11 ms·

Did Russia fake black activism on Facebook to sow division in the US?

87 points by kafkaesq 9y ago

Zigurd 9y ago
This kind of influence doesn't have to be obviously coherent, rational, or consistent. It happens in bulk, and it is to the benefit of influencers if it appears to be human, fallible, inconsistent, and organic while still driving toward a goal. Supporting black activism could be 98% off target w.r.t. propaganda goals, and still be useful to a comprehensive program of political influence. Similarly, you will find everything from 100% fictional goofball pizza parlor child abuse wild-ass rumors to completely objective statistically valid pieces in RT and in Russian influence campaigns.
Rupub 9y ago
I think the Rupublicans are going to leak all kinds of “liberal” accounts to give BLM NODAPL etc a black eye while not releasing all the info on the KKK, white supremacists and malheur occupiers…
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Sensitive topics need to be brought up substantively, or the conversation tends to degenerate into flamewars. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
thrill 9y ago
The more resources that are dedicated to political churn (whether externally generated or intrinsically arising) in a country then the fewer resources that can be focused against those unfriendly to it.
- tambienben 9y ago
  I agree. Is that a reference to a quote? 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.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    It's extremely old strategy to fund internal divisions in a state you want to undermine... 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.
    - tambienben 9y ago
      I would argue that it is (also) warfare waged against the citizenry by established domestic political parties/players.
croon 9y ago
Going off things like this [1], I'm going to say yes. (See location tag) [1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://twitter.com/AntifaBoston/status/912763777698889728 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
- serf 9y ago
  if that's the evidence that Russia instigated black activism in the U.S. , where's the evidence that the U.S. government didn't plant a falsely geo-tagged photo and then bring attention to it in every news outlet that it can influence in order to instigate U.S. hatred towards Russia? 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.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    I personally feel that you raise a good question. I believe that the US is much closer to civil war than most realize, and the government is trying to prevent it by lowering fuel and grain prices, spurring economic growth without hurting the lower class anymore, and creating a common enemy(Russia). I know the only ones claiming Russian involvement is the US government and media. However, I don't think it's a bad thing. Despite our issues, civil war would be a terrible, horrid occurrence.
    - nkozyra 9y ago
      > I know the only ones claiming Russian involvement is the US government and media. 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-election-hacking-uk-intelligence https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/07/russia-us-el...
Caveman_Coder 9y ago
Some additional news stories on the subject... - CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/media/facebook-black-lives-matter-targeting/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/media/facebook-black-lives-m... - Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-operatives-used-facebook-ads-to-exploit-divisions-over-black-political-activism-and-muslims/2017/09/25/4a011242-a21b-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html?utm_term=.b9ac8e953d95 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o... - CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/russian-facebook-ads-targeted-black-lives-matter-muslims-election.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/russian-facebook-ads-targete... - The Hill: http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/technology/352780-russians-bought-black-lives-matter-facebook-ad-that-targeted http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/technology/352780-russian...
free_everybody 9y ago
Did they? CNN says they did, because Facebook said they did. Had to click through to find out that basic information. Thanks, Guardian.
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
Recognizing manipulation is one thing, but doing something to help the issue is another. Most of the ease of propaganda is due to social media. Even if we enact some sort of digital isolationism, that would be trivial to bypass due to proxies and government hacking. 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.
gozur88 9y ago
Every country on the planet tries to influence US elections to some degree or another. Why focus on Russia and not, say, Israel or China? Clinton didn't lose because of Russia. She lost because she was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign.
- amazingman 9y ago
  > Every country on the planet tries to influence elections to some degree or another. Why focus on Russia and not, say, Israel or China? This is intellectually lazy. There’s a difference between normal, ethical, legal influence and malicious psychological warfare.
  - asnfaiosnfsa 9y ago
    Please elaborate. I bet you'll find the line is very difficult to enunciate and still believe in First Amendment type free speech.
- bsder 9y ago
  This is disingenuous. 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.
SapphireSun 9y ago
Nothing below is actually evidence, merely assertions that lead back to military intelligence. If you are skeptical of the Russia story in the first place, I see no reason you shouldn't be skeptical of this story. The nature of the "link" is not substantiated. Imagine if instead Blacktivist is a real activist page that is now roped into the Russia story by reactionaries in military intelligence. The story is now black people's outrage is manufactured by Russia in the midst of reaction to the #TakeAKnee protests. What do you guys think? "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."
rdtsc 9y ago
I stopped buying the Russia narrative. It's been going on for too long and the proof and substance vis-a-vis the hours and effort and noise and predictions generated from it doesn't add up. It started with "17 intelligence agencies" and then "Trump is getting impeached on Thursday for sure when Comey has his hearing", to some ridiculous "golden showers dossier". Yeah it was a good PR campaign, no doubt, it ran for a while, but then it's time to retire it. 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 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8396 Now that's some interesting foreign influence worth talking about
- mistermann 9y ago
  One (or two?) CNN employees were caught on hidden cam entirely candidly admitting it was for ratings, orders from the top of CNN. Seems fairly consistent with reality, especially the longer it goes on.
- beaner 9y ago
  It is also interesting to me to observe how quickly liberals accept that the promotion of their own ideas is divisive - as long as someone else is to blame for it.
  - tdb7893 9y ago
aosfoasb 9y ago
Every skeptic in this thread is getting downvoted to shove them to the bottom. Propaganda at work.
robertwalsh0 9y ago
Lots of Facebook election posts have been flagged and removed - I hope this one isn’t.
beaner 9y ago
Am I crazy to think that the article should contain some evidence for this claim? It doesn't.
- imron 9y ago
  > the article should contain some evidence for this claim Nah, they included a question mark in the title, so that makes it alright /s
tweedledee 9y ago
So many skeptical comments. I had no idea Russia paid so many shills to go on Hacker News.
- imron 9y ago
  Everyone who disagrees with me is a shill ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
jimjimjim 9y ago
just flag the whole thread. garbage fire.
nl 9y ago
I'm astonished anyone is surprised by this. It's pretty clear to anyone studying this that Russian linked accounts promoted anyone except Clinton, and they did it in deliberately provocative ways. 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.
jijji 9y ago
this further puts to bed the russia hacking the election narrative. you dont have to look far [1] to find the top 100 reasons why hillary lost the election. [1] http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  The top one of that top 100 that has to do with Hillary (two Ls for your future reference) is that she might be a globalist (supports open borders.) Yawn. Not even news. True, the Democratic leadership had to resign, they were cheatin' for Hilary and lying about being unbiased. But they weren't up for election.
  - jijji 9y ago
    its not news that: 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
losvedir 9y ago
Huh, I have no problem believing Russia, say, bought ads of various sorts to try to sway the election, and I'm a little surprised at the skepticism here that it happened. That said, I don't totally understand what the problem is. It's good to know they did, but I wish the outcome were more along the lines of a cultural meme spreading that anyone could buy ads so be considerate about what you believe online. Instead I fear we're going down the road of this being some grave offence, and "how could the tech giants have allowed this?!", and Congressional hearings and yet more laws about what you can do online.
jimjimjim 9y ago
wow, lot's of skeptical post all turning up around the same time all using similar talking points. did a link to this get posted on some red site?
zaroth 9y ago
The story of how a BLM Activist twitter account and Facebook account with 360,000 (fake) followers was trying to organize riots in Baltimore but was actually run by Russia? And the BLM Leaders shut them down because they were from out of town. 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&set=a.423996223609.197367.505488609&type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154097683603610&se...
- Flemlord 9y ago
  > where was the NSA/CIA on this? 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.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    This isn't really the NSA's domain -- they're a more technical agency than that. 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.

