Is this surprising to anyone? I assumed that all corporations, politicians and celebrities pay armies of minions to cultivate public opinion. How could it be any other way? I hardly think Bernie Sanders' campaign doesn't do the same thing.
> I hardly think Bernie Sanders' campaign doesn't do the same thing.
A generalized cynicism isn't a substitute for facts.
edit: also, just due to the nature of Sanders' support, discovery of something like this would lose him a lot of it. I don't think anything short of sponsoring a federal abortion ban could turn off Clinton's supporters.
FEC reform is the number one thing that the US federal government needs but no member of Congress will ever touch. All presidential campaign funds must be 100% publicly funded. I don't care how much more it taxes onto federal tax or how un-American it is. This shit will never end otherwise.
There are lots of countries that have strong supreme courts and free speech guarantees in their constitution yet have managed to limit election spending.
I personally find the dissent in Citizens United much more compelling than the majority opinion.
I'm turning into a single issue troll with this, but I think we can make a positive change at the state level by changing ballot access. Just stop allowing parties to nominate candidates.
The machines can still endorse a candidate, but we could gut the national election process one state at a time by requiring any individual that wants to be listed on a ballot to submit petitions for that ballot, rather than receiving the blessings of a privately run national organization.
Submitting a petition to be on a ballot is a basic effort for national party. That's practically the the reason a national party exists in the first place.
It would make the conventions irrelevant. The national party chooses the candidate to place on ballots using whatever rules they set for the national convention. If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be all the procedural nonsense that we see put towards trying to win the national conventions, people that thought they had a serious shot at getting a plurality of votes would organize to get themselves on ballots. We'd have a ballot this fall with 10 names on it, not 2.5.
Click to show the partisan requirements here and note the huge disparities with independents:
So not only is there the huge well organized machine you mention could easily collect signatures, there is also generally a much easier (and tightly controlled) path to the ballot.
edit: It's quite likely that the president would be selected by the Electoral College, but personally I'd prefer that to the current process where the president is selected by the superior voter targeting strategy.
What if someone with a lot of money wants to get Hillary elected, so they spend their own money on sock puppets to promote her? Should Hillary be liable for those actions even if she had no knowledge of them?
This is the "arms length" argument of super PACs. At first glance it sounds really corrupt, but when you actually think about it, how can you tell someone what to spend their money on? If I want to spend $100 million of my own money to promote my candidate of choice, shouldn't I be able to do that?
Congratulations, you've just made part of the case for Citizens United, which coincidentally pertained to an ... unflattering movie about Hillary.
(The stronger case is of course "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press....", most especially core political speech.)
I don't see this as a problem at all, as long as these commenters are representing the opinions of Hillary. I actually believe that people/organizations should be given an opportunity to respond to these comments "officially" using the same channels that commenters make use of.
If they were marked as being paid representatives, this wouldn't be a story. Plenty of people working for all of the campaigns participate in social media.
On reddit, all they have to do is create an account. They can attest that the account is official wherever they want.
The issue that arises with this article is that the people using reddit perceive paid comments as an abuse of the channel, especially when the for pay nature of the comments is obscured.
What about pro-Hillary comments coming from unofficial social media accounts? The article didn't say exactly where these comments would be coming from. I assumed they would be "astro-turf" type users that purport to be everyday reddit users but are actually affiliated with this Hillary PAC.
But that's what they do. There is software out there that allows one person to manage hundreds of different "personas". So they use this software to login to facebook as "Jane Smith", make a couple comments, then login as "John Doe" and reinforce the comments "Jane" made.
Are they above the board? I know at sites like DailyKos there are lots of concern with Sanders supporters that Hillary is buying commenters and even the site itself.
The Hillary supporters claim this is "required given the money being raised on the other side" - $2B is a figure thrown around, and that not doing this is essentially ceding the field.
"It's not propaganda when we do it!" - Every Politician, Ever
Kidding aside, I'm not a fan of astro-turf avenues of engagement. There's no point 'discussing' with a shill. Much like there's no reasoning with a hungry, rabid dog when you're holding a delcious cut of steak. Though the analogy may be flawed, it is worth considering how intensely votes are courted, generally speaking.
