While I understand Russian propaganda in the US election is disconcerting, I feel like the fury over it is very reactionary.
There's nothing stopping someone on US soil from exercising their first amendment rights in the same way to subvert an election. In fact I expect the next presidential election will be dominated by the same tactics from local organizations.
The susceptibility of Americans to shitty lies, conspiracy theories, and a lack of numeracy is a vastly greater threat to the integrity of the US government and much more difficult to fix.
> The susceptibility of Americans to shitty lies, conspiracy theories, and a lack of numeracy is a vastly greater threat to the integrity of the US government and much more difficult to fix.
This susceptibility is likely not particular to Americans. It's this difficult-to-fix nature that necessitates taking an indirect approach to solving this problem.
> This susceptibility is likely not particular to Americans. It's this difficult-to-fix nature that necessitates taking an indirect approach to solving this problem.
There was a podcast where locals in a small town in Eastern Ukraine said they leave the area immediately if a camera crew (for tv news I presume) shows up because they think wherever there is a camera crew in that town, the chances of some kind of bombing or another becomes very high. I mean there are various degrees of "fake" news. One could argue that "suits are back" [submarine] is fake news as well.
How about a direct approach: Governments should stop lying 24/7 to their citizens; Corporate Media needs to get off (rather kicked off) the privileged 'Fourth Estate' pedastal; and education and mental health issues are taken [as] central and fundamental issues to address.
Humanity imho clearly suffers from various forms of psychological problems and is generally poorly educated. Our problem is that the power elite have historically considered the first a lost cause and confused propaganda with education. And here we are.
And far as I can deduce, civilization boils down to sanity and thoughtfulness. The rest is window dressing and 'product'. (I am /not/ dismissing the fruits here, but rather focusing on 'roots'.) What is necessary is sanity. What is necessary is the ability to think effectively. Individually and collectively. Everything else is secondary, and if the former are lacking, abundance in other dimensions only gets you so far and then it peters out.
Such as the radio stations involved in the Rwandan genocide, or the current allegations that Facebook posts are being used to incite violence and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar.
So RT publishes articles about things like the Flint Michigan water crisis and the many government failures that led to it.
You are telling me that this story and the great reporting about issues like this that the RT has published are horrible because they might impact American democracy?
The victims of the Flint crisis are some of the poorest Americans who do not have a voice in politics. For RT to report on issues of concern to the least empowered Americans may cause political change but that is not a bad thing. Papers that generate ad revenue from subscribers averaging over $100K per year in income simply won't write certain stories because nobody would care to read them.
If RT's not-terribly-covert goal were to sow discord and along the way they happen to do good things that are aligned with their goal, should they still be penalized?
Yes, IMO, they should. On net, they are not an honest "journalism" organization IMO and should suffer.
> Papers that generate ad revenue from subscribers averaging over $100K per year in income simply won't write certain stories because nobody would care to read them.
State media outlets can afford to lose tons of ad revenue for their cause. They create a remarkable simulation of the press that they exercise considerable editorial control over.
That susceptability is borne, perhaps rightly so, from mistrust of our government - just look at the election, both sides were going to great lengths including speaking to foreign powers in order to try to get dirt on the other, and one went as far as to use federal law enforcement for political gain.
Once our government learns that the consequence for subverting the trust of their citizenry is chaos, things will get better. But not until then. These people work for us, not the other way around.
both sides were going to great lengths including speaking to foreign powers in order to try to get dirt on the other, and one went as far as to use federal law enforcement for political gain.
Other than the one thing for which there is some evidence, all of these are conspiracy theories so perhaps you're making your point but not in the way you'd like.
Neither of those articles says a campaign used the government to do its investigation. The Clinton campaign used a private investigation firm in your first article just like all campaigns in history. The FBI investigated Trump in your second article because that's its job — it didn't give special access to the Clinton campaign.
I followed the links to find out which governments the Hillary campaign had been working with. Neither of them did this. I'm not sure why your post was downvoted.
Well, if you look into what Fusion GPS is (a lobbying firm working for the Russians on the Magnitsky Act, requested the meeting with Donald Trump Jr under pretenses of having damaging info on Clinton, recently refusing to appear and ultimately pleading the fifth in front of the senate intelligence committee, and under fire for failure to register under FARA) then I can understand your confusion about why it's bad that the DNC paid them 9 million dollars for a shaky dossier which has already had parts discredited, and then delivered that dossier to the FBI. Strange that the newspaper would leave those interesting parts out, right?
> Strange that the newspaper would leave those interesting parts out, right?
What's strange is that you cited as a source a newspaper article you don't agree with and which not only doesn't support but discredits your original claim. Then you spin wild conspiracy theories essentially claiming that Fusion GPS is an arm of the Kremlin without any sources.
This is a much better explanation of your links than a simple "Oh yeah". However, this information is not present in your links. Perhaps you should understand that not everyone is familiar with what you know, and you should provide more context?
Also, the entire point of providing links is to back claims, you need to now provided additional links to the ones you just made. (EDIT: Now provided. Thank you).
I'm still baffled why these reasonable concerns, no context being provided, is receiving a ridiculous number of downvotes.
You're right. I have been following this story closely and I sometimes assume that those who call me a crazy conspiracy theorist have read the same stuff published in the mainstream media as I have.
Steele denied in October 2016 that his "US company" client (the DNC) instructed him to go to the FBI. But then again, Mark Elias has been denying that the DNC funded this dossier for a year:
In June 2016, a request to the Fisa court for surveillance of the Trump campaign was turned down. In July, the dossier was delivered to the FBI. In October, the Fisa surveillance request was granted. However, this Fisa court request was NOT about Carter Page - Page had been under FBI surveillance since a FISA court ruling in 2014: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-governm...
> requested the meeting with Donald Trump Jr under pretenses of having damaging info on Clinton
This is a major claim to make without any solid substantiation.
From your “edit” link:
> Fusion GPS says it had no involvement in the meeting although it did work on a lawsuit that involved Veselnitskaya for more than two years. The firm’s work on the Trump dossier was on a different timeline. Nevertheless, Trump’s legal team is already conflating the two issues as part of their defense of the president’s son.
Putting all of "government" in one box is like having a software architecture diagram with a single box labelled "code".
In this case, there are plenty of factions which are capable of profiting from that chaos. It's not an accident, it's their preferred outcome. Mostly factions within the Republican party fighting against the "permanent state".
> The susceptibility of Americans to shitty lies, conspiracy theories, and a lack of numeracy is a vastly greater threat to the integrity of the US government and much more difficult to fix.
Seems bullish for advertising. I've chuckled at the fact Facebook tells its advertisers how amazing advertising Facebook is, while at the same time saying to the public that it's ludicrous to think Facebook had any impact on the election.
Advertisers themselves aren't much more immune to advertising than everyone else. In fact, I believe adtech industry scams itself internally just as much as it does that to everyone else.
One of these has a growing body of evidence behind it[1] and the other is pure wackadoodle gibberish that would make even Flat Earthers ashamed.
[1] I wouldn't say "won" but I would say "definitely helped" - there are a large number of other forces that contributed much, much more to the GOP win than Russia.
I would say "won", actually. Think about how the average person behaves. Our community here at Hacker News is unusual. Most people believe whatever they see and tell their friends and family so. Once enough people in a group acquire a belief this way, there's almost no way you can make inroads into their minds. I believe that Russia, and only Russia, won the election in 2016. We just depend too much on the internet for information nowadays and its too easy to disseminate disinformation on that platform.
I mean, come on, a lot of us here know how web sites work. For a major country's spy agency, it would be trivially easy to automate account sign up and posting. Is it that hard to imagine? And when every dumb Joe on the planet is likely to believe the first thing they read that strategically appeals to their emotions? You do the math.
> I believe that Russia, and only Russia, won the election in 2016
Who stands to benefit or avoid harm from such a belief? Arguably the people responsible for the national circumstances that lead the population to vote for someone like Trump.
Growing wealth inequality? No, it's Russia
Questionable foreign wars? No, it's Russia
Massively deprived communities across the states? No, it's Russia
Off-shored working/middle class jobs? No, it's Russia
The Russia narrative is extremely attractive to those whose policies have been very unpopular with a large segment of society. Providing this can be kept up through the Trump presidency than the Democrat (and Republican to some extent) lines do not need to change. More of the same. It is not that people don't like our policies, they were just duped by Russia.
To believe that the effects of certain policies have been just rosy for a large section of Americans, is naive. To try and dismiss their views and blame them for being unknown puppets of Russia, is cruel and wrong.
note: I am not suggestion that Russia were not involved in some way in the US election.
> I believe that Russia, and only Russia, won the election in 2016.
The problem is that you also need the gutted Voting Rights Act, rampant GOP gerrymandering, and the ridiculous favouring of Southern States by the Electoral College to get the win - and those have much more of an effect than a Russian finger on the scales.
