Russian Influence Measured

[PyramidHead]

200 millions is a two drops in an ocean.
and the number I heard on CNN was 100 millions.

If Putin trolls with their tiny ads budget managed to outsmart DNC then maybe DNC should rethink their thinking.

This is kind of a key point, we need to put this into perspective and compare it to the more commonplace and overt factors that influence electoral politics, both domestic and international. There are many ways to sway a geopolitical rival to a more favorable position, and part of the dance of political media is to legitimize some while denouncing others. Yet, relative to what most people would agree is best or at least worth striving for--an electoral system that accurately measures the preferences of those most affected by whatever is being voted for and yields a government of accountable representatives with real incentives to serve those preferences above all else--our system of government is in a pretty bad spot already. There are institutional and cultural levers that savvy politicians know how to pull in order to sway the "most affected" or "accurately measures" parts of that clause, to say nothing of "real incentives". It's rarely a direct attack on any individual avenue of representation, that would be too blatant. It gets distributed and re-branded under the label of being tough on crime, protecting jobs, or fighting terrorism. Functionally, though, we are a country with a long history of intentionally hobbling our own degree of democratic control over its policies, before we even start talking about how our neighbors do the same (or we do the same to our neighbors).

So, I feel it's not very informative to speculate about the exact quantification of any one factor, especially one as indirect and nebulous as Russian spamming of Facebook posts, without also examining the relationship between those tactics and the overall state of electoral representation in the country. To do that, we can't take it at face value that everybody who voted in a way that didn't benefit Russia was therefore completely free from brainwashing, international or otherwise. To treat Russia's role in 2016 as some kind of anomaly in either the magnitude or scope of interference relative to the ideal scenario of transparent and fair representation driven by the votes of a motivated and educated populace is naive, especially in an era where some international influence on a far more direct and pervasive level (such as the Israel lobby) is basically unquestioned, and where considerations even further removed from popular preference (like the approval of insurance companies or big pharma) have a more disproportionate influence than social media campaigns by Russian troll farms.

What I'm saying is there's no reason to single out this one avenue of anti-democratic meddling in order to show that things would have been different had it not been present, because you could make an even better case for any number of forces acting to suppress or sway the electoral outcome, a few of which have been present since the founding of our nation (including the Senate itself).

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

200 millions is a two drops in an ocean.
and the number I heard on CNN was 100 millions.

If Putin trolls with their tiny ads budget managed to outsmart DNC then maybe DNC should rethink their thinking.

This is kind of a key point

It is, in fact, not "key" at all and fundamentally avoids addressing what actually is key, namely that the information warfare that the Russians are using (still) is clandestine (i.e, "organic) and thus you are not even aware of it.

Iow, you don't know that it's happening and yet are still influenced by it in ways that are not obvious to you.

Your recent post in the Pete Buttigieg thread is an excellent example in fact.

What I'm saying is there's no reason to single out this one avenue of anti-democratic meddling

Yes, there very clearly and unmistakably is had you actually read just the quotes I've meticulously culled from the numerous studies presented itt, setting aside actually reading the entirety of the studies as I have.

There is a very significant difference between something you are aware of that is trying to influence you and something you have no idea is working very subtly, but inexorably to influence you in a number of different ways and avenues; iow, in an immersive sense.

But please, join barbos as yet another person who doesn't actually research the topics they spew out their asses on.

No wonder this shit is so effective. It's just weaponized Dunning-Kruger.

 

[PyramidHead]

It is, in fact, not "key" at all and fundamentally avoids addressing what actually is key, namely that the information warfare that the Russians are using (still) is clandestine (i.e, "organic) and thus you are not even aware of it.

Iow, you don't know that it's happening and yet are still influenced by it in ways that are not obvious to you.

Your recent postin the Pete Buttigieg thread[/url] is an excellent example in fact.

What I'm saying is there's no reason to single out this one avenue of anti-democratic meddling

Yes, there very clearly and unmistakably is had you actually read just the quotes I've meticulously culled from the numerous studies presented itt, setting aside actually reading the entirety of the studies as I have.

I'm not gonna do that anytime soon because I'd rather not become a dull and insufferable online warrior

There is a very significant difference between something you are aware of that is trying to influence you and something you have no idea is working very subtly, but inexorably to influence you in a number of different ways and avenues; iow, in an immersive sense.

But please, join barbos as yet another person who doesn't actually research the topics they spew out their asses on.

No wonder this shit is so effective. It's just weaponized Dunning-Kruger.

That part in bold, that's what I'm talking about. Russian posting may have been one such thing, but it's not the only one, and not the biggest.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

I'm not gonna do that anytime soon because I'd rather not become a dull and insufferable online warrior

Faaaar too late for that.

There is a very significant difference between something you are aware of that is trying to influence you and something you have no idea is working very subtly, but inexorably to influence you in a number of different ways and avenues; iow, in an immersive sense.

But please, join barbos as yet another person who doesn't actually research the topics they spew out their asses on.

No wonder this shit is so effective. It's just weaponized Dunning-Kruger.

That part in bold, that's what I'm talking about. Russian posting may have been one such thing, but it's not the only one, and not the biggest.

Nice strawman.

 

[barbos]

200 millions is a two drops in an ocean.

Idiotic.

and the number I heard on CNN was 100 millions.

Thus confirming that you didn't actually read the thread and don't know what you're talking about, which, unfortunately for the rest of us never stops you from spewing idiotic sophisms like "200 millions is a two drops in an ocean."

I rarely read your BS, especially the long "dissertations" you quote here.

 

[Trausti]

Idiotic.



Thus confirming that you didn't actually read the thread and don't know what you're talking about, which, unfortunately for the rest of us never stops you from spewing idiotic sophisms like "200 millions is a two drops in an ocean."

I rarely read your BS, especially the long "dissertations" you quote here.

Well, he's only allowed out his room for an hour when they serve pudding.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Idiotic.
Thus confirming that you didn't actually read the thread and don't know what you're talking about, which, unfortunately for the rest of us never stops you from spewing idiotic sophisms like "200 millions is a two drops in an ocean."

I rarely read your BS, especially the long "dissertations" you quote here.

The “long dissertations” posted here are direct quotes from studies that disprove every moronic thing you’ve posted. Congratulations, you not only conceded the point, you proudly affirmed your ignorance. It takes courage to be the village idiot.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Well, he's only allowed out his room for an hour when they serve pudding.

There you go. Always attack the man, never the arguments. You two make a lovely couple under that bridge.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Ok, now that the fucktards have had their fun, it's time to talk about "reflexive control." If you're not familiar with it, it's a Russian espionage tactic that goes back to the Soviet Cold War days, so it's nothing particularly new or innovative, but that's the point. It works, at least well enough to keep employing it.

From a study conducted by the Royal Military Academy of Canada in 2018:

Russia is increasingly applying methods of reflexive control (RC) to influence political decision-making through election manipulation as well as undermining the trust of citizens in political institutions and political systems of targeted countries. Russia is employing RC not only domestically and in neighboring countries such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland but also more and more in NATO countries such as the US, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Canada. For the CAF to be able to develop effective countermeasures, it is essential to achieve a deeper understanding of RC as it was used traditionally during the Cold War and particularly how it has been further developed to be used in current Russian operations. This report discusses the concept of Russian reflexive control, how it has evolved into its current iteration, the mechanics of how it works, and how to identify possible countermeasures to RC.
...
Reflexive control (RC) is the term used to describe the practice of predetermining an adversary’s decision in your favor, by altering key factors in the adversary’s perception of the world. The term is primarily encountered in discussion of Russian techniques of information warfare.1 In this context, the practice represents a key asymmetric enabler to gain critical advantages, neutralizing the adversary’s strengths by causing him or her to choose courses of action that are damaging to the adversary and further Russian objectives.

