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> Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said that he worries the site is vulnerable to Russian political influenc

> Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said that he worries the site is vulnerable to Russian political influence campaigns. As a major proponent of uncensored speech on the internet, the implications of these accusations worry me. Politicians, practically by definition, have a conflict of interest in terms of moderating political speech. The idea that these same politicians could be drafting law-based "solutions" for such moderation leads me to draw hyperbolic comparisons to dystopian novels.

gozur88 9y ago
This is just the Red Scare Part II. What Warner is really concerned about is the loss of control US elites have had over the national narrative.
- beepboopbeep 9y ago
  Good lord.
- cm2012 9y ago
  I know this is a flaggy topic. But generally nations are very touchy about other nations trying to influence their democratic elections (even if the US has done it before).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Cynicism isn't actually insightful. Even what you allege is frightening -- I don't care if he's acting partly out of self interest, the prospect of a foreign state's propaganda arm being able to control the national narrative rather than domestic forces is extremely dangerous to citizens. That is, you and me. There's every indication that they're trying to do so and have results that demonstrate at least some efficacy. I just can't read these sorts of comments as anything but outright Dunning-Kruger about governance, the dangers of propaganda, etc.
maxerickson 9y ago
The laws typically focus on paid political content. What's dystopic about having reddit publish a list of ads that are paid for by certain groups of people?
- slg 9y ago
  Ads aren't the problem anymore. Campaign finance reform in meaningless in the age of bots and social media. It is becoming harder and harder to separate paid political advertisements in the form of astroturfing from genuine grassroots support. Any move to cut down on the former is going to be seen as an assault on the 1st Amendment. Meanwhile the companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have disincentives to cut down on this type of thing. The added traffic, even it is from dummy accounts in Russia, is added revenue. It also seems like a majority of our elected officials are fine with anything that keeps them in power. Odds are this gets worse before it gets better.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Where does the revenue come from again? Anyway, I think a lot of people will be more influenced by a targeted video ad than a random post on reddit. But that's like, just my opinion.
    - bluGill 9y ago
      The margin of victory in an election is often small enough that you need everything. Sure a targeted video is more influential on the total population, but both sides are doing that. If you can get one person to vote your way from some other means that means may well be worth it. Politicians do not want money, they want votes. Some votes can be bought by a video, others by a fake opinion on some news aggregator.
    - hsod 9y ago
      It's not just one post, it's lots of posts, all over the place, every day, for months. It's not hard for me to imagine how a well-funded campaign could subtly warp someone's perception of reality.
gkoberger 9y ago
Hmm, it's tough. I'm a proponent of uncensored speech, too, but Reddit was really bad during the election. Both Trump (Russia) and Clinton (Correct the Record) covered the site with hundreds of thousands of comments, most of which were indistinguishable from regular comments. Not just political subreddits; everywhere. People are illogical; they follow what they read. If you read a comment that says something about Clinton or Trump, and it has 3.2k upvotes, some part of you somewhere is going to start to absorb that opinion. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseam. Pretty soon they didn't need to pay for comments; people adopted and repeated and believed the sentiments themselves. That being said, I have no clue how to begin to fix this without clamping down on the Internet and free speech, which I'm against. But it is a very real problem.
- liquidise 9y ago
  I think you raise a good point, which honestly begs the answer to a high-level unsolved problem: can you guarantee a 1-1 relationship between a person and an account online. Even better if that account can also be anonymous. The implications to solving both could bring functional change to trolling and bot traffic in open forum sites.
  - hire_charts 9y ago
    Even then, can you guarantee that the person behind the account isn't being paid to say things they wouldn't otherwise say?
    - dabockster 9y ago
      Since we had Tom Wheeler successfully lead the FCC's net neutrality regulations after being a cable lobbyist, we can't guarantee anything in that regard.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    That guarantee isn't required for better online discourse, which is good, because it's not something we can reasonably guarantee.
zjaffee 9y ago
The internet absolutely needs to be regulated more. Namely, in regards to the large scale surfacing of user generated ads and other webpages without any amount of in person monitoring before they are deployed. A couple weeks ago I received a phishing call from someone claiming to represent the FBI. When you googled the information they gave about the location of their office, or their phone number, you saw facebook pages, and tons of other very real looking websites surfacing that they were the FBI. I've since reported this information of all of the various legitimate websites, and they have done nothing simply because they aren't forced to.
ianamartin 9y ago
Agree. And from what I’ve seen, the impact of what happened on social media is vastly overblown. I saw a presentation at plotcon last year that really put the influence of social media into perspective for me. The problem with the idea that anyone was able to influence anything is that the boundaries of what gets seen is largely affected by what you already think. Clinton and Sanders supporters were not seeing a lot of the pro-Trump propaganda in terms of bot-posts and news feeds on Facebook at least (Facebook data about post views and news feeds was the topic of the presentation.) And I have a hard time believing that spamming reddit actually caused enough of a shift to sway things in a meaningful way. It has the same echo chamber characteristics that Facebook exhibits, though I can’t prove that yet. What I will say is possible is that the echoes in these silos could have been motivational in getting people who were already trump supporters to go out and vote, and the targeted ads against Hillary could have caused some people to stay home who would have otherwise voted for her. I feel certain that Russia attempted to sway the election. I’m simply not convinced that they were able to do so. There just isn’t enough uncertainty to be accounted for in my mental model of how things went down. This was a contest between the two least popular candidates in the history of those metrics. Republicans hated Trump, and Democrats hated Hillary. It was a contest between who is the least biggest loser from the beginning. Americans in general are feeling pretty bad about politicians and government. Everyone pretty much hates the whole shitstorm. Trump also made better strategy decisions. He went to places in the final days of the campaign that Hillary should have been. But she was taking a victory lap and trying to bump numbers in red states instead of locking down the rust belt. Hillay’s team had better polling data than we had in the national polls. She knew going back from before the primaries that Florida was a much closer race than what it looked like to us. To me, this was the most interesting thing that came out of the DNC leaks. Her team chose to ignore this and acted with a lot of hubris in general. Comey’s behavior was pretty bad and caused a small but important last minute shift in the polls. And in general, there is a real divide between city and country folks as well as between the wealthy and everyone else. I grew up on a farm in middle of nowhere Texas, I live in NYC now. The difference is real. The models I was running with data from the DNC leaks and accounting for the average error of polling results vs election outcomes had Trump winning for weeks in advance of the election. I was so convinced and afraid of a Trump win that I took a week of unpaid vacation to work for the Hillary campaign. The bottom line in U.S. elections is that Democrat and Republican voters are fairly static. Elections—ironically enough—are decided by 10-12% of the population that will swing one direction or the other based on who they are least pissed off at in the moment. When I put all of these factors together, I can’t see very much uncertainty that’s not explained. To be clear, I think that interference—even if it was only attempted and not effective—should be prosecuted and the Trump team should be impeached, indicted, and jailed. But at the same time, I think people need to calm down about the effects of social media. I don’t see supportive data for the idea that it actually changed anything. I certainly don’t see any evidence that says this is such a problem that we need to limit speech on the internet. Using the Trump win to set up legal restrictions of speech on social media is like using a terorist attack to limit your right to protest. Oh fuck me. We already did that. I guess we’re probably screwed.