Stop right there. This is not the place for that. We all know the who desperately claims that again and again, using those exact same weasel words, and he's a pathological liar, so you embarrass and discredit yourself by parroting him.
It's for your own good. Just look at what you said, and think about how stupid it is to start a sentence with "People have said ..." -- it's about as terrible and dishonest a cliché as "I'm not racist, but ..." Next time you find yourself in the middle of a sentence like that, just stop before you embarrass yourself any more.
Your and Trump's implication is that you're not going to say it yourself (even though you do), so you don't have to prove or defend it or stand by it, and it's not your fault if it's wrong -- the only thing you're saying is that people have said it, but you won't say who, and you won't say where you heard it or if you believe it, and you won't say whether they're full of shit or not, but we're not allowed to question or criticize you because your statement that "people have said" may be literally true in some sense, and you're staying above it all by not talking sides, just reporting what people have said, so it's unfair to shoot you as the messenger if it turns out what "people have said" is wrong.
There is absolutely no value to any sentence beginning with "People have said ..." Trump's words that you're literally parroting are the weaseliest of weasel words, the exact same words he used to self aggrandize and deflect responsibility for lying about a grieving mother in his vicious personal attack on a gold star family.
"She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me. But plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet. And it looked like she had nothing to say. A lot of people have said that."
"A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber."
"People have said they’ve never seen this ever before in China."
"When you look at really what’s happened since Charlottesville, a lot of people are saying – and people have actually written – ‘Gee, Trump may have a point.'"
'A lot of people are saying...': How Trump spreads conspiracies and innuendoes
Following the country’s most deadly mass shooting, Donald Trump was asked to explain what he meant when he said President Obama either does not understand radicalized Muslim terrorists or “he gets it better than anybody understands.”
“Well,” Trump said on the “Today Show” Monday morning, “there are a lot of people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. A lot of people think maybe he doesn’t want to know about it. I happen to think that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing, but there are many people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. He doesn’t want to see what’s really happening. And that could be.”
In other words, Trump was not directly saying that he believes the president sympathizes with the terrorist who killed at least 49 people in an Orlando nightclub. He was implying that a lot of people are saying that.
At a rally in New Hampshire in September, a man in the audience loudly declared President Obama a Muslim and “not even an American,” then asked Trump to get rid of Muslim “training camps.”
“You know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there,” Trump responded. “We’re going to look at that and plenty of other things.”
“Some people say it’s worse than stupidity. There’s something going on that we don’t know about,” Trump said in Hilton Head. “And you almost think — I’m not saying that, and I’m not a conspiracy person. . . . Half th...
The fact that you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel of lying Trump sycophants as the source of your misinformation explains why you were so reluctant to say who those "people who have said" were. That totally undermines your argument and proves you're Putin's unwitting useful idiot.
So now we all know where you get the lies and weasel words and Russian propaganda that you parrot, and why the talking points you parrot are intellectually dishonest, worthless and not worth considering. Please go back to /r/TheDonald where you belong. This is not the place for parroting Sean Hannity or spreading Trump's birther conspiracy, pizzagate or crowd size bullshit.
It is embarrassingly similar. Pointing at foreigners as the bogeyman to blame for things is a very tried and true technique. Nobody in this discussion has pointed to any specific stories run by the RT that are problematic. They all just believe that they know the intent of all of RT's journalism simply because of the origin of RT the network.
There is also no corresponding scrutiny of American "news" outlets and the heavily biased stories that they run with impunity. We really don't have news anymore, it's just partisan entertainment. RT is at least as newsworthy as any of the major US news outlets, and I think quite appropriately focuses on issues of concern to the poorest and least politically empowered Americans.
And to be fair, I don't particularly like RT or Russian foreign policy or Putin but to blame those factors for losing the election is ridiculous.
We've seen similar levels of cognitive dissonance in the UK after Brexit. Russia, Low Information Voters, etc etc. It's all just excuses. Examine your policies and your candidates first.
But you just love to watch and parrot Sean Hannity, and use his own favorite weasel words "people have said" to obscure who you're getting your conspiracy theories and marching orders from. Go figure. Tell us more about how everyone is suffering from cognitive dissonance except for you?
Let me rewrite your post so it's more honest about where you got your misinformation from:
"Sean Hannity has said that the "Russia won the election" conspiracy theory is the Democrat's equivalent of "Obama was born in Kenya" birthers."
I'll leave it to you to explain why you didn't write that in the first place, and why anyone should ever take your seriously.
Mate, I'm not even American. I'd seen the quote before on Facebook and was at work so I didn't really have time to google for an attribution. However, please feel free to make that into a bigger deal than it really is.
> There's nothing stopping someone on US soil from exercising their first amendment rights in the same way to subvert an election.
Individuals exercising their first amendment rights do not have the same reach as a propaganda apparatus of a major nation state. It's ridiculous to say that one person has the same reach as a government propaganda machine.
The method in question is here RT using Twitter advertising to reach out to millions of Twitter users. RT itself is small but the reach comes from the cheap advertising. They spent ~ $250k in total which is pretty small compared to total ad budget of a number of PACs. There are many individuals who donate more than that amount and could easily spend it on Twitter ads.
They also spent a lot of man-hours spreading and sharing that content, making it look like it was supported by 'American citizen' sockpuppet accounts, and coordinating that effort across several platforms to actively drive a consistent and singular message.
Not the sort of thing that a grassroots could easily manage; buying a few hundred ads was just a small part of the wider propaganda and sabotage.
Twitter has just been complete shit at figuring out what happened on their platform, anyways; half of their 'identifications' come from, "Facebook told us this account was a sockpuppet on their platform..."
What content are you talking about? RT has published a lot of great stories that are are not flattering to the US (such as about the Flint Michigan water crisis) but are absolutely legitimate news stories that our corporate media doesn't care to report on.
Might RT simply have the goal of getting a foothold in American news reporting by serving an underserved market? If learning more about the drastic mishandling of the Flint Michigan water crisis stirs class conflict in America, are you telling me you think that is a bad thing? It's what is missing from our democracy!
What is the propaganda you are referring to? You seem to assume all of RT's content is propaganda but can't name or link to any stories that qualify. Lol.
Sure, and so was Al Jazeera, but you still have to recognize that they are literally mouthpieces for the nations of Russia and Qatar, respectively.
It's like Voice of America. They can break real stories of corruption and dysfunction, but I'd like to see them investigated and picked up by a more impartial source before I'm going to give them much headroom.
Which is another reason why local journalism is so important and criminalizing/demonizing it for being unflattering is so heinous.
> They spent ~ $250k in total which is pretty small compared to total ad budget of a number of PACs.
One could argue their reach is more efficient than pulling out a million dollar 30 second ad aired to less people. Also consider the millions in marketing materials that RT don't need.
I believe OP is suggesting that the next election will see domestic individuals or cohorts of them with the wherewithal and motivation to at least significantly replicate the reach of a government propaganda machine. Plus, digital advertising's reach has grown cheaper and broader over time, why wouldn't digital propaganda follow the same pattern?
I think there's room for debate on what draws the line between "propaganda subverting the election" and "leveraging our modern scary-effective digital marketing techniques to spread your electoral message." Does it only count as an attack on democracy if a foreign state or individual is doing it?
Both parties made use of shops like Correct the Record in the last election, what does it mean when in addition to the campaigns, wealthy and influential individuals can exert even more reach in the next election? Is it only propaganda if the message is factually false or misrepresented, or is it enough to have enough money to spend or leverage over the platform that you crowd out all alternate dialogue? Is there a definable ethical spectrum for subversive digital messaging? I think there's plenty of subversive messaging online already, that's advertising. Personally, I think creating fake Americans on twitter to influence the American election crossed whatever the line is. It fails the smell test, it stinks of deception.
it's not purely about reach. A foreign government acting to affect elections to destabilize and weaken a country is very different from greedy citizens attempting to enrich themselves with political subterfuge. At the very least, rich American corporatists want to ensure the continuity of American hegemony; it's the cornerstone of their empires. Russian government interference is about deteriorating American hegemony; a system from which Twitter is a beneficiary.
It wasn't my Russian friends tweeting and sharing propaganda, it was my American friends doing it. I'd like to see a study behind memes and those who knowingly trolled this election cycle, treating it more like a sporting event. I mean, you do literally have millions in gambling during the election (all people who have an investment in their choice, regardless of their policies). Would be funny to see that American citizens created and shared more propaganda than any Russian disinfo campaign.
That's true regardless of whether or not Twitter exists.
It's still a false equivalence inasmuch as a rich American is spending money in a way to maintain the status quo; rich Americans like the Koch Brothers benefit from American hegemony. They spend their money to enrich themselves, but they still want the US to remain in power.
A rival government, however, does not want the US to remain in power. As an American company, Twitter benefits from American hegemony, and will act to protect it.