Aka, Trump's entire foreign policy. There is an entire section in the study devoted to Russia's use of RC in social media that I'll abridge for all of the grade schoolers who can't manage to actually read to inform their thoughts:

The history of the concept of reflexive control – as it is referred to in this chapter on Russian social media exploitation for RC – stems from work performed by Vladimir Lefebvre from 1963 to 1967 in the Soviet Union. Following the publication of two seminal works Conflicting Structures 53 and The Algebra of Conflict,54 Lefebvre’s work became the object of a classified report by the KGB in 1968, alleges Diane Chotikul from55 Lefebvre’s (1984) own work entitled Reflexive Control: The Soviet Concept of Influencing an Adversary’s Decision-Making Process.56
...
Despite social media use being omnipresent today, there is no agreed upon definition of what it actually is and what online services belong to it. Traditionally, social networking services like Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn were primarily seen as social media services. When discussing social media exploitation for RC, it is essential to agree on what social media actually is and which social media services and providers are potentially exploited for RC campaigns.
...
While the concept of RC has existed at least since the 1960s, social media has made RC operations much more effective, cheaper and feasible while enabling full deniability. There can be no doubt that social media is the technology that has revolutionized the Russian implementation of RC operations most in the past decade.
...
Just as social media is exploited by Russia to build the credibility of selected actors, it can be used to undermine the authenticity of voices that are unfavorable to an RC campaign or even directly diminish the credibility of an opponent. Well before the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, Russian online media claimed that not only Georgia’s leadership, but also that of the other South Caucasus countries, were preparing an ‘Orange Revolution’ by seeking to retake disputed territories in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria. In 2005, Mikheil Saakashvili, the newly-installed leader of Georgia, was the target of an article in Voenno Promishlennyi Kurier (VPK) where his operational and strategic intentions were clearly outlined, and strongly resembled how the Russia-Georgia war started three years later.77

This was part of a larger influence campaign that helped prepare the target audience for eventual follow-on narratives.78 It was also part of a larger provocation operation initiated by Russia. Interestingly, all countries of the GUAM (Georgia-Ukraine-Armenia-Moldova) association were targeted by the article, and Russia has been able to justify, one way or another, intervention in each of them within ten years of the Matveev article.

Another example of social media exploitation for undermining the credibility of adversaries is the Argumenti I Fakty (AIF) production of an online post instructing readers to make fun of Saakashvili eating his tie.79 This episode became a ten-year running joke for Russia Today (now RT), which posted on its YouTube channel the adventures of the beleaguered ex-president up to his rooftop chase in Kyiv in 2017.80 As a result of such coverage, Saakashvili’s hopes to one day become President of Ukraine are systematically undermined.
...
The effect of social media for influencing public support of the adversary is twofold. First, the target audience becomes aware of adversary activities from an angle it may not otherwise be subject to, which can lead to doubts about the legitimacy of an actor or government,82 potentially weakening public support for the opponent.83 Secondly, social media campaigns signal to target audiences that the information space is not owned by the adversary alone. A social media campaign can give dissenting voices encouragement for their own activities against the adversary government, thereby strengthening RC campaigns.
...
Another example of information sabotage is the damage-control exercise, in form of the online activity following the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine in July 2014. It can be seen as a textbook case of information sabotage seeking to deflect blame and confuse the target audience. It also fits into the larger RC campaign that attempts to influence the perception of domestic and international audiences of Western intentions. On 17 July 2014, flight MH-17 was shot down over Lugansk suburbs and the incident was immediately posted on YouTube, as well as on VKontakte by separatist militiaman Igor Strelkov.89 It was initially believed by the separatists that they had succeeded in shooting down a Ukrainian An-26. As news that the aircraft was a commercial jet surfaced, some VKontakte and Facebook posts were immediately taken down and replaced by a tweet emanating from official Russian sources, stating that two Ukrainian jet fighters were in the vicinity of the Boeing 777.9

The to-and-fro on social media between the Russian, Ukrainian and Western governments is instructive as, slowly but surely, Russia was faced with demands to allow an impartial investigation which indirectly puts the blame on the Kremlin for having supplied the material that brought down MH17, short of Russian officialdom accepting responsibility for the incident.91 Information sabotage in this case served to deflect blame, confuse public opinion about responsibility, and cast doubt on official Western statements. While these activities were a short-term response to the incident, they do feed into that larger Russian effort to discredit Western governments and create the impression of the West acting aggressively.

This bit is particularly relevant to the thread:

The Kremlin uses social media to achieve policy paralysis by creating chaos in the information space. To achieve this effect, it introduces vast amounts of information specifically designed to occupy both a population and its leadership with trying to process conflicting information. This happens by eroding trust in governments and its institutions through spreading false narratives that implicate the government of a target audience in wrongdoing.92 Russia employs a synchronized mix of media that varies from attributed television and news website content to far-right blogs with unclear attribution, to bots and trolls, that in combination with its social media campaigns spread coordinated – but in for this purpose – conflicting, inconsistent and often disputed information.

A goal is to create the impression that one cannot really find out what actually happened and what the situation is, as the available information is conflicting and ‘both sides’ could be right. Due to the seemingly large amount of time necessary to identify truth from falsehoods, many members of the target audience will turn away from the issue. Recent reports show that since 2014, Facebook has been the platform of choice to capitalize on discord within the US, not only over foreign policy, but to exploit internal divisions on issues such as religion, race and immigration by spreading often various conflicting narratives.93 As a response to the uncovering of these activities, Facebook has recently deleted mass numbers of ‘fake’ accounts created by Russian troll farms94 as well as the content they uploaded.95 This has drastically reduced Russian influence through these channels – at least for the time being. Other social media services like Tumblr have taken similar measures, further reducing Russia’s impact on public support through social media in Western countries.9
...
The GMF’s Alliance for Securing Democracy/Hamilton 68 dashboard describes the recent near 7000% increase in the Christopher Steele hashtag on Twitter. This can be understood as an attempt at information pressure (and distraction/diversion) by Russia, since the Steele dossier involves claims and counter-claims made by senior political officials in the UK and the United States. The 35-page dossier alleging collusion between Russian authorities and then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was published on BuzzFeed, a digital media service designed to create and promote viral content. The massive increase of content related to the dossier, and about the dossier’s financing connection to Fusion GPS and the Clinton campaign, are narratives that have been seized upon by RT and others – on social media and beyond – to instill confusion and doubts about the credibility of the dossier. Part of the attempt is to spread so much (seemingly) related information that it appears impossible for target audiences to determine the veracity and authenticity of the report.
...
Romm and Wagner describe Facebook’s investigations into the purchasing of advertising space by Kremlin-backed profiles prior to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.104 The ads aimed to foster discord within the US electorate, particularly in swing states. Interestingly, both the GOP and the Democratic Party supporters were targeted. Ad content pertained to polarizing social issues in the United States, such as race relations or gun control. When ads were pulled by the social media companies, Kremlin trolls directly pushed the ads through Instagram or Facebook’s Messenger application.