gozur88 9y ago

This is just the Red Scare Part II. What Warner is really concerned about is the loss of control US elites have had over the national narrative.

beepboopbeep 9y ago
Good lord.
cm2012 9y ago
I know this is a flaggy topic. But generally nations are very touchy about other nations trying to influence their democratic elections (even if the US has done it before).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Cynicism isn't actually insightful. Even what you allege is frightening -- I don't care if he's acting partly out of self interest, the prospect of a foreign state's propaganda arm being able to control the national narrative rather than domestic forces is extremely dangerous to citizens. That is, you and me. There's every indication that they're trying to do so and have results that demonstrate at least some efficacy. I just can't read these sorts of comments as anything but outright Dunning-Kruger about governance, the dangers of propaganda, etc.

maxerickson 9y ago

The laws typically focus on paid political content. What's dystopic about having reddit publish a list of ads that are paid for by certain groups of people?

slg 9y ago
Ads aren't the problem anymore. Campaign finance reform in meaningless in the age of bots and social media. It is becoming harder and harder to separate paid political advertisements in the form of astroturfing from genuine grassroots support. Any move to cut down on the former is going to be seen as an assault on the 1st Amendment. Meanwhile the companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have disincentives to cut down on this type of thing. The added traffic, even it is from dummy accounts in Russia, is added revenue. It also seems like a majority of our elected officials are fine with anything that keeps them in power. Odds are this gets worse before it gets better.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Where does the revenue come from again? Anyway, I think a lot of people will be more influenced by a targeted video ad than a random post on reddit. But that's like, just my opinion.
  - bluGill 9y ago
    The margin of victory in an election is often small enough that you need everything. Sure a targeted video is more influential on the total population, but both sides are doing that. If you can get one person to vote your way from some other means that means may well be worth it. Politicians do not want money, they want votes. Some votes can be bought by a video, others by a fake opinion on some news aggregator.
  - hsod 9y ago
    It's not just one post, it's lots of posts, all over the place, every day, for months. It's not hard for me to imagine how a well-funded campaign could subtly warp someone's perception of reality.