So it's propaganda to talk about the Flint Michigan water crisis and the utter failure of US officials in dealing with it?
That's the kind of stuff RT publishes most of the time! Read through the historical headlines. This is a very embarrassing and inappropriate move by Twitter, likely intended only to curry favor with American elected officials.
>I feel like the fury over it is very reactionary.
I think the fact that the core of our democracy was attacked with a vast and sophisticated operation by a foreign government to potentially prop up a candidate both friendly to and quite possibly compromised by that foreign government should lead to MORE fury than is currently happening.
Democracy is the heart of the US, and an attack on it is an existential threat. If there's any evidence of this, it should be responded to with due measure.
This is nothing new though. For decades (perhaps longer), democracies have been subverted and are, unfortunately, a liability for many countries. Patriots see it as their duty to protect their countries by insulating themselves against this subversion and consolidating power. It's a dangerous trend.
No one is arguing if it's new. The point is it was massive, sophisticated, and targeted. It was an organized attack. We can debate the history of election subversion some other time, but there is a real threat happening right now. Let's focus on that, yes?
The only piece of solid evidence I personally have inventoried so far is about 100k$ ad spend on divisive issues, rather than supporting a particular candidate. That was not massive (compared to campaign billions). It was targeted at regions and individuals. As far as sophistication, some of the ads I have seen didn't have proper grammar and spelling - they didn't seem credible to my bologna detector. These ads were likely a foreign psychological operation, and have no place in our political discourse, but I guess I'd like to see more before we gut the Bill of Rights. If these ads were enough to subvert our democratic institutions, there's nothing but trouble ahead.
There hasn't been any evidence of anything other than minor mischief. This has become an issue in the US because loyalists of one party think that their candidate should have won and see the issue as some sort of vindication.
>There hasn't been any evidence of anything other than minor mischief.
The son of the candidate openly admitted to meeting with Russian foreign agents in order to secure a quid pro quo agreement (and that doesn't even touch on Flynn and Manafort). We have evidence of pen testing on voting infrastructure, we have copious amounts of evidence of psychological operations currently on-going from Russian services via social media.
This isn't about clinton, this is about defending the core of our democracy from foreign powers. It's obscene to try and shrug it off with such shallow cynicism.
> son of the candidate openly admitted to meeting with Russian foreign agents
Yet the "dossier" that was paid for via a quid pro quo arrangement is not of concern? IMHO both are very concerning.
> pen testing on voting infrastructure
Have you heard that an un-patched windows computer connected to an open internet connection will be pwned in minutes? This is only possible because of massive "pen testing" being done on all IP addresses.
So of course companies that manufacture voting equipment and have public IP addresses for web or email servers will be "pen tested".
Where will that traffic originate from? Probably in one of the many places where there is a lot of cyber fraud. Russia/Ukraine is one of those places. Without very hard, detailed evidence it is not reasonable to conclude that any such efforts were connected to the Russian government.
We have not been given any evidence, we've simply been told to believe this highly politicized narrative. I'm not ready to do that until there has been actual evidence.
> psychological operations currently on-going from Russian services via social media.
So you consider RT publishing stories about the Flint Water Crisis to be highly detrimental to the orderly nature of American society? News orgs are supposed to publish true stories that point out problems that need to be solved. It's sad and reminiscent of highly compliant citizens of a facist regime that anyone can take seriously the idea that stories in RT about Flint MI or about Laquan McDonald are endangering American stability.
>Yet the "dossier" that was paid for via a quid pro quo arrangement is not of concern? IMHO both are very concerning.
Paid to an american firm by both the GOP and Dem campaigns. That is not the same as a quid pro quo with the intelligence service of a foreign government that is actively trying to interfere in an election
>So you consider RT publishing stories about the Flint Water Crisis to be highly detrimental to the orderly nature of American society? ...
That came totally out of no where. I'll let you argue that with your self all you want.
You can't throw around concerns about divisiveness or "sowing destablization" without asserting your view on stories that are true and legitimately concerning.
I suppose you think those are harmful to keeping everyone happy with their lot in life too?
True, there's nothing stopping any random person from doing the same thing. However, no random person has the same incentives as a foreign government to pollute dialog on political matters. The personal gain or sense of satisfaction that an individual might get from launching a disinformation campaign pales in comparison to the economic and ideological pressure that motivates heads of state to do the same thing. So it seems far less likely that we're under threat from random individuals than from foreign governments.
Also, how are you going to "fix" people being dumb? We've been trying to figure that one out for a long time and it's going to take a while to make progress on that front.
Please explain where the "pollution" occurred. Over the past few years I have read RT from time to time and most of the stories were simply about negative aspects of American life that do not get much exposure/focus from American news organizations because they are not flattering. Things like the Flint Michigan water crisis, other areas of failed infrastructure, etc.
For many Americans, reading RT would be likely to create valuable awareness of important issues and make that person more likely to vote in his/her own best interest in the next election.
To say that RT has "polluted" the marketplace of ideas you really have to back that statement up with what you think "pure" ideas are that Americans should be exposed to before casting their vote.
I am reluctant to use a buzzword like "fake news" when I have been reading Chomsky's detailed critiques of American newspapers for a long time and have been (for a long time) well aware of the significant political and corporate motivations behind news organizations (print and television).
What are the "memes" (per Dawkins' definition) that RT intends to publicize? Which of those are false, which are true but misleading, and which are actually true?
Does publishing stories that might make some voters angry with the status quo constitute being "fake news"?
Is RT "fake news" simply because of its origin? Or because of its content? Or because of the timing of its content? Specific examples please.
Under whatever definition you would use to classify RT as fake news, are any American news orgs (NYT, WaPo, CNN, Fox News, WSJ, etc.) also fake news? How do you draw the line? Is it based on content that is false, true but misleading, or true?
Do you believe that certain ideas are dangerous for Americans to believe? Should reading the writings of some of history's dictators be banned? Should violent music lyrics be banned?
Why would you expect a state-funded news agency to dissent from the official positions of its government on key political matters.
I'm not looking to RT for useful coverage of issues in the Ukraine, but when it writes about the Flint Water crisis or police brutality, it might actually have a less biased view than the American press. I hope this isn't actually the case but I fear it may be.
Are you saying that RT has less biased and better coverage of the Flint water crisis than Rachel Maddow?
Specific examples, please: Exactly what have they gotten right that she got wrong? What have they covered that she missed? When have they brought attention to it when she ignored it? Who have they interviewed who she wouldn't invite to her show?
RT covers many other issues that, like the Flint water crisis are deeply embarrassing to the US but are actually legitimate concerning issues to the poorest and most disempowered Americans.
You didn't answer my question, and you failed to provide any specific examples.
You yourself just insisted on specific examples, so I would expect you to provide the same courtesy and evidence to back up your own claims that you demand of other people. Why didn't you?
If you don't have any evidence for your claim, just say so, and don't try to deflect instead. Better yet, don't make claims you're not willing to provide any evidence to support, in the same breath that you demand other people to provide specific examples!
I do not watch any cable news, so I can't comment on the quality of Rachel Maddow's coverage.
I used the example of the Flint Water crisis not to compare RT's coverage to the coverage offered by US media, but to use an example of a very embarrassing thing about the US that is the sort of thing that RT is inclined to publish.
Most people consider it quite reasonable that Maddow covered the Flint water crisis. But there are many other similar issues that do not get any press coverage by the US "news and entertainment" media.
One thing I will say about the US media's coverage of the Flint Water crisis is that a great effort was made to focus only on the problem in Flint, and a small number of officials who acted irresponsibly in the matter.
In reality, many elected officials make similar judgments all the time across all areas of government. It's just rare that we have something as reliable as a simple water pollution test to observe the harm that was caused.
So the real issue with the Flint water crisis is how did incentives come to exist that led Flint's infrastructure to fail so horribly? Where else in the US are similar incentives causing the decline of other important infrastructure? What can we as citizens do to help fix the incentives so that our leaders take it upon themselves to fight for proper upkeep of key infrastructure?
And, even more pragmatically, how many city water supplies are tainted by lead and other chemicals? Have all tests been administered and interpreted properly, etc. I recently learned (for example) that lead level testing in many cities has been highly inaccurate and has led to artificially low readings. This stuff has a tremendous public health impact.
It would be great to have a news organization (RT or other) whose goal it was to publish embarrassing things about the US, its failing infrastructure, and its corrupt politicians. For some reason we are told (by the charlatans) that in order to be patriotic we must defend those things against any foreign assault.
In reality, we in the US would benefit tremendously from increased scrutiny of our nation, its leaders, and its infrastructure. Why is Paul Ryan worth $8M after earning a paltry public servant's salary for his entire career? I'd like to know, and I think chances are if the truth were discovered he'd be run out of office with pitchforks.
If you don't know anything about cable news, then please don't make inaccurate blanket statements about things you don't know anything about. Especially when you're so reluctant to answer questions and provide evidence when asked, right after you yourself demanded the same level of evidence and specific examples.
