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> Afterward, articles about him began to appear on websites that are designed to look like independent news outlets but are not. Most contained flattering infor

> Afterward, articles about him began to appear on websites that are designed to look like independent news outlets but are not. Most contained flattering information about Mr. Gottlieb, praising his investment acumen and philanthropy, and came up high in recent Google searches. Google featured some of the articles on Google News. So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election. Setting up fake new websites to generate content for clients to drown out real stores characterizing their misdeeds. All for just a few thousand per month. This is unbelievable, and yet completely believable at the same time.

aguyfromnb 7y ago
>This is unbelievable, and yet completely believable at the same time. That's why all the squawking about "The Russians! The Russians!" is so hilarious. The kind of work Cambridge Analytica and these boiler rooms in Russian are doing isn't very sophisticated, and certainly doesn't require the backing of a foreign State. A couple of savvy tech people can (and do) inflict the same pain for reasonable sums of money.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  That it's relatively easy to do makes it more likely nation states are getting involved, not less.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - larnmar 7y ago
    Of course, but it’s also getting lost in the noise of what the parties themselves are doing.
- seppin 7y ago
  Russian military intelligence broke into DNC servers, stole emails, then gave them to a fake media cutout (wikileaks) to present in the most damaging way possible. So no, states are getting into this game.
  - cookiecaper 7y ago
    Insofar as "Russian military intelligence" is Seth Rich and "fake media cutout" is an independent publisher not beholden to the political interests that prevail upon large American media companies, then sure. You can dislike Trump all you want, but invoking the Russian boogeyman and smearing honest people like Assange is pretty low. The fact that political parties and major media outlets feel obliged to hide behind such transparently flimsy excuses is commentary on both how far the moral standard has fallen and the empty desperation of our cultural power brokers.
    - arcticfox 7y ago
      Comments like this make me lose faith in humanity. You don't seem like a stupid person, but are willing to believe in an unbelievably complex cover-up that would require hundreds of career public servants to lie for some unknown benefit, as opposed to the obvious scenario: Russia doesn't give the slightest damn about meddling in elections. They're willing to murder people with exotic poisons on foreign soil on a regular basis, why would election meddling be any different?
      - cookiecaper 7y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean because I didn't say anything about a "complex cover-up", and I'm certain that Russia (and most other states, including America) is continuously running operations to sway things in their favor all over the world -- that's what spies and intelligence agencies do. But I don't see how that's relevant here. Seth Rich provided the emails to Wikileaks and Assange is nobody's puppet, and Wikileaks definitely does not deserve to be called a "fake media cutout". Trump won the election because he appealed to a large number of Americans who voted for him because they thought he was the better candidate. Everything else is denial and excuse-making. Who said anything about a conspiracy requiring the coordination of "hundreds of career public servants"?
        seppin 7y ago
        > Seth Rich provided the emails to Wikileaks > You don't seem like a stupid person Don't give him that. He believes things with no evidence for personal reasons, that's what stupid people do.
jsonne 7y ago
This is a very well understood and existing market for PR agencies utilizing blackhat SEO. Overrun legitimate but negative stories with shady backlinks to get Google to penalize them. Simultaneously create fake websites, awards, profiles, news etc and flood search results with more positive things. Most people I see selling this do so for 5k to 10k per month.
- cookiecaper 7y ago
  Yes, SEO is still big business, and it's big business because it's effective. For any term that has even minor commercial relevance, you've generally gotta dig into at least the 3rd or 4th page before you start to see real results. Google has been successfully gamed essentially for its entire history. The fact that so many technical people believe the propaganda like "SEO doesn't work anymore" just shows how disconnected and gullible they are. And if technical people are naively Googling away, how much hope does that leave for your average citizen?
pjc50 7y ago
I mean, why not? Free speech means unlimited freedom to lie, right? To do otherwise would be surrender to an arbiter of truth. This is just how it is going to be now. Every search and every set of YouTube recommendations will contain a thousand lies and one truth, and it's your fault if you can't identify the true one.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  > Free speech means unlimited freedom to lie, right? This has never been, and will never be true. Free speech has always had legal limitations. It’s illegal to defame someone, for example. Who really wants to live in a world where it’s so much easier and effective to lie than to tell the truth? Where the burden of seeking the truth becomes finding a needle in a haystack, do you want to live in that world? History has shown us when societies fail to recognize the truth, and it has only ever brought death and destruction. If the freedom to spread lies far and wide without repercussions overpowers our society’s ability to function, we’re in for some deep trouble.