It can be argued that some violence that occurred during demonstrations in the United States, such as the Charlottesville White Nationalist demonstration and the Black Lives Matter counter-protesters incident 105, and similar incidents during Black Lives Matter demonstrations 106, correlate with Russian social media subversion operations. Causation, however, is very difficult to establish. Nonetheless, geotargeting of residents of Ferguson and Baltimore suggests a direct attempt by Russian influence campaigns to capitalize on racial tensions and past violence.
...
Another recent example is Russian distraction operations in the case of the recently uncovered Russian agent Maria Butina who operated in the US. The Duran re-published an RT analysis which focused on alleged procedural errors in the arrest and indictment. While Butina is accused of not registering as a foreign agent and infiltrating the National Rifle Association (NRA), The Duran and RT aim at distracting attention from her activities by fabricating news content around the actual story, thereby focusing the target audience’s attention to other issues. The information thereby leads the target audience from one undesired position that doesn’t fit into the larger RC campaign narrative to a new destination far removed from that original story.
...
In terms of opinion shaping, coordinated campaigns through all relevant media sources – television, online media, social media in the form of Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte and YouTube – achieve the largest reach. It is likely that social media will continue to play a central role in supporting Russian RC campaigns, particularly because the fabrication of authority and followership is so easy to construct; on social media, an alternate reality can be automated by bots and trolls, for example, posting in comment sections. This alternate reality helps shape attitudes, create sentiments, and propel users into a parallel universe which can be created to the exact liking of the Kremlin – a form of influencing that cannot be created to the same extent in the offline world. These shaped attitudes can then be further influenced through campaigns affecting existing groups or leading to the formation of new groups that push narratives in support of the alternate reality. These groups – and they can be online communities – can then propel emotions of its members to extreme levels, mobilizing targets to commit violence. An example for this is the violence seen in Charlottesville in 2017. In this case, RC methods were used to discredit Western actors in the eyes of the target audience by exploiting societal fault lines and supporting political extremes.

Among their conclusions:

This paper has discussed the theoretical concept of Russian reflexive control, how it was further developed into what is today in Russia referred to as ‘managed reality’ and how its implementation has worked in the most pertinent cases of its implementation in the past 10 years. The discussion of its application in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria has demonstrated that the Russian application of reflexive control entails a far broader and more complex approach than pure deception, or providing an adversary commander with false operational information on which to base his or her decision. Instead of consisting simply of disinformation, reflexive control implies a compound program of targeted decision-making through multiple vectors, accounting for not only the adversary's logical processing of information, but also the emotional, psychological, cultural and other frameworks within which decisions are made. Reflexive control is therefore a very complex concept and its implementation depends on many coordinated efforts over a very long time-frame.
...
The complexity of the concept – and particularly the various elements of it that have to be coordinated effectively for the long-term effect to be achieved – offers many avenues to counter reflexive control operations. As demonstrated, while reflexive control is a long-term game, it appears to be a rather fragile operation that is fairly easy to counter, once identified, if target audiences are made aware of the concept, how it works and who may be exploiting it against them.

Hence all of the "it's a hoax" bullshit that we still see going on.

More disturbing, however, is the fact that such reflexive control measures seem to be working:

Looking to the 2020 presidential election, 56% of Americans think it is either very likely or likely Russia will interfere. 40% say it is unlikely.

If you dig deeper into the poll numbers, you find that 59% of Republicans think it is unlikely.

Iow, in spite of the findings of our neighbors to the north in regard to how easily the tactic can be thwarted, we are still extremely vulnerable to its effectiveness.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Now let's turn to Trump's use of Twitter, particularly in light of everything so far presented in this thread in regard to how "emotional contagions" work in cross-platforming and "strong-tie" connections. This is from Gallup (emphasis mine):

President Donald Trump's unprecedented use of the social media platform Twitter as one of his primary means of presidential communication appears to be effective from a big-picture perspective. Over three-quarters of Americans say they see, read or hear about Trump's tweets a lot or a fair amount.

Trump views his use of Twitter as a way of sending unfiltered opinions and views directly to the public. In June 2017, Trump tweeted: "The FAKE MSM [mainstream media] is working so hard trying to get me not to use Social Media. They hate that I can get the honest and unfiltered message out."

But while a large majority of Americans ultimately hear about his tweets and the news they generate, few Americans say they read Trump's tweets unfiltered, directly from Twitter. Instead, most appear to read or learn about them indirectly, through either other social media or the broader news media.

Only 26% of Americans have a Twitter account, and 30% of that group -- or 8% of the overall U.S. population -- personally follow Trump's official Twitter account (@realDonaldTrump). Fifty-five percent of those who follow Trump on Twitter say they read all or most of his tweets, with another 25% saying they read some. Taking all of this into account, 4% of Americans overall have a Twitter account, follow Trump's account and read all or most of his tweets. The percentage reading Trump's tweets directly rises to 6% when including those who say they read some of his postings.

The corollary of the finding that relatively few Americans read Trump's tweets directly on Twitter is that most of those who say they see, read or hear a lot or a fair amount about his tweets -- 69% -- are getting their information from a secondary source. Some of their access to his tweets could be relatively straightforward, such as when a friend forwards a tweet or when a tweet is reprinted directly in a publication and the person reads only the tweet. But Americans' awareness of Trump's tweets is more commonly the result of an indirect, filtered dissemination.

When did this all begin in earnest? From The Little-Known Story of Donald Trump’s First Tweet published on Time.com we have (emphasis mine):

Trump’s initial online messaging was sporadic, coming once every few days. In the first years of life, @realDonaldTrump was obviously penned by Trump’s staff, much of it written in the third person. The feed was mostly announcements of upcoming TV appearances, marketing pitches for Trump-branded products like vitamins and key chains, and uninspired inspiring quotes (“Don’t be afraid of being unique — it’s like being afraid of your best self ”).

But in 2011, something changed. The volume of Trump’s Twitter messages quintupled; the next year, it quintupled again. More were written in the first person, and, most important, their tone shifted. This @realDonaldTrump was real. The account was also real combative, picking online fights regularly — comedian Rosie O’Donnell was a favorite punching bag—and sharpening the language that would be- come Trump’s mainstay. His use of “Sad!,” “Loser!,” “Weak!,” and “Dumb!” soon reached into the hundreds of occurrences. Back then, it still seemed novel and a little unseemly for a prominent businessman to barrel into online feuds like an angst-ridden teenager. But Trump’s “flame wars” succeeded at what mattered most: drawing attention.

As the feed became more personal, it became more political. Trump issued screeds about trade, China, Iran, and even Kwanzaa. And he turned President Barack Obama, whom he’d praised as a “champion” just a few years earlier, into the most prominent of his celebrity targets, launching hundreds of bombastic attacks. Soon the real estate developer turned playboy turned reality show entertainer transformed again, this time into a right-wing political power. Here was a voice with the audacity to say what needed to be said, all the better if it was “politically incorrect.” Not coincidentally, Trump began to use the feed to flirt with running for office, directing his Twitter followers to a new website (which had actually been created by his lawyer Michael Cohen). ShouldTrumpRun.com, it asked.
...
Resurrecting an old internet conspiracy, Trump attacked not just Obama’s policies but his very eligibility to serve. (“Let’s take a closer look at that birth certificate.”) The online reaction spiked. Together, Trump and Twitter were steering politics into uncharted territory.

Through social media, Trump was both learning how the game was played online and creating new rules for politics beyond it. All those over-the-top tweets didn’t just win fans. They also stoked an endless cycle of attention and outrage that both kept Trump in the spotlight and literally made him crave more and more.