Were you aware that Rachel Maddow got an Emmy for her coverage of the Flint water crisis? Or is that a big surprise to you?
Since you apparently were not aware of Rachel Maddow's coverage of the Flynt water crisis or the award she won for it, why don't you watch her Emmy-award-winning reporting for the answers to those questions you asked me to deflect from answering the questions I asked you first, to see if she's already answered some of your questions?
MSNBC’s complete coverage of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan – the health threat to residents, and the response from Governor Rick Snyder and others: http://www.msnbc.com/flint-michigan-water-crisis
"Maddow persistently reported on the city's lead-in-water crisis in December 2015, weeks before Gov. Rick Snyder declared Genesee County in a state of emergency."
"A month later, the cable news host visited Flint, holding a live town hall broadcast at the Brownell/Holmes STEM Academy on the city's north side to speak with residents, educators, researchers and politicians, including Mayor Karen Weaver, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha and Virginia Tech Professor Dr. Marc Edwards."
"Maddow also spent time speaking with Flint residents, including master plumber Harold Harrington and activist-turned-mayoral candidate Arthur Woodson."
Since you presume to know so much about RT's "less biased" coverage of the Flint water crisis, then please tell me exactly when RT started to cover the Flynt water crisis, how many minutes of coverage they gave it, and what awards they won for their coverage, if any.
How does their coverage compare to Rachel Maddow's, and how is it "less biased" as you claim without proof? Give me SPECIFIC examples of how they were better and less biased. Links to evidence please, not diversions.
To quote your own words: "you really have to back that statement up". I will. Won't you?
Some more specific examples and links to evidence for you:
This article shows when other media outlets like MSNBC started covering it, but it doesn't mention anything about RT. You seem to think you know what the facts are in regard to that, so will you please share them with us? Again: Post evidence for your claims, don't just make more claims without evidence again!
"Among national media figures, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow stood out for her extensive coverage in December 2015, when she devoted far more time to the situation in Flint than every other major television network combined."
"More Than 68 Minutes devoted to the crisis on MSNBC's primetime programming in December and the first four days of January -- all of which took place on Rachel Maddow's show. That was far more than all the other broadcast and cable networks' primetime coverage of Flint, combined."
I don't watch cable news because the few times I have watched it lately it has been of very poor quality. Notably, Rachel Maddow has been caught embellishing the Russia story to the point where I think it's clear she has a strongly partisan view of the issue which interferes with her ability to do unbiased reporting.
I think I had heard about Maddow's Emmy but forgotten about it. Please note that I did not claim that RT's coverage was superior to any other specific coverage, just that RT tends to cover many more of that kind of embarrassing, unflattering story that generally is not part of the major media/entertainment companies' coverage.
My point was not about the Flint crisis specifically, it was about the importance of those unflattering kinds of stories to the democratic process.
How many times do I have to ask you for evidence? You're the one who first demanded specific examples, then reneged multiple times when asked to provide the same thing yourself.
You want to have it both ways: in your mind, RT's extremely biased and politically motivated reporting of the Kremlin's official position on Ukraine doesn't disqualify their non-award-winning coverage of Flynt that you can't even produce examples of, but the bias you perceive when Rachel Maddow dares to criticize Trump by reporting his own words and deeds in her coverage of the Russian scandal totally disqualifies all of her award-winning reporting on the Flynt water crisis. Bullshit, comrade.
That's totally dishonest and hypocritical of you. You asked for specific examples, and now that I gave you some you don't want to discuss them, and still refuse to prove any specific examples of your own. I gave you those specific examples that you asked for. So I wish you would provide the same when asked again and again. I'll give you another try, now.
Please give me links to those RT articles about the Flynt water crisis that you claim are unbiased and better than Rachel Maddow's coverage, and give me links to Rachel Maddow's reporting on the Flynt water crisis that show she's biased.
Otherwise admit you don't have any evidence, even though you demand it from other people. Your stonewalling and deflecting and false equivalencies means it's true you have no evidence, and you're ignoring the evidence I gave you, but you don't have the intellectual honesty to admit it.
At least you've admitted that you're guilty of whataboutism, even though you don't understand what the term actually means.
It's not only Americans. In my history classes in an Argentine high school my professor was a serious conspiracy theories who taught how, among other things, the 9/11 attacks were engineered by the US government for world domination, George Bush wanted to buy southern Argentina to steal our freshwater reserves, and Cuba found the "natural" cure for cancer (but of course the US government doesn't allow it to be exported). I heard these conspiracies coming from otherwise smart people all the time.
The issue here is that we have an entire generation that was raised in an environment where having stupid beliefs didn't matter, since news came from mostly "expert" sources, which is now living in a world where a big part of the information you give and receive comes from sites like Facebook or Twitter. If it's an education problem, it's unsolvable: you can't easily teach 50 year old the way they thought about media their entire life was wrong.
What about when U.S. media outlets do the same in other countries? Like all the time. I'm not saying RT is not Russian propaganda but come on, next time CNN publishes a headline like "Inside Hussein's WMD facilities " I hope @jack will ban them as well.
Seriously, this is where Twitter's hypocrisy reaches its pinnacle. The US "news" media is a combination of war propaganda and "living in countries other than the US sucks" propaganda.
I'm not sure how it's hypocritical per se, when looked at from the angle that Twitter is headquartered in the United States.
It seems like a fair portion of the US government now strongly believes that Russian social media propaganda is attempting to destabilize the United States government, with Twitter being a dominant platform for spreading the disinformation. So I'm sure there was quite an incentive to block some of this in some form.
So you expect companies to have jingoistic political allegiance to the jurisdiction that they happen to have been founded in? That is actually quite scary.
> strongly believes that Russian social media propaganda is attempting to destabilize the United States government
The key word here is "destabilize". If the NYT were to write a story about the water pollution in Flint Michigan and also break a story that officials covered up polluted water in 20 other major US cities, would that cause "destabilization"? I certainly hope it would! More than a few people should not win office again after such a fiasco.
The purpose of journalism is to be adversarial to powerful interests, and to share the truth (even if it's unflattering) with the public, so that corrective actions can be taken... corrective actions may involve changing the status quo.
As for "disinformation", nobody has pointed out what stories should be considered disinformation, and whether they were completely false, or if they were true but misleading.
Russia shutting down VOA is not terribly relevant here. The VOA is obviously propaganda if you listen for 10-15 minutes, while RT has focused on some important issues for the poorest Americans that do not get reliable coverage from other big media outlets.
I don't see many businesses having huge instinctive "jingoistic political allegiances", frankly, unless perhaps if it's a SOA or military driven or the like. However, most businesses in any nation tend to work with and cooperate with national governments on various probes, particularly where they are headquartered, unless there is a huge reason not to. Congress is heavily scrutinizing Facebook and Twitter over Russian influence at the moment; reports like this (https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf) heavily critical of RT and Sputnik's role in this election are being produced by our intelligence agencies. So in this regard, Twitter's reaction is not surprising.
We'll never know is how much Twitter management agreed to drop RT/Sputnik advertising based on what they felt was right (due to whatever reason), what was right or good for the business, or whether they did this largely due to pressure from the government. The main thing we know is that Twitter's corporate reaction here is obviously different than, say, Twitter's corporate reaction to their role in the Arab Spring.
Most of the time, in general, I think RT / Sputnik do report actual events, but with a very heavy pro-Kremlin slant (so not unlike VOA in this regard). However, they dip enough of their toes into the Infowars style conspiracy theory stuff (in part because relying on native disaffected groups is part of their strategy -- http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2015/57133... ) that I wouldn't trust an article only sourced there at all. If RT "broke" that officials covered up polluted water in 20 other major US cities, for instance, I'd look elsewhere to confirm that story.
> If RT "broke" that officials covered up polluted water in 20 other major US cities, for instance, I'd look elsewhere to confirm that story.
Of course, as would I. It is not my understanding that the allegations of disinformation have to do with fake stories RT has allegedly broken. If so the number of stories to read to gauge the accuracy of the claims would be much smaller :)
"I feel like the fury over it is very reactionary."
I think this is the current boogey-man to go after. I think it's a useful tool for politicians (DNC, Hillary Clinton, Democrats and Republicans - none of them wanted Trump where he is today) to bury their heads in the sand and say that it wasn't their fault that they got the election so wrong. They can point to Russia and ignore their own shortcomings that in my opinion put people off of voting for what they "should" have voted for. Given the choice of a deeper soul-searching or blaming someone else, humans usually choose to point the finger at someone else.
Did Russia/Russians attempt to influence the election? Absolutely. I'm sure most major powers in the world did, in one way or another. They'd be silly not to at least consider it, in the same way that I'm sure the United States attempts to serve its own interests via other countries' elections. But I don't think it's anywhere near as effective as politicians seem to want to make it appear.