  - gumby 7y ago
    I believe defamation is a civil matter, not a criminal one.
    - JonathonW 7y ago
      This depends entirely on jurisdiction, and even in the US (where there are no criminal defamation laws at the federal level) varies from state to state. Much of Europe still have criminal defamation laws on the books, for example.
      - harryh 7y ago
        Indeed there are many many ways in which much of Europe doesn't really respect the ideals of free speech. This is but one example.
  - AlexandrB 7y ago
colechristensen 7y ago
"Independent" news orgs do the same thing. Watch out for the next positive article about a person or organization and ask yourself if it was written by a journalist organisation seeking the truth or as a puff piece in collaboration with the subject. There is a pretty blurry line between news and advertising these days to a much greater extent than most realize.
- altec3 7y ago
  Southpark has a pretty good episode on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro
  - globuous 7y ago
    This is so amazing. I love south park, thanks for sharing ;)
- saagarjha 7y ago
  http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- malandrew 7y ago
  > Watch out for the next positive article about a person or organization The only reason this heuristic works is because news companies have become so untrustworthy that when left to their own devices they are only capable of writing negative articles about people. They never take the initiative to report positive news when a person or organization merits it. Even when a person or organization deserves praise, the media finds a way to spin it into a "if it bleeds, it leads" story.
- briandear 7y ago
  Almost every major media organization does this. For example, impeachment coverage was carried live, while the discussion of the FISA abuses was mostly ignored. If media orgs were “seeking the truth,” they wouldn’t be selectively covering hearings that boost their narrative but fail to tell the complete story. Another example: Buzzfeed “News” had one critical story on Obama out of 100 total stories. Even if you love Obama, suggesting that he was “good” 99 out of 100 times is pure propaganda. Selective editing and coverage decisions are far more sinister than reputation management firms.
save_ferris 7y ago
What’s so frustrating about this is that Status Labs will never be called out for this. And even if they do, they’d probably use their platform of fake news outlets to drown out criticism, because this is exactly what they do for a living. Our ability to inform the public online is fundamentally broken, and here are these guys making a killing by literally lying to the world.
- nathancahill 7y ago
  A guy was pitching me his SEO services as being the best in the business. He offered me his business card but I said, don't worry, when I need an SEO guy I'll search google for one and you should be the first result!
  - alex_stoddard 7y ago
    https://www.xkcd.com/125/ https://www.xkcd.com/125/
    - smexy 7y ago
      There's a relevant xkcd for everything!
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  "Our ability to inform the public online is fundamentally broken" Is it worse than before or was it always broken?
  - lordnacho 7y ago
    It can be both, but in the old world you couldn't just conjure up a whole newspaper with flattering content. The fact that costs have changed is significant in a qualitative way.
    - chrisdhoover 7y ago
      Remember the Maine!
gumby 7y ago
By and large business magazines have always been nothing but puff pieces. Those cover-story interviews with execs are always puffery in the hope of getting "access" in future and of course advertising. These fake sites simply cut out the middleman. The Economist has been one of the rare exceptions, though it's not really a business magazine...and has a regular profile page that is indeed the same sort of puff piece.
- selectodude 7y ago
  Are you referring to the obituary?
  - gumby 7y ago
    No, I think the obituaries are pretty reasonable and aren’t always about nice people. The business section often has a profile (complete with profile picture) of some worthy that always seems to be pretty positive.
- Animats 7y ago
  Forbes, in the days of Malcomb Forbes, Sr., wasn't. He was hated for it, and he didn't care. He was sued, and his attitude was "I'm a billionare, go ahead".
  - gumby 7y ago
    As a onetime subscriber in the 80s I strongly disagree (and I didn’t renew for that reason). I felt the articles were typically not hard hitting and when they were critical of someone it was either because they simply didn’t like that person or, more commonly, it felt fake, like the WWE fake wrestler feuds or “reality tv”. At least that was my impression as a callow youth in my 20s trying to get a couple of startups off the ground. Also the Forbes family empire was admitted to be not especially large as they themselves described it, though believed to be >$100M