Propaganda is, by definition, anything which promotes or publicizes a political cause or POV. Are you really against that? Or are you just afraid of the word "propaganda"?
Right... So how is an employee of a politician informing the public of what the politicians actual stance is 'propaganda' of the denotative and connotative form?
Paid comments which try to hide the fact that they are paid comments are deceptive (and probably unethical), and if they are for a political purpose, they are also propoganda?
This seems like a fairly reasonable criterion(?) to me.
I don't know whether the comments in question hide the fact that they are paid comments. If they don't, and are up front about it, I suppose that isn't inherently very deceptive, and probably not really propoganda in any strong sense.
It's a loaded term to insinuate that the cause or POV is using less-than-transparent mechanisms to garner a desired reaction. I've got no problem with political discourse, or even espousing controversial ideological proposals. That's all natural and healthy.
What I dislike is using tactics to frame one side of a narrative as impervious to criticism, which in this case, seems to be the desired outcome from the entity providing $$$.
How would it be impervious to criticism? It seems like these people are going around looking for statements that are incorrect about her and correcting them.
These people are going around looking for statements that are "incorrect" about her and "correcting" them.
And, despite the obvious shadiness, they are coordinating the process in ways that would be illegal in other media, simply because the laws haven't kept up with society.
They are being paid to "correct" them by the person who has a vested interest in how the "corrections" portray the facts, linguistically. Let's toss out a hypothetical example:
Fact: Hillary Clinton is being investigated regarding her use of a private email server.
Fact via "Correction": Republicans have instigated an investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for political gain.
See what I'm alluding to? If not, then okay, but I don't think I can get much more granular.
The hypothetical part was that somewhere, out there, someone is posting this. Obviously, we don't have the actual posts, just the money trail that paid for them.
Not at this time; apparently the operation is just getting started according to this documentation.
If the group does their job well, then - partially kidding here - there should be a representative coming by relatively soon to correct my perception of what the group is motivated to do and how it looks in real life.
As in, the burden of transparency isn't on my suspicion, but rather in their actions. To correct my suspicion, they should have no trouble showing all the cases of non-propaganda-resembling "corrections" they've performed. Then there'd be no reason for a person like me to suspect gamesmanship in the endeavor.
No, it's not that simple. Propaganda has a definition which usually includes something about false info or spin. From Marian-Webster "propaganda
: ideas or statements that are often false or exaggerated and that are spread in order to help a cause, a political leader, a government, etc."
Oxford "Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view"
Propaganda is, by definition, anything which promotes or publicizes a political cause or POV.
No, it isn't "anything" which promotes a cause or a POV.
It's the presence of manipulation (and as applies to astroturfing campaigns, such as the "Correct the Record" antics appear to be) false pretense that make it propaganda.
Seems simple to police : have an account that has a "registration" number. You get some basic training and access to a FAQ generator and can post "on message" replies - all above board as you need it.
Well, don't do that. It's like having links to PACs -
there was a political campaign sending tweets to a shell account about which wards it needs targeting (can't find the reference) - jail time was needed.
Same here. If people with no connection to a campaign are responding online - fine. If there is a connection. Gosh, jail time
Can anyone tell me why this is wrong, exactly? Or, for that matter, why this news?
Edit: to be more clear, I don't expect the same level of objectivity from Reddit or Hacker News comments that I do from an actual news story, so I don't have the same ethical issues with the Hillary campaign paying people to post comments on her behalf.
Well, the story is probably popular here and on Reddit because it makes people suspicious of each other and also makes us, as commentators, feel important. Somebody is being paid a lot of money to get at us!
But the real reason that this is a news story is because SuperPACs have one defining trait: they don't coordinate with the candidates at all. However, in this particular instance, due to "loopholes", this SuperPAC is able to coordinate directly with the Clinton campaign. In essence, Clinton gets direct control over SuperPAC money for this specific purpose, which is newsworthy if fairly dry.
Hmmm...well I can only speak for myself, but I see a number of problems with this. To spare time though, I will focus on the two things I perceive to be the biggest problem:
"Due to FEC loopholes, the Sunlight Foundation’s Libby Watson found this year that Correct the Record can openly coordinate with Clinton’s campaign, despite rules that typically disallow political campaigns from working directly with PACs."