But did it? Is that the only reason why he suddenly started using Twitter (in 2011) to stoke emotional outrage and political attacks?

Recall what Putin was doing in Russia in 2011. From this Guardian piece Russians fight Twitter and Facebook battles over Putin election:

Russians have flooded Facebook and Twitter as they organise unprecedented protests against Vladimir Putin's United Russia party. But they are not alone. Thousands of Twitter accounts appear to have been created with the sole purpose of drowning out opposition voices by flooding the service's hashtag search function.

The automated attacks have dumped a blizzard of meaningless tweets with hashtags such as #Navalny, on which tweets about Alexei Navalny are collated, making it impossible to follow the flow of news about the arrested opposition leader. Many of the so-called "Twitter bots" have now been shut down.

The flood of fake tweets came after liberal websites, including the LiveJournal blogging platform, the website for radio station Ekho Moskvy and weekly journal Bolshoi Gorod , were shut down by distributed denial of service attacks on Sunday, the day of Russia's disputed parliamentary vote.

The website for Golos, an independent election monitor, was also shut down. Golos employees complained this week that their email had been hacked and inaccessible for several days. On Friday, tabloid Life News published employees' private emails, detailing correspondence with the US development agency – presented as "proof" that the group was acting on foreign orders to disrupt the Russian election.

The elections were in December, but the idea of using Twitter (and Facebook) as tools of influence in exactly the same ways he then used on American voters began much earlier, coinciding almost exactly with Trump suddenly being "activated" on his long ignored Twitter account.

And while that one isolated incidence could be called a coincidence, the methods and the similarity of everything that came after could not possibly be explained by coincidence.

As this eerily prescient 2015 Atlantic piece on Putin's obsession with controlling all forms of media notes:

As a former KGB officer and head of the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, Putin knows the value of information. His concept of the media, however, is a far cry from the First Amendment. For him, it’s a simple transactional equation: Whoever owns the media controls what it says.

“There should be patriotically minded people at the head of state information resources,” Putin told reporters at his 2013 annual news conference, “people who uphold the interests of the Russian Federation. These are state resources. That is the way it is going to be.”

From his first days as president, Putin moved quickly to dominate the media landscape in Russia, putting not only state media but privately owned broadcast media under the Kremlin’s influence.

“The limitations on the media have existed for the 15 years that Vladimir Vladimirovich has been in power,” Alexey Venediktov, editor in chief of Echo of Moscow, Russia’s only remaining independent radio station, told me during a December visit to the Russian capital. The war in Ukraine, he added, has solidified Putin’s view of the media: “It’s not an institution of civil society, it’s propaganda. [The Russian broadcasters] First Channel, Second Channel, NTV, Russia Today internationally—these are all instruments for reaching a goal inside the country, and abroad.”
...
Putin pursues a two-pronged media strategy. At home, his government clamps down on internal communications—primarily TV, which is watched by at least 90 percent of the population, but also newspapers, radio stations, and, increasingly, the Internet. State-aligned news outlets are flooded with the Kremlin’s messages and independent outlets are pushed—subtly but decisively—just to the edge of insignificance and extinction. At the same time, Putin positions himself as a renegade abroad, deploying the hyper-modern, reflexively contrarian RT—an international news agency formerly known as Russia Today—to shatter the West’s monopoly on “truth.” The Kremlin appears to be betting that information is the premier weapon of the 21st century, and that it can wield that weapon more effectively than its rivals.
...
In 2000, shortly after Putin was inaugurated as Russia’s president, government security forces arrived at the offices of the parent company of NTV, an independent channel generating high ratings for its investigative reporting, and began seizing documents. The authorities chalked the raid up to a business dispute, claiming that NTV’s owner, media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, owed his creditors $300 million and wouldn’t pay them back. State-controlled Gazprom-Media took over the channel less than a year later. While NTV is still one of Russia’s biggest channels, it has been politically neutered and now hews closely to the Kremlin’s viewpoint.

Perhaps most revealing of all is this bit in regard to Ukraine:

If a “mental war” is raging inside Russia, internationally Moscow is waging an information war, with media the weapon of choice. As Putin sees it, the West started this particular conflict and Moscow’s mission, as he told journalists from RT, Russia’s global broadcasting arm, is to break the “Anglo-Saxon monopoly on global information streams.”

During a recent interview with the National State Television and Radio Company (VGTRK), a reporter asked the president why the world “doesn’t see the truth”—meaning Russia’s truth—about the war in Ukraine.

“First of all, the world is complex and diverse,” Putin answered. “Some people see it, while others don’t want to see it and do not notice it. [The] world media monopoly of our opponents allows them to behave as they do.”

Russia is locked in “informational confrontation, ideological confrontation,” Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, explained to me. “Sometimes information begins to dominate the reality and to change the reality like a broken mirror. So that’s why, the more you ensure your presence in the informational flows globally, the more you succeed in delivering your point of view. … You have to have a very sophisticated and a very developed system of communication of your ideas and your point of view to an international community.”

This quote from this other Time article on Russia Today that is linked in the original above quote:

Putin founded RT in 2005 with a budget of about $30 million and gradually ramped it up to more than $300 million per year by 2010. (By comparison, the BBC World Service Group, which includes TV, radio and online news distribution, has a budget of $376 million for 2014–15. The BBC’s International Service is the biggest broadcast newsgathering operation in the world.) The network has already gone a long way toward “breaking the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on global information streams,” as Putin instructed it to do during a visit to RT’s brand-new studios in Moscow in 2013. For him this project is about much more than vanity in an era when digital media are, as he unabashedly put it in October, “a formidable weapon enabling the manipulation of public opinion.”

It has proved formidable enough to put the West on the defensive. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry denounced RT last April as a “propaganda bullhorn” for Putin, accusing it of “distorting what is happening, or not happening, in Ukraine.” Western policy*makers have increasingly debated the need for a more vigorous response, either with fresh funding for their own media outlets, such as Voice of America, or a new Russian-language channel to fight Putin on his own turf.

But experts warn that getting into a propaganda war with Russia will be self-defeating. The only way to counter mis*information, they say, is to doggedly stick to the facts. The aim of RT is to “inundate the viewer with theories about Western plots, to keep them dazed and confused,” says Peter Pomerantsev, a British expert on Russian propaganda. Trying to counter that RT-type spin with Western counter-spin would only serve to legitimize RT. That would only play into Putin’s hands.

To further understand where all of this may have started (particularly in regard to Trump suddenly becoming an anti-Obama fanatic), there's this from the Atlantic piece:

After the outbreak of war in Ukraine and allegations of Russian involvement in the conflict, it was hard to find positive stories about Russia in the Western press, I conceded. But I told her—with the exception of major newspapers like The New York Times and the Washington Post—there wasn’t much reporting on Russia, period. Only the most sensational (and usually negative) stories received substantial coverage.

Sitting at her computer, she told me that she has trouble sleeping these days, thinking about the carnage in Ukraine, and she blames it all on the United States. “We feel like we’re at war,” she said angrily. “What are we supposed to think? That’s exactly the opinion of many Russians—that the conflict in Ukraine is a result of American meddling."

But it didn’t start with Ukraine, she went on; Russia has felt under threat for 15 years, ever since NATO bombed Belgrade. “I mean, we were completely in love with the United States before that. Completely,” she said. “You had Russia wrapped around your little pinkie! Then, for some ugly reason, you bombed our little brother. We more or less hate you ever since, I mean, as a country.”