It doesn't matter, twitter. Delete the bots, ban the people making them, use ML to find out how they make so many and look so convincing to Americans, be transparent about how many people vs. bots you have. Or go home.
Right, you can't do any of that because then your shareholders would know about your hugely inflated growth numbers and your stock would collapse. I wonder, Twitter is so much worse for society than anyone ever knew, and they have been so quiet and complacent in the Russian takeover of the USA, that maybe they have acted illegally? Is it possible Twitter has been lying about bot account numbers and inflating their userbase counts to increase share value?
Okay, kick off the ads made by Russian enemies of the USA, that's a good move. But why did you allow it in the first place? Because of the money, and because nobody thought at Twitter than Russians buying political ads is a bad idea? The purchased ads weren't even the main issue - it's the millions and millions of bots echoing racist and hateful things to divide and wreck the US.
Fuck twitter.
This isn't enough. Apologize for the Russian takeover that you let happen. Don't donate that money to some cause about civic debates in the future. America is under attack right now. Give that money to someone who can stop the Russians because it's not you or your civic debates.
> Google apologizing that you can find misinformation on the web?
Did Google run political ads that were purchased by other countries and intended to deceive the US electorate? If so then YES + a lot more than apologize.
> Paper apologizing for people writing on it?
There's no need for this. This is a major issue and I'm taking it very seriously. The "it's a joke bro" attitude here on HN, in your comment, all over reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc., is sickening. It plays right into the Russian books - make the Americans argue about it and make jokes and make fun of the people who care!
> Did Google run political ads that were purchased by other countries and intended to deceive the US electorate?
Just from a quick search [1], yes. I don't think megous's comment has a "it's a joke bro" attitude. You're criticizing a company that provides a free service for taking the due diligence to prune its paying clients of anyone that they don't think should be a paying client. This has nothing to do with inflated growth numbers, it's about Twitter making the decision that they do not want state-funded Russian companies advertising on their platform. The bots issue is a completely different thing that I'm sure Twitter has an entire team of devs devoted to. It's not as easy as flipping a switch. They need to make sure they aren't banning real users of their service just because language and posting patterns used by those bots are based on those of real users.
There is a massive difference between stumbling onto fake news from a Google search and having it repeatedly presented to you without any action taken on your part.
Have you ever considered that those so-convincing bots aren't actually bots at all and might be so convincing because they're actual people? Always makes me chuckle how quick people are to call others machines or paid-actors because an unsavoury opinion is held.
No, I haven't, because there are teams, scientists, researchers, etc, that are slowly finding, identifying and proving botnets of accounts on Twitter.
I also use the term bot lightly, to include 'human being following orders' from a government or other organization.
> Always makes me chuckle how quick people are to call others machines or paid-actors because an unsavoury opinion is held.
WHAT? How dare you accuse me of this? "because an unsavoury opinion" what is this? That has nothing to do with this. I am accusing accounts of being bots because they are created automatically, they don't tweet normally like humans do, they follow clearly discernible patterns, etc. These bots are focused on sewing hatred and racism in the US.
I would never do what you are insinuating and it's insane that you think I would. Russians are using technology and paid actors to influence public opinion in the US. This is not based on some "unsavoury opinion" I didn't like in a tweet. This is the reality.
> Apologize for the Russian takeover that you let happen
if you compare the amount of money allegedly spent by "the russians" VS the amount of money spent by "the americans" themselves, talking about "the russian takeover" of Twitter or Facebook is pure hysteria.
Americans need to stop blaming the Russians for all their problems. Most Russians could not give a damn about US, most are way too busy making hands-meet right now.
The Russians didn't create or foster a divisive environment where everything is about insignificant petty differences. The Russians do not own CNN, ABC, MSNBC or Fox news who are making billions out of exploiting american divisions on every matter possible. The Russians didn't create that society of outrage and entertainment, the Russians didn't shape american society.
> if you compare the amount of money allegedly spent by "the russians" VS the amount of money spent by "the americans" themselves, talking about "the russian takeover" of Twitter or Facebook is pure hysteria.
The amount of money is a single metric and not what we should use to base every decision on or understand an entire complex issue from a single source (money). The Russian ads were very well crafted to be easily sharable and to be viral. The amount of money they spent has little to do with how much influence they have.
Your entire post is "whataboutism". What about the Americans being bad? What about CNN being bad? What about ABC being bad? What about most Russians just trying to make ends meet? What about MSNBC? What about Fox news?
I don't care.
The Russians are actively doing this on Twitter, right now. The others are bad too. That doesn't mean anything at all about this.
I also wonder what about lobbyism in general. Why is this allowed and the other not. Because it’s good for economy? What if it’s still bad for society?
Lobbyism is just 'someone making a case'. It's not unreasonable for individuals or groups to 'lobby their cause' to politicians. It just has a bad name because it can be abused.
And yes, it's not unreasonable for nation-state actors to take steps to thwart American intervention in whatever.
Though often, the state in question is not elected, which begs a serious question of legitimacy -> if you're going to make a 'moral equivalence' argument of tit-for-tat interference ... it's hard to do if one side is a dictatorship. :)
Political opposition figures, business figures and members of the press are murdered or imprisoned arbitrarily.
Media networks and large businesses are arbitrarily confiscated.
Primary media channels are direct forms of state propaganda.
State agencies are deeply systematically corrupt - always in the control of the friends of Putin, taking massive kickbacks, using state power to force deals. Sochi is a good example of how these shennanigans work. See the CBC expose on Sochi construction - kickbacks were up to 85% on construction (i.e. state pays $500M for a building, most of it goes back to the buyer, a 'friend of Putin'), and 15% goes into actual construction.
So it's not 'North Korea' but it's not a normal democracy, not by a stretch.
Agreed that lobbyism itself is just “asking politicians to consider your wishes” by any group of interest.
I mean industry lobbyism by mega-corporations with the single goal of growth and financial gain without respecting the effects on society and nature (which in turn has an impact on society in terms of health and wellbeing)...
Also revealed today was slides from pitch desk Twitter provided RT, proposing RT spend a large amount of money advertising during and about the US election.
Afaik - most international US media interferes in many elections, anywhere in the world with strong opinions. Why is it wrong with the reverse? Germany's Spiegel, or UK's Guardian can also have opinions about US elections and what's wrong in it?
Would you please not create bulk accounts to post with here? Throwaways are fine if there's some specific purpose, e.g. something personally sensitive, but we ban users who do it routinely. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Hacker News is a community. You don't have to use your real name, of course, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.
The Guardian or Spiegel don't pay for ads saying a candidate is planning to use FEMA to invade Texas and force all white people with guns to have abortions.
Forgive my ignorance - I never read them b/c I'm not interested in main news but Could you point me where RT/Sputnik said "a candidate is planning to use FEMA to invade Texas" and "force all white people with guns to have abortions."
It does seem like there are a fair bit of analysts in United States intelligence (Clint Watts being on that side of the fence, essentially) who strongly believe that RT or Sputnik are less media sources, and are instead funnels of disinformation propaganda designed to destabilize the United States government. Whatever your personal opinion of these media sources are, in this light, Twitter's action here is hardly surprising.
That message was lead by the Bush-Cheny administration. Multiple press orgaisations repeated that message, it's true, and practices could have been better. But it can be very difficult to arrive at the truth when you are being very deliberately and relentlessly lied to.
Which gets us back to the issue of Russian propaganda through social networks.
So the US administration said a lie which was convenient for them, and the media repeated it. The Russian administration said a lie which was convenient for them, and the media repeated it. What's the difference exactly? Is the difference that the Russian gov has more influence in Russian media than the US gov has in US media?
Why is it that you treat one case as "look at their evil propaganda" and the other as "oh gee practices could be better"?
Let me be honest with you. I'm European so I shouldn't really have a stake here. But I look at the world and what I see is that US media is infinitely more influential in Europe than Russian media. Infinitely more influential in Europe than even European media, and that concerns me. So your "oh gee practices could be better but we're the good guys trust me" doesn't fly with me.
One specific outlet made a correction about one specific story.
What do you mean?
Both the NYTimes and the Washington Post published major editorials saying how they got it wrong. I'm sure other papers followed as well, but they were some of the more notable.
And it was hardly one story - it was a whole narrative about how they trusted that the White House was giving them information in good faith, and how they should have paid more attention to signs that faith was misplaced.
And yes - that faith was misplaced, and yes they should have paid more attention.
It is my opinion that absolutely nothing changed
Well, both papers became much more doubtful about any claims from the Bush administration after that.
And you may have noticed they were pretty harsh on Obama's claims of how easy health care would be. They also seem to be asking questions about some of the Trump administrations claims - or at least he seems to think they are being very unfair to him.
Multiple outlets. WashPo and NYTimes are the major national papers. PBS News Hour has multiple investigations of coverage. As do policy, media, and general-press magazines.