gkoberger 9y ago

Hmm, it's tough. I'm a proponent of uncensored speech, too, but Reddit was really bad during the election. Both Trump (Russia) and Clinton (Correct the Record) covered the site with hundreds of thousands of comments, most of which were indistinguishable from regular comments. Not just political subreddits; everywhere. People are illogical; they follow what they read. If you read a comment that says something about Clinton or Trump, and it has 3.2k upvotes, some part of you somewhere is going to start to absorb that opinion. Rinse and repeat, ad nauseam. Pretty soon they didn't need to pay for comments; people adopted and repeated and believed the sentiments themselves. That being said, I have no clue how to begin to fix this without clamping down on the Internet and free speech, which I'm against. But it is a very real problem.

liquidise 9y ago
I think you raise a good point, which honestly begs the answer to a high-level unsolved problem: can you guarantee a 1-1 relationship between a person and an account online. Even better if that account can also be anonymous. The implications to solving both could bring functional change to trolling and bot traffic in open forum sites.
- hire_charts 9y ago
  Even then, can you guarantee that the person behind the account isn't being paid to say things they wouldn't otherwise say?
  - dabockster 9y ago
    Since we had Tom Wheeler successfully lead the FCC's net neutrality regulations after being a cable lobbyist, we can't guarantee anything in that regard.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  That guarantee isn't required for better online discourse, which is good, because it's not something we can reasonably guarantee.

zjaffee 9y ago

The internet absolutely needs to be regulated more. Namely, in regards to the large scale surfacing of user generated ads and other webpages without any amount of in person monitoring before they are deployed. A couple weeks ago I received a phishing call from someone claiming to represent the FBI. When you googled the information they gave about the location of their office, or their phone number, you saw facebook pages, and tons of other very real looking websites surfacing that they were the FBI. I've since reported this information of all of the various legitimate websites, and they have done nothing simply because they aren't forced to.

ianamartin 9y ago

Agree. And from what I’ve seen, the impact of what happened on social media is vastly overblown. I saw a presentation at plotcon last year that really put the influence of social media into perspective for me. The problem with the idea that anyone was able to influence anything is that the boundaries of what gets seen is largely affected by what you already think. Clinton and Sanders supporters were not seeing a lot of the pro-Trump propaganda in terms of bot-posts and news feeds on Facebook at least (Facebook data about post views and news feeds was the topic of the presentation.) And I have a hard time believing that spamming reddit actually caused enough of a shift to sway things in a meaningful way. It has the same echo chamber characteristics that Facebook exhibits, though I can’t prove that yet. What I will say is possible is that the echoes in these silos could have been motivational in getting people who were already trump supporters to go out and vote, and the targeted ads against Hillary could have caused some people to stay home who would have otherwise voted for her. I feel certain that Russia attempted to sway the election. I’m simply not convinced that they were able to do so. There just isn’t enough uncertainty to be accounted for in my mental model of how things went down. This was a contest between the two least popular candidates in the history of those metrics. Republicans hated Trump, and Democrats hated Hillary. It was a contest between who is the least biggest loser from the beginning. Americans in general are feeling pretty bad about politicians and government. Everyone pretty much hates the whole shitstorm. Trump also made better strategy decisions. He went to places in the final days of the campaign that Hillary should have been. But she was taking a victory lap and trying to bump numbers in red states instead of locking down the rust belt. Hillay’s team had better polling data than we had in the national polls. She knew going back from before the primaries that Florida was a much closer race than what it looked like to us. To me, this was the most interesting thing that came out of the DNC leaks. Her team chose to ignore this and acted with a lot of hubris in general. Comey’s behavior was pretty bad and caused a small but important last minute shift in the polls. And in general, there is a real divide between city and country folks as well as between the wealthy and everyone else. I grew up on a farm in middle of nowhere Texas, I live in NYC now. The difference is real. The models I was running with data from the DNC leaks and accounting for the average error of polling results vs election outcomes had Trump winning for weeks in advance of the election. I was so convinced and afraid of a Trump win that I took a week of unpaid vacation to work for the Hillary campaign. The bottom line in U.S. elections is that Democrat and Republican voters are fairly static. Elections—ironically enough—are decided by 10-12% of the population that will swing one direction or the other based on who they are least pissed off at in the moment. When I put all of these factors together, I can’t see very much uncertainty that’s not explained. To be clear, I think that interference—even if it was only attempted and not effective—should be prosecuted and the Trump team should be impeached, indicted, and jailed. But at the same time, I think people need to calm down about the effects of social media. I don’t see supportive data for the idea that it actually changed anything. I certainly don’t see any evidence that says this is such a problem that we need to limit speech on the internet. Using the Trump win to set up legal restrictions of speech on social media is like using a terorist attack to limit your right to protest. Oh fuck me. We already did that. I guess we’re probably screwed.