewd conversation about women, rather than trump.

A big question is how influence the three major leaks had on the election, and from an outside perspective it seems insane that the whole US political direction get decided on embarrassing leaks rather than political subjects.

IIRC the DNC was using Crowstrike for their AV and security who interestingly has a lot of their company based in Ukraine, and both CS and DNC refused to allow the FBI access to servers and logs to verify the Russian attack.

IDK much about much, but that sure does seem questionable to me.

The RNC has since hired Crowdstrike too, even as Republican officials they support have said lots of stuff about Crowdstrike and Ukraine. The public statements are all for show.

I’m not sure that’s a big vote of confidence for me. The other take on what you wrote is the RNC watched the DNC skirt over any sort of responsibility to allow authorities to investigate such a claim and want in on that action.

The Crowdstrike line is another primary talking point of the paid Russian propagandists.

A talking point belonging to a group one dislikes does not make it invalid.

If someone else had looked at the servers, it seems likely we would have heard of it by now...

So is it the Russians or the media reaction that made the difference? If I recall correctly one of Greenwald's main theses is that click-thirsty coverage of exciting-sounding stories overwhelmed more substantial topics in the 2016 election.

The Russians definitely found a flaw in the way the U.S. works with political information today, and exploited it for a big effect. And I don't think that flaw is fixed as we head into this election.

So, I agree with Greenwald that a broken media environment made it possible. But I disagree with him that that casts doubt on Russian involvement, or invalidates Russian activity as a topic of national concern.

Did Greenwald ever say he doubts Russian involvement? I know he on the side of "Trump didn't conspire" and feels that the rest of the media is mishandling the matter, but I don't think he's ever disputed the actual meddling.

(Correct me if I'm wrong; if he's actually disputing the existence of the meddling he'd go down a few notches in my esteem).

Greenwald wanted evidence presented of the meddling, but that it was something the US and Russia both regularly do.

https://medium.com/@ggreenwald/statements-about-possibility-...

Podesta got phished. The actual email that phished him is available on Wikileaks for anyone to examine. Anyone who can set up a website and send an email can phish. Invoking Podesta as proof of "Russian hacks" says a lot more about you than about Trump (for whom I would never vote) or Russia (with whom I hope we don't have a stupid war).

A. Posesta had a password of P@ssw0rd iirc. Let’s not pretend this required some nation state espionage. He had a bad password AND entered credentials into a phishing site. He pretty much had it coming sooner or later.

B. The CONTENT of Podesta’s emails were the problem for Clinton. How much money she took from Wall Street, her public and private opinions depending who she was talking to, the very real pay-to-play “Donations” to her fund while she was Secretary. Her collusion with the media, including asking Trump to be propped up with coverage as a pied piper she “knew” she could beat. Russia didn’t make her do things that looked bad when made public, or make her skip campaigning in key states. I’m a little shocked at how all the hate is directed to the assumed-Russian messenger, when the real problem was she truly was a bad candidate who did bad things. she is responsible for Trump in many ways, yet, people years later still defending her. Makes no sense.

Edit: ok, hide the truth, don’t thank Clinton for Trump even though that’s what happened.

Pointing to the amount spent and then declaring it impossible Russia swung the election is an extremely questionable argument coming from a user of this site. User targeting is the X-factor for facebook advertising; no one on this website believes that any X dollars spent on advertising is equivalent to any other X dollars spent. The fact that Russia microtargeted swing voters and voters in key states, and with the help of Cambridge Analytica data crafted messages for specific demographics, must be central to an analysis of whether they swung the election.

Would you accuse other campaigns of swinging the election for using similar tactics? For example in Obama's 2012 campaign his online organizing director admitted to micro-targeting, harvesting of friends lists (and admitting the users of their app probably didn't know this, and it's now against FB ToS). [1]

This same person recently founded a company that publicly boasted its tech could "sway" the 2020 election. [2]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/03/25/596805347/how-does-cambridge-...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/01/higher-ground-labs/

A strange reply considering the context. The moral judgment in the subtext of my comment isn't on swaying the election, its on foreign nation. The candidates and their agents are legitimately looking to sway the election in their favor. That's what campaigning is. That Obama's activities were in an effort to sway the election in his favor is an uninteresting point.

We'll probably never know with certainty exactly how much it changed things.

But we can do a lot more to ensure our elections are free from foreign influence in the future.

One way might be to do something about the guy going on TV to ask foreign countries to dig up dirt on a rival.

> do something about the guy going on TV to ask foreign countries to dig up dirt on a rival.

Hillary deleted 30,000 emails after a subpoena was issued. Trump suggested that since other countries had hacked her server they probably had the 30,000 deleted emails and they could turn them over to help the investigation.

Also, our political leadership could stop engaging in corrupt behavior, so that hacking their electronic communications is of little value to foreign powers trying to sway our elections.

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