- rchaud 7y ago
  The Economist manages to escape this because they don't do any journalism or interviews. They provide opinionated commentary on international affairs, peppered with quotes from reports and think tank policy people. And as a result, their analyses are often limited, and can mostly be summarized as "liberalizing the markets would have solved this".
endorphone 7y ago
"So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election" Is this an equivocation? One are tiny, marginally impactful capitalist firms run by private individuals. The other are enormous nation-states that can wield the power of government -- and literal control over life or death -- to influence. Acting surprised as if this = that is specious and not useful.
superfrank 7y ago
This isn't even anything new. My first dev job out of college was in 2012 at a small media agency. We had some bigger clients, but we also still managed some super basic websites for local doctors, lawyers, etc that were some of our first clients when we the company was just starting up. One day the CEO comes in and says, "We need someone to work with another company to make some changes to one of the websites and this is urgent". Since I was new and it was just text changes I got assigned the task. Basically, one of the plastic surgeons who's site we managed was being sued for malpractice, and it was high profile enough that it made some local news websites. This surgeon hired a "reputation management" company to do pretty much what was explained in this article. My job was basically to get on a call with this company and make the changes they requested, which was basically taking lines from the articles and working them into the surgeons website. So if a news article's said "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon is accused of malpractice" we would go through his website and change text from "Dr Bloblaw" to "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon" where ever we could. Additionally, they requested that I hide "Dr Bloblaw malpractice" and similar terms in small white text all over every page and some other black hat SEO shit. I'm sure there was more to it, since I took 3 or 4 calls with them spread out over a month, but I can't remember more details. I'm long gone from that company and I'm sure those techniques don't work anymore, but yeah, in one form or another this type of reputation management is probably as old as SEO. (Names and locations are changed)
- jv22222 7y ago
  > This isn’t anything new Yep. I first heard about “reputation” firms doing this in 2009.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    This has been going on at least hundred years, and likely 200.
    - dandelo1953 7y ago
      This subject touches on a lot of things tangential to a lot of words like world wide problems. Many things wrong in the online work seem systemic and tend to magnify our IRL problems. Is anyone out there creative enough to step outside the box enough to even envision a system that can support our current economic environment, let alone see a way to get this ship on that course before it's sunk?
take_a_breath 7y ago
The Texas GOP is planning to do similar in 2020 [1]. It’s also happening in small towns across the country [2]. [1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2019/11/26/republican-party-of-texas-election-strategy-document-for-2020-elections-leaked-to-democrats/ https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2019/11/26/republic... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/19/locality-labs-fake-news-local-sites-newspapers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/19/locality-lab...
chatmasta 7y ago
Not only that, but there's a startup doing it openly and being celebrated for it in 2020: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-25/acronym-s-newsrooms-are-a-liberal-digital-spin-on-local-news https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-25/acronym-s...
rolltiide 7y ago
lol this is how its always been We only investigated it this time due to cold war sentiments and weaponizing an obviously compromised candidate for the highest position in the land Any other combination of this is not newsworthy, such as a PR company that happens to be in Portugal, or Rhode Island
iudqnolq 7y ago
> So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing Both are scummy, but there's no clear law against this IF you're not a foreign agent. Surely it's believable that the government might want to forbid foreign operatives from doing things Americans are allowed to do. A trivial example is voting.
TomMckenny 7y ago
>So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election. When it's done by a foreign government, it's an act of aggression. When it's done internally, it's an expression of camping financing. Like brain cancer vs skin cancer I suppose.
ajross 7y ago
> So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election. The core accusation with 2016 isn't "fake news", it's that a foreign intelligence service deliberately targetted a senior campaign staffer, stole his email, and selectively leaked it at the direction of the opposing US campaign. The fake news stuff was bad too, but that's not generally considered criminal. The remedy to that was universally considered to be better gatekeeping on the part of the content intermediates (Facebook in that case, Google here).