“If you talk with anyone in Russia,” she explained, “all of them will tell you that America is out there to get us, to expand NATO to all our borders, to get Ukraine into NATO, Georgia into NATO. To have their bases all over the place, in order to make us weak and to make us—basically, to destroy the nuclear parity.”

Our conversation soon turned to American “exceptionalism,” which the United States, Simonyan said, exploits to justify bombing other countries. “Why do you think that you are the wisest, the fairest, the most, the best?” she asked me. “Whenever Obama says, ‘We are an exceptional nation,’ seriously, people here in Russia get really angry, and many feel threatened. Because the last person we heard such words from was Hitler.”

Note also the intense distrust of NATO and how one of Trump's first big steps in the WH was to completely shit all over our NATO allies. But, more to the point, we can easily see where all of this originated on Putin's end, who, in 2011 was laying the groundwork (in more ways than one) for taking back the Presidency, but also had this stark example to deal with:

On Monday evening, Kolpakov, 38, was among several thousand Russians who took to the streets of Moscow in the biggest opposition protest in years.

Such protests against Putin’s rule, as president from 2000 to 2008 and as prime minister since then, have rarely drawn more than about 200 people, some of them Soviet-era dissidents and others activists in marginalized opposition groups.

Typically, they are quickly dispersed by heavy-handed riot police. But Sunday’s rally attracted about 5,000 people and a similar rally on Tuesday drew several hundred.

Many were responding to calls on social networking sites VKontakte and Facebook to “continue the revolution,” and tweets sent by protesters from Triumfalny Square in central Moscow.

“For the first time really the online presence has transformed offline politics,” said Konstantin von Eggert, a commentator for Kommersant FM radio. “The whole thing works like a snowball. This is definitely the start of something that will stay in Russian political life.”

Yeah, but not in a positive way.

ust as news of planned rallies spread on social media, protesters and opposition forces used Twitter to keep each other up to date on the whereabouts of detained leaders.

The wife of Alexei Navalny, a blogger now serving a 15-day jail sentence for his role in Monday’s protests, took up his twitter feed on Tuesday. Later in the day, a follow-up protest at which police detained about 300 people was streamed live on the Internet.

By Wednesday afternoon, more than 13,000 people on Facebook and 6,000 on Russia’s Cyrillic-language VKontakte had pledged to attend a fresh protest near the Kremlin on Saturday. Another 11,000 people said they “maybe” would join.
...
“It’s absolutely a Facebook story. It’s not as if there is some kind of organizer of this, some kind of villain,” veteran journalist Sergei Parkhomenko told Dozhd TV, an independent cable and Internet television station that has been one of the only broadcasters to cover the opposition protests.

For Kolpakov, who lives on the outskirts of Moscow and works at a recording studio specializing in children’s songs, new media has been instrumental in changing his view of Putin since he won popularity by restoring order following Russia’s difficult transition to a market economy in the 1990s.

“During Putin’s first term, I was happy that he restored some kind of order. Then it became clear this order was not for the good of the country but for the good of his inner circle,” he said.

“It takes time to understand that the authorities have crossed some kind of line.”
...
The ability of social networking sites to mobilize a large group of Russians is a new and powerful tool that could give the Kremlin cause for concern as Putin plans a return to the presidency in a March election.

“A Twitter revolution is when people stop messing around on twitter, and start coordinating action through it,” tweeted Ilya Varlamov, whose twitter followers grew by several thousand to almost 6,000 throughout the day on Tuesday.
...
“Let’s be honest, so far the Internet and social media have influence only in big towns and cities,” said Gennady Gudkov, an opposition lawmaker with the left-leaning Just Russia party. “It doesn’t have much sway in the regions and provinces.”
...
Many bloggers fear the Kremlin will act to reign in Russia’s vibrant blogosphere, if it becomes too influential. Some bloggers have already been prosecuted offline under libel law and Russia’s wide-reaching law on extremism.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks - attempts to make a computer or network unavailable - have in the last few days shut down a large number of media websites. Russia’s most popular blogging site, LiveJournal, was hobbled.

The cyber attack also simultaneously crippled the websites of leading radio station Ekho Moskvy - owned by state energy monopoly Gazprom - Kommersant newspaper and other top media outlets. Russia’s main independent vote monitor, Golos, was another targeted.

“I am sure the authorities will very soon try to introduce legislation that will restrict the Internet,” Von Eggert said, although the Kremlin has denied such suggestions.

Or, maybe they found a smarter way to use it to their advantage, learning from what happened?

One final note from the Gallup piece:

Democrats are significantly more likely than Republicans to say they see, read or hear a lot about Trump's tweets (64% vs. 50%, respectively). Democrats also edge out Republicans when including those who read a fair amount of his tweets: 84% of Democrats see, read or hear about at least a fair amount of the president's tweets, compared with 77% of Republicans (and 71% of independents).

 

[TSwizzle]

It is, in fact, not "key" at all and fundamentally avoids addressing what actually is key, namely that the information warfare that the Russians are using (still) is clandestine (i.e, "organic) and thus you are not even aware of it.

Iow, you don't know that it's happening and yet are still influenced by it in ways that are not obvious to you.

No wonder this shit is so effective. It's just weaponized Dunning-Kruger.

 

[scombrid]

Bots or broken by propaganda?

Who in their right mind would post this much?

https://www.facebook.com/stickmarsh


https://www.facebook.com/vance.hughes.39/timeline?lst=100001566791998:100029637094600:1556294701

Actually, I know Jim Porter personally. But it almost seems like his account is high-jacked. Or maybe that I why I don't see him out on the lake very much anymore? He's hunkered behind his keyboard sharing every piece of propaganda spoon fed to him by Breitbart and the Bots? Feeds are full of fake content such as a fake quotes by Democrat candidates and a fake picture of freshmen US Reps in front of a picture of Bin Laden and the ISIS flag. Somebody is still injecting that type of content into social media world and these deluded patriots are still spreading it.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

It is, in fact, not "key" at all and fundamentally avoids addressing what actually is key, namely that the information warfare that the Russians are using (still) is clandestine (i.e, "organic) and thus you are not even aware of it.

Iow, you don't know that it's happening and yet are still influenced by it in ways that are not obvious to you.

No wonder this shit is so effective. It's just weaponized Dunning-Kruger.

Thanks, twizzle. Any time the usual suspects post it always affirms how close to the bone it cuts.

 

[scombrid]

The timing of Trump wading into the Birther conspiracy theory is telling. That's been a mark I've noted for awhile.

At the time I wasn't sure if it was just Republican strategy trying to undermine Obama in the 2012 election.

Interesting how he weaponized the conspiracy theories (DHS bullets, Jade Helm, Agenda 21, anti-vaccine...) that were popular among the far right (and that the GOP was all to happy to promote when it could be aimed at Obama) to mobilize the base of the party to push him through the primaries.

Of course then in the general he just had to move the needle a little. It didn't matter how bad he was, every Republican was going to vote for him. Democrat voters were going to vote for whatever Democrat. They just needed to suppress Democrat turnout a little and then get a few of the "you caint tell me wut to do" rednecks that normally don't vote fired up enough to go vote against "Killary" and the "deep state" and all the other forces of evil that were making their lives bad while giving all the goodies to welfare (brown people and messicans).