Your representations (in this thread and elsewhere) simply fail to accurately reflect the facts.
I think the WP's analysis of that was pretty good:
"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"
In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."
There's a difference between having strong opinions, and actually conspiring to have somebody elected. One is posting news, the other is creating news (see entire Facebook groups from Russia posting fake news).
There is still the question though: have other nations participated in this creation of news? Probably so, so perhaps the spot light shouldn't be on Russia only, but more generalized into this problem. But, the problem exists nonetheless and taking action is reasonable.
Has a conspiracy to have someone elected been confirmed? IFAIK, Russian ops was to sow distrust in the electorate not so much to favor one candidate over the other.
The ultimate goal would be to have the elections questioned by the losers (whoever the winner was) in order to diminish US influence abroad as the winner would be busy with internal affairs. It was probably a bet against Hillary winning since she had a more hawkish international vision.
Clinton's involvement with the Magnitsky Act gave Putin a lot to be specifically angry about, versus Trump who has a lot of existing ties to Russia (not to mention the campaign being filled with people who also had their own positive ties to Russia). It's possible that they did not have the specific goal of influencing for one candidate, but they had a ton more to gain from one specific candidate winning over the other. I think it takes some naiveté to assume they didn't have a focused effort on behalf of one candidate over the other.
That would make sense if the odds had been plus or minus 5 pts but by all accounts the odds were something like 93:7 in Hillary's favor. I don't think Russian intelligence had better understanding of our electorate than the DNC itself --they can't have been that out of touch with the people they were looking to represent.
Don't make the same mistake that Clinton did in buying into the media narrative of a landslide. Their stats were bad, hands down. 538 had the odds much closer.
People still actually trust wikileaks? Assange just admitted that the Trump campaign approached him for the Hillary emails, yet that wasn't reported. Their unbiased release all of the information narrative fell over years ago. Now they're more or less tools used by Russia to sow dissent amongst the US and western / NATO nations.
Not just that, but they timed releases to benefit one side. The Podesta emails dropped an hour after the Access Hollywood video. That's not a coincidence.
Not sure why this matters. Due to both publications I decided not to vote for either of the two candidates. It would not have mattered when either piece of information was released, both were enough to convince me that the third party candidates needed more love.
What is your logic for thinking this is even possibly the case?
Consider something. Let's use Trump as an example, since the discussion of 'why aren't they releasing stuff on [the other side]' is generally connected to him. Imagine somebody had a treasure trove of leaked and compromising information on Trump. And they then submitted this information to Wikileaks. As the weeks and months passed by, it became clear to them that Wikileaks was not going to publish this information. Do you think they would not submit this to other media outlets? US media outlets would do absolutely anything for this sort of information.
I'm curious to see where my logic may be failing me.
> Do you think they would not submit this to other media outlets?
Other outlets are accepted [by general public] to have already been compromised wrt bias.
Up until the Trump campaign - Wikileaks was considered to be an unbiased leak of private and/or confidential information.
The name "Wiki" even intentionally evokes the name Wikipedia, the (slightly biased) generalist source of information that appears at the top of many of our search results.
In many cases, Wikileaks is actually worse. Seeing MSNBC or Fox News flash on the screen, we know the bias put forth by the company. We don't know Assange's bias. Correction, we do now.
To be honest, I'm curious to see how your logic even equated Wikileaks to other media outlets in the first place.
I don't feel you're answering the question. I asked exactly why you felt there was good reason to consider, let alone assume, that Wikileaks is choosing to withhold meaningful and impactful information on Trump.
If I take your response as the answer then it would imply you believe that somebody would choose to simply not publish substantive leaks if they couldn't get them published by wikileaks. However, I'm sure you don't believe that, so that must be a straw man - leading me to believe that you probably are simply choosing to not answer the question.
There are far too many assumptions in this comment, particularly in the second paragraph, to even begin to unpack.
Your entire Parent post is centered around a false equivalency between MSM outlets and Wikileaks.
Here's a similar assumption I'll throw your way: Parent personally slighted you and/or your belief system, and caused you to react this aggressively to my comment.
If I were to employ the same non-sequitur logic
you used about myself further, I would reckon you are a shill.
Again, I feel I am asking a very simple and reasonable question. You suggested that Wikileaks 'might' (and your phrasing is more akin to are) be witholding valuable and condemning information on Trump.
I'm just asking why you think this and in particular why our hypothetical leaker would not simply contact another organization for publication if Wikileaks failed to do so? Many of the biggest leaks in recent times have not come from Wikileaks. The Panama Papers were published by Süddeutsche Zeitung. Snowden's NSA and global surveillance leaks were brought to the public attention through contact with Glenn Greenwald.
I'd actually even take this a step further. Wikileaks is under an implicit, but mandatory, obligation to publish such materials if they were given them. Imagine our leaker did simply take the materials to e.g. Glenn Greenwald and published our hypothetical groundbreaking leaks. A condition of said leaks could also be publication of the fact that they were provided to Wikileaks who chose to not publish them. That would, overnight, destroy Wikileaks as an organization.
Exactly. You are thinking of this logically while most of the people accusing Wikileaks of acting deliberately on Trump's behalf do not pay close attention to Wikileaks or understand its obvious journalistic motivations.
The minute anyone can prove that WL withheld anything newsworthy to suit its own political goals, WL is done. This has not happened. Further, anyone who leaked something big about Trump to WL (such as his taxes) would clearly want to see them exposed, and would not sit by and wait for Trump to win while the damning materials went unpublished.
As a voter, if someone hired by a potential political nominee asked Wikileaks for illegally acquired information, I'd like to know. In a hypothetical world where Wikileaks gave them that information, it would in fact be criminal.
Assange stated that the data was requested by Cambridge Analytica knowing they were hired by the Trump campaign for normal opposition research. I consider withholding that information alone (the fact that the guys Trump's campaign hired attempted to break the law and were rebuffed) as quite impactful. Trump is quite tight with Brad Parscale, as he was the "Campaign Digital Director" in charge of these things.
Yes. Their entire Erdogan files release was a tragedy from start to finish
They released a bunch of info claimed to be mails from the inner echelons of the AKP (ruling Islamist party) that turned out to be an archive of a public Yahoo group used by random Turks to bitch about things including politics.
If they'd have hired a basic Turkish speaker to look at the leak, they'd have avoided being burned. Instead, they decided to get into a spat with an actual journalist and researcher who's been working against Erdogan for years and tried to paint them as Erdogan shills.
Hasn't Assange said that the campaign reached out to them? Opposition research is not extraordinary. Wasn't it revealed the Trump Dossier was paid ofr by Podesta/DNC?
They all do the same stuff.
That said, what has WikiLeaks published that has turned out untrue?
Allegedly also partially "funded by an unknown Republican during the GOP primary."
> That said, what has WikiLeaks published that has turned out untrue?
I don't think anybody is arguing that WikiLeaks is posting fake news or untrue information - the argument is that WikiLeaks is curating the information it releases in order to send a specific message.
Like when the CIA infiltrated the 2012 French election?
No, not like that at all.
The claim there is: All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA's human ("HUMINT") and electronic ("SIGINT") spies in the seven months leading up to France's 2012 presidential election.
That's dramatically different to actively trying to (a) make US citizens lose faith in the US election system and, (b) influence the election outcome.
Reading the CIA leak, it seems like pretty sensible questions. The ethics of spying during an election could be argued, but I think it is entirely reasonable for every country to be trying to understand similar things listed in that document ("What policies do they promote to help boost France's economic growth prospects?", "What are their opinions on the German model of export-led growth?" etc).
I'd like to see some evidence as well. An adversarial media is a sign of a healthy democracy, and RT definitely filled that role with zeal. Their correspondents were often the only ones asking the "tough" questions at press briefings.
Neither of those was acting as though they weren't pushing foreign influence directly in the united states. If they were, the DOJ would likely also ask them to fill out FARA[1] paperwork, just as they've asked RT[2] and Sputnik. Your comparison doesn't quite work apples to apples in any regard.
RT - just makes up things out of thin air with no root in reality.
Spiegel, LeMonde, Guardian, NYT dont do that. Usually there is some fire before the smoke
Spiegel and Guardian aren't part of a state-sponsored program with an explicit goal of destabilization. It's not difficult to understand & imagine what the difference is between both creating story lines & hyping / targeting those stories for maximum damage versus straight journalism.
The US interferes with elections and those states combat those attempts. Other states interfere with US elections, and we must combat those attempts as well. Welcome to the game, not playing is not an option.
The problem in the case of the Twitter announcement is that it appears dishonest. RT/Sputnik were not the source of the fake news stories that marred the US election, and yet are taking the blame for it. While the real producers of fake news aren't mentioned and get a free pass:
Yet somehow this "integrated state propaganda machine" manages to write better journalism about many issues of concern to the least powerful Americans than the American press.