aguyfromnb 7y ago

>This is unbelievable, and yet completely believable at the same time. That's why all the squawking about "The Russians! The Russians!" is so hilarious. The kind of work Cambridge Analytica and these boiler rooms in Russian are doing isn't very sophisticated, and certainly doesn't require the backing of a foreign State. A couple of savvy tech people can (and do) inflict the same pain for reasonable sums of money.

ceejayoz 7y ago
That it's relatively easy to do makes it more likely nation states are getting involved, not less.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- larnmar 7y ago
  Of course, but it’s also getting lost in the noise of what the parties themselves are doing.
seppin 7y ago
Russian military intelligence broke into DNC servers, stole emails, then gave them to a fake media cutout (wikileaks) to present in the most damaging way possible. So no, states are getting into this game.
- cookiecaper 7y ago
  Insofar as "Russian military intelligence" is Seth Rich and "fake media cutout" is an independent publisher not beholden to the political interests that prevail upon large American media companies, then sure. You can dislike Trump all you want, but invoking the Russian boogeyman and smearing honest people like Assange is pretty low. The fact that political parties and major media outlets feel obliged to hide behind such transparently flimsy excuses is commentary on both how far the moral standard has fallen and the empty desperation of our cultural power brokers.
  - arcticfox 7y ago
    Comments like this make me lose faith in humanity. You don't seem like a stupid person, but are willing to believe in an unbelievably complex cover-up that would require hundreds of career public servants to lie for some unknown benefit, as opposed to the obvious scenario: Russia doesn't give the slightest damn about meddling in elections. They're willing to murder people with exotic poisons on foreign soil on a regular basis, why would election meddling be any different?
    - cookiecaper 7y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean because I didn't say anything about a "complex cover-up", and I'm certain that Russia (and most other states, including America) is continuously running operations to sway things in their favor all over the world -- that's what spies and intelligence agencies do. But I don't see how that's relevant here. Seth Rich provided the emails to Wikileaks and Assange is nobody's puppet, and Wikileaks definitely does not deserve to be called a "fake media cutout". Trump won the election because he appealed to a large number of Americans who voted for him because they thought he was the better candidate. Everything else is denial and excuse-making. Who said anything about a conspiracy requiring the coordination of "hundreds of career public servants"?
      - seppin 7y ago
        > Seth Rich provided the emails to Wikileaks > You don't seem like a stupid person Don't give him that. He believes things with no evidence for personal reasons, that's what stupid people do.

jsonne 7y ago

This is a very well understood and existing market for PR agencies utilizing blackhat SEO. Overrun legitimate but negative stories with shady backlinks to get Google to penalize them. Simultaneously create fake websites, awards, profiles, news etc and flood search results with more positive things. Most people I see selling this do so for 5k to 10k per month.

cookiecaper 7y ago
Yes, SEO is still big business, and it's big business because it's effective. For any term that has even minor commercial relevance, you've generally gotta dig into at least the 3rd or 4th page before you start to see real results. Google has been successfully gamed essentially for its entire history. The fact that so many technical people believe the propaganda like "SEO doesn't work anymore" just shows how disconnected and gullible they are. And if technical people are naively Googling away, how much hope does that leave for your average citizen?

pjc50 7y ago

I mean, why not? Free speech means unlimited freedom to lie, right? To do otherwise would be surrender to an arbiter of truth. This is just how it is going to be now. Every search and every set of YouTube recommendations will contain a thousand lies and one truth, and it's your fault if you can't identify the true one.