87 points by kafkaesq 9y ago

This kind of influence doesn't have to be obviously coherent, rational, or consistent. It happens in bulk, and it is to the benefit of influencers if it appears to be human, fallible, inconsistent, and organic while still driving toward a goal. Supporting black activism could be 98% off target w.r.t. propaganda goals, and still be useful to a comprehensive program of political influence. Similarly, you will find everything from 100% fictional goofball pizza parlor child abuse wild-ass rumors to completely objective statistically valid pieces in RT and in Russian influence campaigns.

Rupub 9y ago

I think the Rupublicans are going to leak all kinds of “liberal” accounts to give BLM NODAPL etc a black eye while not releasing all the info on the KKK, white supremacists and malheur occupiers…

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Sensitive topics need to be brought up substantively, or the conversation tends to degenerate into flamewars. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

thrill 9y ago

The more resources that are dedicated to political churn (whether externally generated or intrinsically arising) in a country then the fewer resources that can be focused against those unfriendly to it.

tambienben 9y ago
I agree. Is that a reference to a quote? 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.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  It's extremely old strategy to fund internal divisions in a state you want to undermine... 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.
  - tambienben 9y ago
    I would argue that it is (also) warfare waged against the citizenry by established domestic political parties/players.

croon 9y ago

Going off things like this [1], I'm going to say yes. (See location tag) [1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://twitter.com/AntifaBoston/status/912763777698889728 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

serf 9y ago
if that's the evidence that Russia instigated black activism in the U.S. , where's the evidence that the U.S. government didn't plant a falsely geo-tagged photo and then bring attention to it in every news outlet that it can influence in order to instigate U.S. hatred towards Russia? 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.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  I personally feel that you raise a good question. I believe that the US is much closer to civil war than most realize, and the government is trying to prevent it by lowering fuel and grain prices, spurring economic growth without hurting the lower class anymore, and creating a common enemy(Russia). I know the only ones claiming Russian involvement is the US government and media. However, I don't think it's a bad thing. Despite our issues, civil war would be a terrible, horrid occurrence.
  - nkozyra 9y ago
    > I know the only ones claiming Russian involvement is the US government and media. 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-election-hacking-uk-intelligence https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/07/russia-us-el...