You know they did the same thing with Brexit, convinced "Joe the Plumber" that his life was shit because "unelected Bureaucrats" were giving all the good stuff to immigrants. Joe the Plumber never did and still has no idea how the EU is structured.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Here's a fun tidbit I hadn't seen before:

Why did then-FBI Director James Comey feel he needed to take the Clinton email matter into his own hands and cut out his own bosses, the leaders of the Justice Department?
...
The Washington Post has told the story before, and now the [Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz report on the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server] confirms it: In March 2016, the FBI got ahold of "highly classified information," according to the report, that "included allegations of partisan bias" or attempts by [then-Attorney General Loretta] Lynch to impede the Clinton email probe.

The FBI looked into the discovery and could not corroborate it, plus Comey told investigators he knew from the first moment that the discovery wasn't true. According to the Post, the material purported to be a Russian intelligence document that discussed an email that was not included.

In that purported email, Lynch supposedly told a Clinton campaign staffer not to worry about the investigation because she would take care of everything.

It also said, according to the new IG report, that Comey was deliberately drawing out the Clinton email investigation to help Republicans. Comey told investigators that he knew it wasn't true and that he didn't believe that Lynch had offered the assurance to the Clinton campaign that the questionable document described.

However, even though Comey never believed the information, it still helped prompt him to decide to box out Lynch and then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, the report says:

"Comey said that he became concerned that the information about Lynch would taint the public's perception of the [Clinton] investigation if it leaked, particularly after DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 began releasing hacked emails in mid-June 2016."

Meaning what? Not only did the Russians influence the conduct of American officials with a questionable document — the use of forgeries is a long-standing aspect of active measures — but also the American officials involved here knew the material almost certainly wasn't real. Even so, it still affected Comey's choices, and to the degree it was intended to help disrupt the election, it worked.

So the much touted "Comey effect" was evidently also the direct result of the Russian information warfare machine.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

I've referenced her before (and need to read her book), but this Salon interview of Kathleen Hall Jamieson is well worth the read. Ms. Jamieson is a best selling author of numerous books, a Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, co-founder of FactCheck.org and, most recently, the author of the book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President: What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know.

Snippets (all are her quotes):

Research shows that disinformation is fed within the fairly narrow confines of the right-wing echo chamber.

The synergy among Breitbart and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh is very real and the likelihood that any one of them would be citing the Russian information that was released through WikiLeaks, for example, is extraordinarily high relative to mainstream news outlets and other sources. The amplification power for its audience is higher on the conservative end of the ideological sphere than for those people who pay attention to more mainstream news media outlets and other sources.
...
Some people are more predisposed towards accuracy. When confronted with new information they are more likely to ask, "How do I know that? Is that correct?" To the extent that we, as individuals, feel and become more partisan in our identity, we are less likely to emphasize accuracy, to question the motivations about the information that we seek out and subsequently use. Confirmation bias is also very important here, as human beings are often critical and highly analytic about anything that we disagree with and uncritically accept information that may be more suspect when it agrees with our priors.

Social media is very important here. Because people are increasingly involved with social media, it's more likely their partisan and other political identities are being triggered in those spaces. In turn this means that people are less likely to be concerned with what is accurate. The result is that we are much more vulnerable to propaganda.
...
I originally thought that the idea that the Russians could have used social media to create a substantial impact on the election was absurd. I started to change my mind when I saw the first release of Russian social media and troll campaign ads and messaging during the U.S. Senate hearings in October and November of last year. These ads were a coherent plan and understanding of the presidential election which was consistent with Donald Trump's political needs.
...
We don't ordinarily have voters who are as conflicted as they were in 2016. And we had a higher percent of people self-identifying as "independent," which meant they were less anchored to a political party. When you come into those final weeks and you see that almost one out of eight voters hasn't decided yet, that's unusual. There were enough people able to be influenced when the hacked content gotten illegally by the Russians from the Democratic campaign headquarters burst into the news after Oct. 7, 2016 -- and that's when early voting is taking place.

There were enough undecided voters watching those last two debates to make an impact on the election. For example, one of the questions that was based on the hacked information was about Hillary Clinton saying one thing in public and another thing in private. In reality, Clinton was using an example from the Steven Spielberg movie about Abraham Lincoln when she said, “Sometimes you need to do some things with one constituency and some with another.”

She was talking about all the maneuvering that Abraham Lincoln did to ensure that he could protect the country through the Civil War. She was not saying, “Well, when I was behind closed doors, I told Goldman Sachs one thing while I'm telling the public something else.” When that statement about the Lincoln film is taken out of context, it seems to be an admission that she was saying things in private that did not agree with her public statements. Hillary Clinton is thrown onto the defensive in that presidential debate and Trump gains a major advantage out of that.

The evidence for this is reflected in responses made by debate viewers as compared to non-viewers. Debate viewers think Clinton is more likely to say one thing in public and another in private.

In the last debate, the issue was what Clinton said about trade and immigration. The statement in the hacked speech was actually about energy transfer. What Chris Wallace implied was that Clinton had conceded that she stood for open borders. Donald Trump makes this immediately about immigration in the debate, but in reality the hacked speech had nothing to do with immigration.

She's disadvantaged in that exchange as well. In total this shows how the Russian hackers got this into the mainstream of American political discourse. Journalists took it out of context and this information was used to hurt Hillary Clinton.

In regard, specifically, to how they influenced the campaign, the question is asked:

[SALON] If you were to explain to the average American how the Russians were able to impact the 2016 presidential election, what would say?

[JAMIESON] The Russians were able to change the climate of communication for some voters and members of the public through social media in ways that disadvantaged Hillary Clinton. The Russians were able to change the media agenda and questions asked during two presidential debates in ways that disadvantaged Hillary Clinton. The Russians and their disinformation campaign may have influenced a consequential decision by James Comey to make public the reopening of the FBI investigation into the Clinton email server on Oct. 28, 2016, in ways that decisively impacted the election.

[SALON] Is it reasonable to conclude that the Russians were able to swing the election in favor of Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton, thus securing a victory for him?

[JAMIESON] Yes, it is probable although not certain. The case for the Russian trolls is more tentative because we don't have the targeting information from the social media companies. The information hacked and leaked by the Russians is a stronger case. Adding in the impact of Russian disinformation and its influence on James Comey makes the case very strong that the Russians were able to swing the 2016 presidential election in Donald Trump's favor

That interview was from February of 2018. Her book was unfavorably reviewed by The Guardian and she responded in October of 2018 with a published rebuttal, where she noted (among other things):

In the process of announcing the US Justice Department’s July 2018 indictment of a dozen Russian military intelligence officers for hacking Democrats’ computers and publishing the contents, US deputy attorney general Rod J Rosenstein noted that: “What impact they may have had [on the 2016 presidential election] … is a matter of speculation.” I disagree. While the case will never be iron-clad, one can plausibly determine how these Kremlin-tied saboteurs changed the contest that put real estate developer Donald J Trump in the White House.

Doing so entails two steps. The first requires documenting the ways in which the Russian cyber-theft of more than 150,000 emails and documents affected key players, bolstered or undercut the electoral strategies of the major party contenders, legitimized central Republican attacks, and altered the media and debate agendas. The second involves asking how these changes in the balance of messaging and the media agenda compare to those whose effects have been documented in past campaigns.
...
My starting premise is that the tranche by tranche posting – first through Guccifer 2 and DCLeaks and then by WikiLeaks – of content hacked by Russian operatives transformed reporters and media outlets, in the words of the Pulitzer prize-winning reporting team at the New York Times, into “a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence”. Searching for scoops and supposed scandals in the firehose of Russian hacked content, reporters downplayed Russia–related information that disadvantaged the Republicans, infused the media agenda with anti-Clinton “news”, and decontextualized hacked content in ways problematic for the Democrats.
...
When the Access Hollywood tape threatened to sink the Trump candidacy, the media’s use of hacked content buoyed it. On 7 October 2016, two days before the second presidential debate, the lewd admissions memorialized on that hot mic recording prompted pundits to wonder whether Trump was confessing to sexual assault. As highly placed Republicans considered whether to move vice presidential nominee Mike Pence to the top of the ticket, a revelation found in Bob Woodward’s Fear, Russian hacking disseminated on WikiLeaks saved the day for Trump by redirecting the media agenda. Displaced in the process was the announcement earlier that day by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security that the Russians were behind the hacking of the Democratic accounts.