save_ferris 7y ago
> Free speech means unlimited freedom to lie, right? This has never been, and will never be true. Free speech has always had legal limitations. It’s illegal to defame someone, for example. Who really wants to live in a world where it’s so much easier and effective to lie than to tell the truth? Where the burden of seeking the truth becomes finding a needle in a haystack, do you want to live in that world? History has shown us when societies fail to recognize the truth, and it has only ever brought death and destruction. If the freedom to spread lies far and wide without repercussions overpowers our society’s ability to function, we’re in for some deep trouble.
- gumby 7y ago
  I believe defamation is a civil matter, not a criminal one.
  - JonathonW 7y ago
    This depends entirely on jurisdiction, and even in the US (where there are no criminal defamation laws at the federal level) varies from state to state. Much of Europe still have criminal defamation laws on the books, for example.
    - harryh 7y ago
      Indeed there are many many ways in which much of Europe doesn't really respect the ideals of free speech. This is but one example.
- AlexandrB 7y ago

colechristensen 7y ago

"Independent" news orgs do the same thing. Watch out for the next positive article about a person or organization and ask yourself if it was written by a journalist organisation seeking the truth or as a puff piece in collaboration with the subject. There is a pretty blurry line between news and advertising these days to a much greater extent than most realize.

altec3 7y ago
Southpark has a pretty good episode on this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro
- globuous 7y ago
  This is so amazing. I love south park, thanks for sharing ;)
saagarjha 7y ago
http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
malandrew 7y ago
> Watch out for the next positive article about a person or organization The only reason this heuristic works is because news companies have become so untrustworthy that when left to their own devices they are only capable of writing negative articles about people. They never take the initiative to report positive news when a person or organization merits it. Even when a person or organization deserves praise, the media finds a way to spin it into a "if it bleeds, it leads" story.
briandear 7y ago
Almost every major media organization does this. For example, impeachment coverage was carried live, while the discussion of the FISA abuses was mostly ignored. If media orgs were “seeking the truth,” they wouldn’t be selectively covering hearings that boost their narrative but fail to tell the complete story. Another example: Buzzfeed “News” had one critical story on Obama out of 100 total stories. Even if you love Obama, suggesting that he was “good” 99 out of 100 times is pure propaganda. Selective editing and coverage decisions are far more sinister than reputation management firms.

save_ferris 7y ago

What’s so frustrating about this is that Status Labs will never be called out for this. And even if they do, they’d probably use their platform of fake news outlets to drown out criticism, because this is exactly what they do for a living. Our ability to inform the public online is fundamentally broken, and here are these guys making a killing by literally lying to the world.

nathancahill 7y ago
A guy was pitching me his SEO services as being the best in the business. He offered me his business card but I said, don't worry, when I need an SEO guy I'll search google for one and you should be the first result!
- alex_stoddard 7y ago
  https://www.xkcd.com/125/ https://www.xkcd.com/125/
  - smexy 7y ago
    There's a relevant xkcd for everything!
jeffdavis 7y ago
"Our ability to inform the public online is fundamentally broken" Is it worse than before or was it always broken?
- lordnacho 7y ago
  It can be both, but in the old world you couldn't just conjure up a whole newspaper with flattering content. The fact that costs have changed is significant in a qualitative way.
  - chrisdhoover 7y ago
    Remember the Maine!

gumby 7y ago

By and large business magazines have always been nothing but puff pieces. Those cover-story interviews with execs are always puffery in the hope of getting "access" in future and of course advertising. These fake sites simply cut out the middleman. The Economist has been one of the rare exceptions, though it's not really a business magazine...and has a regular profile page that is indeed the same sort of puff piece.

selectodude 7y ago
Are you referring to the obituary?
- gumby 7y ago
  No, I think the obituaries are pretty reasonable and aren’t always about nice people. The business section often has a profile (complete with profile picture) of some worthy that always seems to be pretty positive.
Animats 7y ago
Forbes, in the days of Malcomb Forbes, Sr., wasn't. He was hated for it, and he didn't care. He was sued, and his attitude was "I'm a billionare, go ahead".
- gumby 7y ago
  As a onetime subscriber in the 80s I strongly disagree (and I didn’t renew for that reason). I felt the articles were typically not hard hitting and when they were critical of someone it was either because they simply didn’t like that person or, more commonly, it felt fake, like the WWE fake wrestler feuds or “reality tv”. At least that was my impression as a callow youth in my 20s trying to get a couple of startups off the ground. Also the Forbes family empire was admitted to be not especially large as they themselves described it, though believed to be >$100M
rchaud 7y ago
The Economist manages to escape this because they don't do any journalism or interviews. They provide opinionated commentary on international affairs, peppered with quotes from reports and think tank policy people. And as a result, their analyses are often limited, and can mostly be summarized as "liberalizing the markets would have solved this".