I don't disagree with your characterization, but I'd also characterize cable news, the NYT, WaPo, etc. that way. These big "news and entertainment" companies do not offer any meaningful political dissent whatsoever.
And yet they don’t have journalists resigning and calling them propaganda, or resigning because they were assigned to leave the US and work in Crimea. There’s a clear difference when the journalists themselves can’t stomach what they are doing.
Are you going to provide those specific examples of Rachel Maddow's Emmy-award-winning reporting on the Flynt water crisis being biased and inaccurate, and those specific examples of RT's coverage of the Flynt water crisis being unbiased and accurate?
You're the one who demanded specific examples, but then failed to provide any yourself, after being asked repeatedly.
What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow is an actress and not a journalist? What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow has zero journalistic acumen?
Specific examples!
By the way, have you looked up the definition of whataboutism yet, to which you have openly confessed of being guilty? It's not a "buzzword". It's not "juvenile". And it definitely doesn't mean "Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason" as you falsely claim. It's a logical fallacy particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda, comrade.
I'm not sure if you are serious or if you are trolling. It is you who are making the claim that needs to be supported by evidence. Namely, this is the claim that RT's journalism is obviously sub-standard compared to US media/entertainment journalism.
You also seem to be willfully misunderstanding why I brought up the Flint Water Crisis, which was simply to point out an example of the kind of embarrassing story that RT seems to focus on when reporting on US domestic issues. I brought up the Flint Water Crisis simply because it's one that most people are familiar with and the importance of journalistic coverage of the situation is obviously important to the democratic process.
I don't think Rachel Maddow is relevant at all to this discussion. If her coverage of the Flint issue was exemplary, that's great. It is not germane to my use of the Flint example at all. The fact that you and most people are aware of the Flint Water Crisis is because it happens to be one of the rare stories like this that did get significant big media coverage. Thankfully, Maddow determined that covering the story would not alienate her advertisers!
As for your dogged effort to keep this discussion about whataboutism and the minutia surrounding its definition, I have reviewed the definition and it seems to be relevant only to debates where there are two sides and one side uses the technique as a logical fallacy in an attempt to persuade or in order to distract from the truth of his opponent's argument.
The remarks I made that led to my being accused of whataboutism were some questions I asked about scenarios that seem to me to warrant a similar approach to determining the harms/benefits of journalism. Please re-read that last sentence again several times as it is critically important to my point.
I am not asking those parallel questions to distract attention from the claim you make that RT's reporting has caused destabilization, simply asking you to clarify (by applying your analytical approach to some similar scenarios) a more general rule for categorizing journalism as being harmful or helpful through the lens of political "stability" (a term which is highly loaded and rarely used without significant bias).
I understand how the technique you describe as whataboutism is sometimes used in a persuasive argumentation scenario argued by two partisans. But in this case you are the only partisan. I consider the Russian government and the US government fairly morally similar, and I'm not interested in arguing the minutia of how the US is slightly better, because I don't disagree. My concern is whether RT helps or hurts the marketplace of ideas and the search for truth in the American political discourse, and my argument is that it helps in many obvious ways, while the specific harms that you and others claim exist cannot be supported by links to specific articles, etc. The many articles about embarrassing aspects of the US are very easy to find on RT, and I view those as helpful to American democracy rather than "destabilizing".
Since you seem to be one who views "stability" as a good thing no matter what, I was hoping that you would clarify when journalism that can be perceive to create destabilization is good vs when it is bad. Your simplistic view seems to be that regardless of all other factors, if the journalism was done by a journalist whose salary is paid by a foreign government, the journalism is bad and unhelpful, no matter any other factors. But by this definition the VOA is also all bad and unhelpful, so I think it's a pretty useless definition.
Again, since I think you might be trolling, I don't want to spend too much time trying to be thoughtful in my reply. In my view, propaganda is everywhere, and the reader must understand how to filter it from the truth. That is a core responsibility of citizenship. I'll often cross-reference NYT stories with a similar story in the Globe and Mail, since om...
I think you're half right. I think it's less meaningful than it should be but still better than the alternative. Remeber, this "better journalism" of a state propaganda machine is part of a continuous front to sow discord in the target nation. It leverages weakness that you rightly point out to do this.
Isn't it enough that the weaknesses of our own media needs work that we don't help to undermine with those who actively chip away at the basic tenets of an open society?
Agreed, but I think what you call straight journalism has largely turned into creating & hyping story lines, especially outlets like the Guardian and equivalent sources on the right. It's not as egregious and they're motivated by money/views/prestige instead of destabilization to fulfill geopolitical goals. But the media (especially the infotainment outlets) can be fairly destabilizing and unhealthy in their own right. Russia was exploiting an environment that our media had already established and prepped for them.
and they're motivated by money/views/prestige instead of destabilization to fulfill geopolitical goals.
Exactly the point.
Look, there's this thing in western jurisprudence called "mens rea". It's what differentiates, say, first degree murder from manslaughter.
In this case, RT and Sputnik are clearly motivated by the desire to manipulate the US election. As you've already conceded, those other outlets are not. As a result, these represent different acts, and therefore it is not unreasonable for them to warrant different responses.
Please define the word destabilization. Does that mean changing the status quo? Would the NYT be guilty of destabilization if it published an expose revealing that officials in 20 US cities hid significant drinking water pollution from their citizens for years? Surely once published the article would destabilize politics in those cities significantly.
Similarly, suppose the NYT published Donald Trump's taxes, revealing information that was likely to create a multi-year impeachment effort. Would that destabilize the US? It's hard to argue it would make things more stable.
Did the NYT's publication of Judith Miller's reporting on Saddam's WMD that helped sell a war effort that killed and displaced millions of people and cost trillions of dollars cause "destabilization"?
Newspapers are supposed to publish information that leads to political change. That is the point of having a free press, so that ideas can be shared that can be vetted by the public and acted upon to make society better.
I'm asking you to clarify your view by presenting some scenarios that I consider relevant to the analysis of the main issue we are discussing.
Your point would be a lot stronger if you are able to convey a consistent world view for analyzing those scenarios, or by explaining how the scenarios are different. I mention them because I think they are similar and ought to be analyzed similarly, but I'm open to persuasion.
No, you are not. First, there is an accepted meaning for destabilization. Wikipedia has a pretty good definition and it certainly doesn't match your changing the status quo.
Secondly, your whataboutism is an effort to change the subject away from the topic, a private company concluding that it didn't want RT+Sputnik's advertising money. It then ventures into not very good equivocation (Judith Miller was not the Times; indeed, she was forced to resign by the Times).
If you read the Wikipedia definition you posted, the first definition is to undermine political power. That means the same thing as changing the status quo. Powerful interests by definition want the status quo to continue because it's what makes them powerful. When powerful interests talk of "change" it's not change that would endanger their power, hence it would not change the status quo in any significant way.
Of course Judith was forced to resign once the sloppy reporting was fact checked by people who did not work at the NYT. The NYT had to let Judith go to save face after it helped defeat the anti-war activists and other people who were cautious to believe George W. Bush's claims about Saddam.
Keep in mind that for a major company like the NYT firing one reporter is not a big deal at all. It should be shocking that simply firing one person is enough to make the journalistic scandal of the millennium go away.
It's actually not a misdirection, it's the main point. The crux of the issue is whether you define certain journalistic behaviors as being bad/wrong just because they threaten the status quo power structure of the US.
If you think about it, your assertion that the alleged political motives of RT are inappropriate hinges upon your judgment that it is in Russia's national interest to undermine the legitimacy of powerful interests in the US, and (apparently) thus to weaken the US or put it at some sort of disadvantage.
I realize you are convinced that my views and comments fit some schema you feel duty-bound to try to refute, but I think that if you examine your belief system on the matter you will find that you simply feel loyalty to the status quo power structure in the US, which is closely aligned with its government. Thus you oppose any sort of disruptive or revolutionary behavior or ideas that might threaten this status quo that you are fond of.
Note that the status quo in the US is corporatism and militarism, and that there is really not a leftist movement of any stature in the US. HRC and Trump are both slight permutations of a more authoritarian version of Bush or Obama, since the nation has turned more toward authoritarianism as time has gone on.
Only if you view this authoritarian, militaristic course of action as being strongly in the US national interest is it possible to believe with full certainty that RT publishing stories that might appeal to the American far left or the most disempowered Americans is a bad thing. For only then does the amplification of those ideas/movements, etc., threaten anything that is a force of good.
In my view, the biggest weakness in the US is that there is very little dissent and we put far too much trust in our leaders, and apply far too little scrutiny to our institutions (public and private), allowing significant diversion of resources to various groups who benefit from the status quo.
Politicians should fear journalists and should fear the public finding out about their excesses, their side deals, and the true stories of how they became millionaires on $150K public servant salaries. If RT helps expose these fraudulent people for what they are, the US will be far better off for it. And yes, a consequence of some toppling of the existing power structures would probably be less global militarism, but I think it's hard to argue that our laying waste to so many countries abroad is remotely in the US national interest, but no disrespect intended if you do feel strongly that Trump's action in Yemen, etc., is bold and necessary to the world order.