By posting segments of speeches Hillary Clinton delivered behind closed doors, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange shifted the media focus from Trump’s proclivities and the reasons the Russians might be happy to see him win, to an examination of the vulnerabilities of both major party nominees. Accordingly, Trump champion and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani argued on influential Sunday interview shows on 9 October that Trump’s bragging about his celebrity entitlement and Clinton’s hacked closed-door remarks each revealed flawed candidates.

In the days that followed, reporters exhausted their interest in Trump’s boast that he kissed attractive women without their consent and could get away with anything including grabbing their genitals. By contrast, a Google Trends search confirms that successive disclosures from WikiLeaks garnered attention throughout the last month of the campaign. From 3 October to 20 October, a period after Trump’s poor and Clinton’s strong performance in the first debate and before FBI director James Comey’s re-opening of the Clinton server investigation on 28 October, our Annenberg surveys show a significant drop in perceptions that Clinton was qualified to be president. A likely explanation is a news agenda filled with scandal-framed press coverage of the hacked content posted on WikiLeaks.

In the same month, the moderators in the last two general election debates transformed hacked content into questions hostile to Clinton’s candidacy and consistent with persistent Republican attacks. At issue in the second debate on 9 October were rambling thoughts the former secretary of state expressed in a closed-door talk to the National Multifamily Housing Council. In it, she cited Abraham Lincoln’s actions as an illustration of the need “to balance the public and private efforts that are necessary to be successful politically,” and noted that the then popular Steven Spielberg film showed Lincoln doing just that:

“You just have to sort of figure out how to – getting back to that word, “balance” – how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that’s not just a comment about today … [and then 120 words about Lincoln]. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back-room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.”

Citing only the last sentence from that segment, in front of an audience of 66.5 million viewers, debate moderator Martha Raddatz asked: “Is it acceptable for a politician to be “two-faced?”

Stolen material was stripped from its context as well in the final debate on 19 October when, before more than 71.6 million viewers, moderator Chris Wallace truncated a key sentence of Clinton’s from the same hacked tranche to claim: “We’ve learned from WikiLeaks, that you said this. And I want to quote, ‘My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.’” Had the Russians not published the hacked Democratic material with WikiLeaks’ help, neither debate question could have drawn legitimacy from Clinton’s own privately spoken words.

For Trump, open borders signaled unrestricted trade as well as immigrants and refugees streaming in to wreck havoc on innocent citizens. Throughout the campaign, the Democratic nominee had rejected Trump’s allegation that she favored any such thing. The words she spoke in private did not diverge from that public position. Missing in Wallace’s question was the rest of the original sentence, which in its entirety read: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” When Trump tied the statement to immigration and Clinton stated that it was instead about energy, he accused her of lying.

Importantly, our surveys show that viewers of either of these two debates were more likely than non-viewers to report a difference between Clinton’s public and private sentiments, an assessment consistent with the one presupposed by both the moderators’ and Trump’s use of the hacked content in those two encounters. These negative post-debate perceptions predicted a reduced likelihood that a respondent would envisage voting for the Democratic nominee.

It is now clearer than ever that, abetted by Assange’s WikiLeaks and by harried US reporters, the Russian cyber-theft and release of tens of thousands of Democratic emails and documents bolstered the electoral strategy of Trump and undercut Clinton’s, legitimized central Republican attacks and altered the media and debate agendas.

In past campaigns, smaller changes than these in the media agenda moved more than the 78,000 votes that in 2016 decided the electoral college. It is therefore very likely that without Russian interventions, Donald J Trump would not be the US’s 45th president. That is a reality with which our democracy in general and our press in particular have yet to fully contend.

In another interview on PBS New Hour, she clarified an important point about how the media responded to the Russian/Wikileaks hack:

My theory of how the election outcome was changed is that the discourse climate was changed.

So, we know from our past research that, when you change the balance of the messages, so you have more negative messages about one candidate than the other, you shift votes, not massive numbers, but you shift enough to decide a close election.

And what that means is that, if you can get the number of messages out there to be highly negative, compared to where they would have been, in social media — that's the trolls — and in mainstream and conservative media — that's the hackers — to shift in both cases against Secretary Clinton, candidate Clinton, you're more likely to move votes against her.

That's why I call them discourse saboteurs.
...
First, if the media had said, every time we're going to say WikiLeaks, instead, we will say Russian stolen content hacked from Democratic accounts illegally, or Russian stolen content given us by Julian Assange, who wanted to see Hillary Clinton defeated, because Hillary Clinton wanted him prosecuted for his use of national security data, the source and the message would have stayed tied.

By calling it WikiLeaks, the press made us assume that this was just normal content, and was — that it came from a news source, a legitimate source, not from the Russians.

Well, it's exactly what happened. They hacked the material, gave it to WikiLeaks, came into our media. And we lost track of the fact that it was Russian-sourced.
...
The social media platforms have made many changes to try to minimize the likelihood that they will be able to replicate 2016. They have increased the likelihood that they're going to catch anybody trying to illegally buy ads as a foreign national, for example.

The place that we haven't seen big changes is with the press. We haven't heard from our major media outlets. If tomorrow, somebody hacked our candidates and released the content into the media stream, how would you cover it? Would you cover it the same? And would you assume its accuracy, instead of questioning it and finding additional sourcing for it, before you release it into the body politic?

I would like to know what the press is going to do confronted with the same situation again.

When you add up all of what has been covered so far--Comey acting as he did because of Russian influence; the press acting as they did because of Russian influence; the voters evidently acting as they did because of Russian influence--it's pretty fucking hard to not conclude that the deciding factor was Russian influence.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Interesting tidbits from an older Wired article, Here's How Much Bots Drive Conversation During News Events. Good to know there are methods being developed, since evidently no Republicans are doing anything about them:

Late last week, about 60 percent of the conversation was driven by likely bots. Over the weekend, even as the conversation about the caravan was overshadowed by more recent tragedies, bots were still driving nearly 40 percent of the caravan conversation on Twitter. That's according to an assessment by Robhat Labs, a startup founded by two UC Berkeley students that builds tools to detect bots online. The team's first product, a Chrome extension called BotCheck.me, allows users to see which accounts in their Twitter timelines are most likely bots. Now it's launching a new tool aimed at news organizations called FactCheck.me, which allows journalists to see how much bot activity there is across an entire topic or hashtag.
...
Identifying bots is an ever-evolving science. To develop their methodology, Bhat and his partner Rohan Phadte compiled a sample set of accounts they had a high confidence were political propaganda bots. These accounts exhibited unusual behavior, like tweeting political content every few minutes throughout the day or amassing a huge following almost instantly. Unlike automated accounts that news organizations and other entities sometimes set up to send regularly scheduled tweets, the propaganda bots that Robhat Labs is focused on pose as humans. Bhat and Phadte also built a set of verified accounts to represent standard human behavior. They built a machine learning model that could compare the two and pick up on the patterns specific to bot accounts. They wound up with a model that they say is about 94 percent accurate in identifying propaganda bots. Factcheck.me does more than just track bot activity, though. It also applies image recognition technology to identify the most popular memes and images about a given topic being circulated by both bots and humans.