endorphone 7y ago

"So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election" Is this an equivocation? One are tiny, marginally impactful capitalist firms run by private individuals. The other are enormous nation-states that can wield the power of government -- and literal control over life or death -- to influence. Acting surprised as if this = that is specious and not useful.

superfrank 7y ago

This isn't even anything new. My first dev job out of college was in 2012 at a small media agency. We had some bigger clients, but we also still managed some super basic websites for local doctors, lawyers, etc that were some of our first clients when we the company was just starting up. One day the CEO comes in and says, "We need someone to work with another company to make some changes to one of the websites and this is urgent". Since I was new and it was just text changes I got assigned the task. Basically, one of the plastic surgeons who's site we managed was being sued for malpractice, and it was high profile enough that it made some local news websites. This surgeon hired a "reputation management" company to do pretty much what was explained in this article. My job was basically to get on a call with this company and make the changes they requested, which was basically taking lines from the articles and working them into the surgeons website. So if a news article's said "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon is accused of malpractice" we would go through his website and change text from "Dr Bloblaw" to "The Daytona Beach plastic surgeon" where ever we could. Additionally, they requested that I hide "Dr Bloblaw malpractice" and similar terms in small white text all over every page and some other black hat SEO shit. I'm sure there was more to it, since I took 3 or 4 calls with them spread out over a month, but I can't remember more details. I'm long gone from that company and I'm sure those techniques don't work anymore, but yeah, in one form or another this type of reputation management is probably as old as SEO. (Names and locations are changed)

jv22222 7y ago
> This isn’t anything new Yep. I first heard about “reputation” firms doing this in 2009.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  This has been going on at least hundred years, and likely 200.
  - dandelo1953 7y ago
    This subject touches on a lot of things tangential to a lot of words like world wide problems. Many things wrong in the online work seem systemic and tend to magnify our IRL problems. Is anyone out there creative enough to step outside the box enough to even envision a system that can support our current economic environment, let alone see a way to get this ship on that course before it's sunk?

take_a_breath 7y ago

The Texas GOP is planning to do similar in 2020 [1]. It’s also happening in small towns across the country [2]. [1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2019/11/26/republican-party-of-texas-election-strategy-document-for-2020-elections-leaked-to-democrats/ https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2019/11/26/republic... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/19/locality-labs-fake-news-local-sites-newspapers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/19/locality-lab...

chatmasta 7y ago

Not only that, but there's a startup doing it openly and being celebrated for it in 2020: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-25/acronym-s-newsrooms-are-a-liberal-digital-spin-on-local-news https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-25/acronym-s...

rolltiide 7y ago

lol this is how its always been We only investigated it this time due to cold war sentiments and weaponizing an obviously compromised candidate for the highest position in the land Any other combination of this is not newsworthy, such as a PR company that happens to be in Portugal, or Rhode Island

iudqnolq 7y ago

> So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing Both are scummy, but there's no clear law against this IF you're not a foreign agent. Surely it's believable that the government might want to forbid foreign operatives from doing things Americans are allowed to do. A trivial example is voting.

TomMckenny 7y ago

>So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election. When it's done by a foreign government, it's an act of aggression. When it's done internally, it's an expression of camping financing. Like brain cancer vs skin cancer I suppose.

ajross 7y ago

> So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election. The core accusation with 2016 isn't "fake news", it's that a foreign intelligence service deliberately targetted a senior campaign staffer, stole his email, and selectively leaked it at the direction of the opposing US campaign. The fake news stuff was bad too, but that's not generally considered criminal. The remedy to that was universally considered to be better gatekeeping on the part of the content intermediates (Facebook in that case, Google here).