PACs which raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and other private business groups have always been questionably legal. However, they have been allowed to exist under strict regulation so long as they remained completely separate from candidates' campaigns.
It would appear, however, that a PAC is now coordinating with the Hilary campaign while not being under the same fundraising restrictions.
To me, PACs have always been subversions of the American governmental process and now one operating more or less as the "long-arm" of an individual candidate's campaign just makes them even more troubling.
The second thing is this type of brigade behavior, especially with funding behind it, is particularly dangerous since it has a disproportionate ability to influence general public perception. It may not influence you or I much individually, but I am not sure Hacker News readers/commentators are a representative sample of the "average American".
I must now assume that any comment on this page of the 'so what?' or 'everyone does it' variety or any downplaying whatsoever is in fact a paid shill. That includes any disagreements with this statement :)
At first I chuckled at your comment and scrolled away. Then I saw how many people on this thread are downplaying this. Now I'm wondering if you're right
You might not be far from the mark, actually. The funny thing about at least one Hillary supporter that I know is how vocal they are about all other politicians being just as bad as, if not worse than, HRC, and that ergo, HRC is no worse than anyone else, and ergo HRC is as equally viable as anyone else. It's quite a distorted Weltanshauung.
1M - how come so cheap? With a 1B+ scale campaigns one would think that such an important tactical theater would receive more spending. Probably it is one of the indication of a reason - not enough resources spent/committed - why Hillary doesn't do that well with the young.
This may give her a stronger online presence in a naïve sense, but it also undermines all of her genuine supporters. Now every Hillary supporter on the Internet looks like they’re being paid off.
Really makes you wonder what kind of administration she’d run. Seems like money always turns up wherever she turns up; the direction of causality is up to your imagination.
Don't politicians pretty much buy their votes? Only difference is where the money comes from and how they spend it. I haven't looked into it, but I wonder what the price for a vote is these days?
Maybe the real problem is that people in this country still think that the more they hear something, the more it’s worth hearing. If they’d only keep those little slivers of truth about Hillary in mind among the sea of lies—if there were any mental permanence to their observations about her—then maybe she’d stop being able to slip through the cracks like she has about the emails, the speeches, and (foreseeably) this Big Brother-esque move.
What it means (in combination with the analysis that a huge %age of Twitter followers are not real) is, there are even less humans that like her, than we think.
She is like a rich person that bribes people to hang around her.
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A generalized cynicism isn't a substitute for facts.
edit: also, just due to the nature of Sanders' support, discovery of something like this would lose him a lot of it. I don't think anything short of sponsoring a federal abortion ban could turn off Clinton's supporters.
At the very least, it's sloppy that Team Hillary let this slip...
http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project-of-...
I personally find the dissent in Citizens United much more compelling than the majority opinion.
“The likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim... People think the FEC is dysfunctional. It’s worse than dysfunctional."
- Ann Ravel, FEC Chairwoman
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/us/politics/fec-cant-curb-...
The FEC has referred __eight___ campaign finance enforcement cases to the DOJ since __1978__.
http://www.bna.com/fec-rarely-votes-n17179934048/
The machines can still endorse a candidate, but we could gut the national election process one state at a time by requiring any individual that wants to be listed on a ballot to submit petitions for that ballot, rather than receiving the blessings of a privately run national organization.
Submitting a petition to be on a ballot is a basic effort for national party. That's practically the the reason a national party exists in the first place.
Click to show the partisan requirements here and note the huge disparities with independents:
https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_presidential_candi...
So not only is there the huge well organized machine you mention could easily collect signatures, there is also generally a much easier (and tightly controlled) path to the ballot.
edit: It's quite likely that the president would be selected by the Electoral College, but personally I'd prefer that to the current process where the president is selected by the superior voter targeting strategy.
This is the "arms length" argument of super PACs. At first glance it sounds really corrupt, but when you actually think about it, how can you tell someone what to spend their money on? If I want to spend $100 million of my own money to promote my candidate of choice, shouldn't I be able to do that?
(The stronger case is of course "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press....", most especially core political speech.)