The tool is still in its earliest stages and requires Bhat and his eight-person team to pull the numbers themselves each time they get a request. Newsrooms interested in tracking a given event have to email Robhat Labs with the topic they want to track. Within 24 hours, the company will spit back a report. Reporters will be able to see both the extent of the bot activity on a given topic, as well as the most shared pieces of content pertaining to that topic.

There are limitations to this approach. It's not currently possible to the view the percentage of bot activity over a longer period of time. Factcheck.me also doesn't indicate which way the bots are swaying the conversation. Still, it offers more information than newsrooms have previously had at their disposal. Plenty of researchers have studied bot activity on Twitter as a whole, but FactCheck.me allows for more narrow analyses of specific topics, almost in real time. Already, Robhat Labs has released reports on the caravan, the shooting in Pittsburgh, and the senate race in Texas.
...
But according to Bhat, the bots have hardly disappeared. They've just evolved. Now, rather than simply sending automated tweets that Twitter might delete, they work to amplify and spread the divisive Tweets written by actual humans.

"Bhat" no less. Strange days indeed.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Of further note (especially for anyone that saw the documentary on Netflix): The strange afterlife of Cambridge Analytica and the mysterious fate of its data

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

More grist for the mill regarding the recently release bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee findings. In a nut:

The Senate Intelligence report details a troubling fact: in the three months leading up to Election Day, Russian-planted false information on Facebook outperformed real news.

Deeper dive from the report:

According to one November 2016 analysis, in the final three months leading up to Election Day, calculated by total number of shares, reactions, and comments, the top-performing intentionally false stories on Facebook actually outperformed the top news stories from the nineteen major news outlets. That analysis found that in terms of user engagement, the top two intentionally false election stories on Facebook included articles alleging Pope Francis' endorsement of Donald Trump for President (960,000 shares, reactions, and comments), and WikiLeaks' confirmation of Hillary Clinton's sale of weapons to ISIS (789,000 shares, reactions, and comments).
...
Craig Silverman, "This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook," Buzzfeed, November 16, 2016, ("During these critical months of the campaign, 20 top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyper-partisan biogs generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions and comments on Facebook. ... Within the same time period, the 20 best performing election stories from 19 major news websites generated a total of 7,367,000 shares, reactions and comments on Facebook.")
...
A September 2017 Oxford Internet Institute study of Twitter users found that, "users got more misinformation; polarizing, and conspiratorial content than professionally produced news." According to the study, in the "swing state" of Michigan, professionally produced news was, by proportion, "consistently smaller than the amount of extremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked commentary, fake news and other forms of junk news," and the ratio was most disproportionate the day before the 2016 U.S. election. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper from January 2017 assessed that intentionally false content accounted for 38 million shares on Facebook in the last 3 months leading up to the election, which translates into 760 million clicks-or "about three stories read per American adult."

In conducting a broader analysis of false information dissemination, in what was described as "the largest ever study of fake news," researchers at MIT tracked over 125,000 news stories on Twitter, which were shared by three million people over the course of 11 years. The research found that, "Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information." The study also determined that false news stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than accurate news, and that true stories take about six times as long to reach 1,500 people on Twitter as false stories do. According to the lead researcher in the study, Soroush Vosoughi, "It seems pretty clear that false information outperforms true information."

In regard to the use of automated bots to spread the fake news:

These researchers also concluded that "bots [were] pervasively present and active in the online political discussion about the 2016 U.S. presidential election," adding that "the presence of social media bots can indeed negatively affect democratic political discussion rather than improving it."39 Arriving at a similar conclusion, an Oxford Internet Institute study-of 17 million tweets posted during the 2016 election found that bots "reached positions of measurable influence," and "did infiltrate the upper cores of influence and were thus jn a position to significantly influence digital communications during the 2016 U.S. election."

In testimony to the Committee, social media researcher John Kelly suggested that automated accounts focused on fringe political positions are far more active than the voices of actual people holding politically centrist views: "In our estimate, today the automated accounts at the far left and far right extremes of the American political spectrum produce as many as 25 to 30 times the number of messages per day on average as genuine political accounts across the mainstream." In other words, "the extremes are screaming while the majority whispers."
...
Use of Automated Accounts and Bots. The use of automated accounts on social media has allowed social media users to artificially amplify and increase the spread, or "virulence," of online content. Russia-backed operatives,exploited this automated accounts feature and worked to develop and refine their own bot capabilities for spreading disinformation faster and further across the social media landscape. In January 2018, Twitter disclosed its security personnel assess that over 50,000 automated accounts linked to Russia were tweeting election-related content during the U.S. presidential campaign.

Russian actors are prolific users of automated accounts and bots. Phil Howard, citing the findings of a study dpne by the Oxford Internet Institute, concluded that Russian Twitter networks "are almost completely bounded by highly automated accounts, with a high degree of overall automation." His study assessed that "some 45 percent of Twitter activity in Russia is managed by highly automated accounts," and that Ukraine remains "the frontline of experimentation in computational propaganda with active campaigns of engagement" between Russian and Ukrainian botnets. 70 Early automation was fairly primitive and easier to detect and disrupt, but malicious bot activity has continued to grow in sophistication.

And in regard to trolls, well, let's just say we all here could have written this one:

Kremlin-backed entities have spent years professionalizing a cadre of paid trolls, investing in large-scale, industrialized "troll farms,'' in order to obscure Moscow's hand and advance the aims of Russia's information operations both domestically and abroad.
...
In 2015, NATO's Strategic Communications Center of Excellence commissioned research on the use of trolling in hybrid warfare, publishing its conclusions in the spring of 2016. The study, which was largely focused on discussions surrounding the Ukraine-Russia conflict, outlined a variety of influence techniques employed by trolls online, including the aggressive use of offensive slurs and attacks; utilization of irony and sarcasm; peddling conspiracy theories; employing profile pictures of young, attractive men and women; diverting discourse to other problems; posting misleading information on information sources like Wikipedia; emphasizing social divisions; and presenting indigestible amounts of data without sources or verification.

Perfectly describes the usual suspects around here.

Of additional and important note from the findings of the report (emphasis mine):

The Committee found that the IRA's lnformation warfare campaign was broad in scope and entailed objectives beyond the result of the 2016 presidential election. Further, the Committee's analysis of the IRA's activities on social media supports the key judgments of the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections," that "Russia's, goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton,· and harm her electability and potential presidency."5 However, where the Intelligence Community assessed that the Russian government "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him," the Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment of Secretary Clinton's campaign.

That last bit means they not only found that Russia interfered, but that their efforts were successful. That's what "and to the detriment" means. It's not just figurative commentary.

On a side note, this is exactly what I kept pointing out as it began:

The Committee found that paid advertisements were not key to the IRA's activity, and moreover, are not alone an accurate measure of the IRA's operational scope, scale, objectives, despite this aspect of social media being a focus of early press reporting and public awareness.

It was the clandestine "organic" tactics that were effective--the ones where you can't tell where it came from or who is behind it, shared by your friends and family (so you believe them even more so than you would if it came with a "this message approved by Candidate X" stamp on it)--and remain so today.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

And here's a link to Volume I, which I have not had the time to go through yet.