Caveman_Coder 9y ago

Some additional news stories on the subject... - CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/media/facebook-black-lives-matter-targeting/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/media/facebook-black-lives-m... - Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-operatives-used-facebook-ads-to-exploit-divisions-over-black-political-activism-and-muslims/2017/09/25/4a011242-a21b-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html?utm_term=.b9ac8e953d95 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o... - CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/russian-facebook-ads-targeted-black-lives-matter-muslims-election.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/russian-facebook-ads-targete... - The Hill: http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/technology/352780-russians-bought-black-lives-matter-facebook-ad-that-targeted http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/technology/352780-russian...

free_everybody 9y ago

Did they? CNN says they did, because Facebook said they did. Had to click through to find out that basic information. Thanks, Guardian.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago

Recognizing manipulation is one thing, but doing something to help the issue is another. Most of the ease of propaganda is due to social media. Even if we enact some sort of digital isolationism, that would be trivial to bypass due to proxies and government hacking. 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.

gozur88 9y ago

Every country on the planet tries to influence US elections to some degree or another. Why focus on Russia and not, say, Israel or China? Clinton didn't lose because of Russia. She lost because she was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign.

amazingman 9y ago
> Every country on the planet tries to influence elections to some degree or another. Why focus on Russia and not, say, Israel or China? This is intellectually lazy. There’s a difference between normal, ethical, legal influence and malicious psychological warfare.
- asnfaiosnfsa 9y ago
  Please elaborate. I bet you'll find the line is very difficult to enunciate and still believe in First Amendment type free speech.
bsder 9y ago
This is disingenuous. 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.

SapphireSun 9y ago

Nothing below is actually evidence, merely assertions that lead back to military intelligence. If you are skeptical of the Russia story in the first place, I see no reason you shouldn't be skeptical of this story. The nature of the "link" is not substantiated. Imagine if instead Blacktivist is a real activist page that is now roped into the Russia story by reactionaries in military intelligence. The story is now black people's outrage is manufactured by Russia in the midst of reaction to the #TakeAKnee protests. What do you guys think? "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."

rdtsc 9y ago

I stopped buying the Russia narrative. It's been going on for too long and the proof and substance vis-a-vis the hours and effort and noise and predictions generated from it doesn't add up. It started with "17 intelligence agencies" and then "Trump is getting impeached on Thursday for sure when Comey has his hearing", to some ridiculous "golden showers dossier". Yeah it was a good PR campaign, no doubt, it ran for a while, but then it's time to retire it. 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 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/8396 Now that's some interesting foreign influence worth talking about

mistermann 9y ago
One (or two?) CNN employees were caught on hidden cam entirely candidly admitting it was for ratings, orders from the top of CNN. Seems fairly consistent with reality, especially the longer it goes on.
beaner 9y ago
It is also interesting to me to observe how quickly liberals accept that the promotion of their own ideas is divisive - as long as someone else is to blame for it.
- tdb7893 9y ago

aosfoasb 9y ago

Every skeptic in this thread is getting downvoted to shove them to the bottom. Propaganda at work.

robertwalsh0 9y ago

Lots of Facebook election posts have been flagged and removed - I hope this one isn’t.

beaner 9y ago

Am I crazy to think that the article should contain some evidence for this claim? It doesn't.

imron 9y ago
> the article should contain some evidence for this claim Nah, they included a question mark in the title, so that makes it alright /s

tweedledee 9y ago

So many skeptical comments. I had no idea Russia paid so many shills to go on Hacker News.

imron 9y ago
Everyone who disagrees with me is a shill ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

jimjimjim 9y ago

just flag the whole thread. garbage fire.

nl 9y ago

I'm astonished anyone is surprised by this. It's pretty clear to anyone studying this that Russian linked accounts promoted anyone except Clinton, and they did it in deliberately provocative ways. 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.

jijji 9y ago

this further puts to bed the russia hacking the election narrative. you dont have to look far [1] to find the top 100 reasons why hillary lost the election. [1] http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com

Nomentatus 9y ago
The top one of that top 100 that has to do with Hillary (two Ls for your future reference) is that she might be a globalist (supports open borders.) Yawn. Not even news. True, the Democratic leadership had to resign, they were cheatin' for Hilary and lying about being unbiased. But they weren't up for election.
- jijji 9y ago
  its not news that: 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

losvedir 9y ago

Huh, I have no problem believing Russia, say, bought ads of various sorts to try to sway the election, and I'm a little surprised at the skepticism here that it happened. That said, I don't totally understand what the problem is. It's good to know they did, but I wish the outcome were more along the lines of a cultural meme spreading that anyone could buy ads so be considerate about what you believe online. Instead I fear we're going down the road of this being some grave offence, and "how could the tech giants have allowed this?!", and Congressional hearings and yet more laws about what you can do online.

jimjimjim 9y ago

wow, lot's of skeptical post all turning up around the same time all using similar talking points. did a link to this get posted on some red site?

zaroth 9y ago

The story of how a BLM Activist twitter account and Facebook account with 360,000 (fake) followers was trying to organize riots in Baltimore but was actually run by Russia? And the BLM Leaders shut them down because they were from out of town. 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&set=a.423996223609.197367.505488609&type=3&theater https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154097683603610&se...

Flemlord 9y ago
> where was the NSA/CIA on this? 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.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  This isn't really the NSA's domain -- they're a more technical agency than that. 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.