On reddit, all they have to do is create an account. They can attest that the account is official wherever they want.
The issue that arises with this article is that the people using reddit perceive paid comments as an abuse of the channel, especially when the for pay nature of the comments is obscured.
An astro-turf user is by definition misrepresenting themselves. They gain credibility by presenting themselves as unaffiliated with the candidate.
The Hillary supporters claim this is "required given the money being raised on the other side" - $2B is a figure thrown around, and that not doing this is essentially ceding the field.
Kidding aside, I'm not a fan of astro-turf avenues of engagement. There's no point 'discussing' with a shill. Much like there's no reasoning with a hungry, rabid dog when you're holding a delcious cut of steak. Though the analogy may be flawed, it is worth considering how intensely votes are courted, generally speaking.
This seems like a fairly reasonable criterion(?) to me.
I don't know whether the comments in question hide the fact that they are paid comments. If they don't, and are up front about it, I suppose that isn't inherently very deceptive, and probably not really propoganda in any strong sense.
What I dislike is using tactics to frame one side of a narrative as impervious to criticism, which in this case, seems to be the desired outcome from the entity providing $$$.
And, despite the obvious shadiness, they are coordinating the process in ways that would be illegal in other media, simply because the laws haven't kept up with society.
Fact: Hillary Clinton is being investigated regarding her use of a private email server.
Fact via "Correction": Republicans have instigated an investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for political gain.
See what I'm alluding to? If not, then okay, but I don't think I can get much more granular.
If the group does their job well, then - partially kidding here - there should be a representative coming by relatively soon to correct my perception of what the group is motivated to do and how it looks in real life.
As in, the burden of transparency isn't on my suspicion, but rather in their actions. To correct my suspicion, they should have no trouble showing all the cases of non-propaganda-resembling "corrections" they've performed. Then there'd be no reason for a person like me to suspect gamesmanship in the endeavor.
No, it isn't "anything" which promotes a cause or a POV.
It's the presence of manipulation (and as applies to astroturfing campaigns, such as the "Correct the Record" antics appear to be) false pretense that make it propaganda.
The problem isn't overt campaigning. The problem is covert astroturf campaigning.
there was a political campaign sending tweets to a shell account about which wards it needs targeting (can't find the reference) - jail time was needed.
Same here. If people with no connection to a campaign are responding online - fine. If there is a connection. Gosh, jail time
Edit: to be more clear, I don't expect the same level of objectivity from Reddit or Hacker News comments that I do from an actual news story, so I don't have the same ethical issues with the Hillary campaign paying people to post comments on her behalf.
It's a form of lying, a form of corruption.
Also, it's in the interests of places like Reddit and HN to keep them out. It's distorts the comments in an unpleasant way.
I'm fine with corps and stuff posting here, as long as they identify themselves as such.
But the real reason that this is a news story is because SuperPACs have one defining trait: they don't coordinate with the candidates at all. However, in this particular instance, due to "loopholes", this SuperPAC is able to coordinate directly with the Clinton campaign. In essence, Clinton gets direct control over SuperPAC money for this specific purpose, which is newsworthy if fairly dry.
"Due to FEC loopholes, the Sunlight Foundation’s Libby Watson found this year that Correct the Record can openly coordinate with Clinton’s campaign, despite rules that typically disallow political campaigns from working directly with PACs."
PACs which raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and other private business groups have always been questionably legal. However, they have been allowed to exist under strict regulation so long as they remained completely separate from candidates' campaigns.
It would appear, however, that a PAC is now coordinating with the Hilary campaign while not being under the same fundraising restrictions.
To me, PACs have always been subversions of the American governmental process and now one operating more or less as the "long-arm" of an individual candidate's campaign just makes them even more troubling.
The second thing is this type of brigade behavior, especially with funding behind it, is particularly dangerous since it has a disproportionate ability to influence general public perception. It may not influence you or I much individually, but I am not sure Hacker News readers/commentators are a representative sample of the "average American".
Really makes you wonder what kind of administration she’d run. Seems like money always turns up wherever she turns up; the direction of causality is up to your imagination.
She is like a rich person that bribes people to hang around her.