Your entire main point has been to intentionally misdirect from the topic.
Go learn the real definitions of the terms you're tossing around, instead of making up your own.
You're the one who actually claims to be guilty of whataboutism: "OK I'm guilty."
Are you proud of that? Do you wear it as a badge of honor? Those were your own words. Don't contradict yourself now by denying that you're not trying to misdirect.
I don't think that considering analogous or similar scenarios when trying to understand an issue is a bad thing, no matter what juvenile label you put on it.
You still don't understand what the term "whataboutism" means. And now you've descended to calling a word names like "buzzword" and "juvenile". You can't hurt a word's feelings by calling it names, but you can learn what it means. So why don't you look up what the word means before confessing it applies to you, then calling it names?
I have responded in detail to the accusation you made of whataboutism in one of my other replies. It only applies when someone is a partisan trying to distract or persuade in an argument against another partisan.
As I pointed out in that more detailed comment, I was asking some questions about similar scenarios to try to understand the analytical approach that you are applying that lets you confidently judge certain journalism as harmful.
I think you missed the joke: a Jeopardy reference, where you, Alex Trebek, just presented a textbook example of whataboutism, and CalChris was playing the role of the contestant by identifying what you just did in the form of a question.
To further ruin the joke by over-explaining it, he wasn't literally asking you to define whataboutism, because you'd just given an excellent example of it, so his question was rhetorical, and your answer was not only redundant but also incorrect.
Well, labeling someone’s comment with a buzzword is not really a counter-argument.
Your and his arguments could be labeled as “Tory” but it would be useless for me to point that out; id rather attempt to reach common ground or understanding.
You seem to have again missed the point that whataboutism isn't a valid counter argument.
You've also proven you don't know what the definition of whataboutism is. The fact that you don't happen to know the definition doesn't mean it's a "buzzword".
It's a logical fallacy particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda (which is the main point of this discussion).
Please look up the real definition before trying to incorrectly define it and confess to being guilty of it, because you don't even understand what you're confessing to.
The definition you gave was wrong, even though you are guilty of doing it yourself, and what you're doing is logically fallacious and intellectually dishonest.
I think rather than using a silly made-up word like whataboutism you should simply call out someone's views or comment specifically for whatever logical error you think it contains.
I looked at the definition of whataboutism on Wikipedia, and now I think I understand what you are attempting to argue.
If person A says "Russia treats political enemies badly" and then person B replies "Well, the US puts its political enemies in Gitmo", you would call that a scenario where person B should have said something specifically to refute person A's statement, but instead made a parallel assertion that does not have any direct relation to the statement made by person A.
In your view, in order to refute the claim made by person A, someone would have to provide evidence that in fact Russia does not treat political enemies badly.
When someone is heavily partisan and makes the comment of person B above, the intent might be to deflect attention from person A's point. If you view person A and B as adversaries each trying to be objectively right in some highly logical world, then only a strict logical refutation of person A's point would suffice. The definition of whataboutism descries it as a logical fallacy, which is quite telling.
The truth is, both claims may be true. Person B's statement does not refute person A's statement, but it is not meant to. In reading through the comments that you and the other person claimed were whataboutism, I think your interpretation was that I was asking rhetorical questions that I thought had an obvious answer which should logically refute your assertion.
In fact, I was simply introducing a few scenarios that seem similar to me so that I could better understand how it was so easy for you both to make very broad (and seemingly impulsive) statements with strong implications about the "appropriate" political consequences of journalism.
I was hoping that one of you would explain to me some method of analysis that offered insight into all of those scenarios in addition to this Russia stuff.
It seems that you did not mean to make broad statements about journalism, only about RT specifically because RT is obviously guilty by virtue of its association with the Russian government.
To me that is not obvious, and so when I hear words used like "destabilization" or "terrorism" (these are both propaganda words and I heavily discount any statement containing either one) I have to wonder if perhaps the person making the argument has more of a persuasive motive than a desire to understand the situation or phenomenon in question.
Rightfully accusing you of "whataboutism" IS simply calling out your views or comment specifically for whatever logical error it contains.
You're trolling in bad faith, demanding people provide specific examples then refusing to provide any yourself, and making untrue blanket statements about cable news and then trying to excuse your ignorance by claiming you don't actually know anything about cable news and never watch it. Yet you claim to know so much about RT, but never provide any links to back up any of your claims about it, even after being repeatedly asked. You said that Rachel Maddow's coverage of Flint was suspect because she made an overreach in her coverage of Russia, yet you have no problem with RT broadcasting Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine and don't think that reflects on their coverage of Flynt, to which you conveniently can't find any references, so we just have to take your word.
Your arguments have no merit, because you're being intellectually dishonest and trolling. And this is not the place for that. Take it somewhere else where it will be appreciated like /r/The_Donald, if you're not going to stop it here.
You're the one who didn't know what the word "whataboutism" meant, and who posted an incorrect definition, yet with your very own words, you actually explicitly confessed to being guilty of whataboutism: "OK I'm guilty."
So do you still stand by your confession that you're guilty of "whataboutism", now that you've bothered to skim (but not understand) one article about it?
There is nothing "silly" or "made up" about the word "whataboutism". That's proven by the fact that there is a 15 page Wikipedia article with 116 citations in it, including references to "whataboutism" in the Oxford Living Dictionaries and Cambridge Dictionary.
What's "made up" is your incorrect definition that you gave for it: "Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason".
What exactly is so "silly" about this -- it seems pretty serious and on-topic to me, comrade:
Tactic: Propaganda technique
Type: Tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy)
Logic: Logical fallacy
Active period: Cold War–present
Prominent usage:
Soviet Union propaganda,
Russian propaganda,
Russian annexation of Crimea,
Russian military intervention in Ukraine,
Donald Trump,
Related:
Ad hominem,
And you are lynching Negroes,
The pot calling the kettle black,
Red herring,
The Mote and the Beam,
Clean hands
Some of the replies to this comment fall glibly on one side or another, but I think that there's a remarkably fine and fuzzy line.
Consider the international broadcasters like Voice of America, the BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle. These organisations are state-funded, broadcast to dozens of foreign countries via shortwave or satellite and often have explicit foreign policy goals. A government beaming news reports into a foreign (and often hostile) country is at the very least suspicious.
We know as a fact that the US has engaged in major international astroturfing campaigns, using large clusters of VPN nodes and thousands of bogus personae to influence public debate in foreign countries. There's a not-unreasonable argument that this capability is mainly being used to combat "extremism", but there's a huge amount of disagreement about what exactly constitutes "extremism".
Perhaps it's time for an international convention on psychological warfare? At the very least, it would be useful to have some kind of high-level debate on where we draw the line between providing an alternative viewpoint and engaging in hostile propaganda activities.
I don't understand what is fuzzy about it - Deutsche Welle might be a state actor but the US intelligence agencies apparently don't consider it hostile/dangerous to the US. This argument basically comes down to the childish "if they don't take money from 1 state actor, they should stop taking money from every state actor in the world".
To me it makes perfect sense that when a foreign state actor is determined to be hostile to your country by your intelligence community, that you are going to stop accepting money from them.
Also seems (if RT is telling the truth) that the paid RT election propaganda on twitter was actually twitter's idea that they pitched to RT, so perhaps twitter got greedy and is complicit (as opposed to just having ran ads indiscriminately) and now they're trying to wash their hands to avoid a PR disaster.
> These organisations are state-funded, broadcast to dozens of foreign countries via shortwave or satellite
I think it's not just about being state-funded, but "powerful interests" funded. Large corporations want to control public opinions just as much. US government doesn't sponsor CNN directly, but it itself as a business as well as its advertisers are vested in having one political outcome vs another. They are far from neutral.
As to the topic at hand, it all started with a PR campaign promoted by Clinton and the media organizations which backed her candidacy (to the point of handing her debate questions beforehand or smearing or silencing her opponents) that Russians significantly altered the results of the election, up to and including flipping the result completely.
We've heard for months Russians, Russians, Russians, "17 Intelligence agencies", piss dossier blackmail, secret meetings or coded gestures being signaled at some dinners and so on. It is a story many want to believe, because it explains their view of the world -- "my compatriots could not have possibly have voted how they did", or "my candidate was so good and experienced there is no way people could have voted for any other candidate". So there is a desire to believe in these conspiracy theories, simply because they provide an explanation for what happened.
As you said, Russia is interfering with elections, so are Americans, Chinese, anybody with money is going to trying to influence election results in US. They'd be stupid not to.
And I agree in general with the idea of identifying and stopping the influence as much as possible, so good on Twitter here. What is suspicious is this continuous obsession with Russia. I think it is a distraction and a waste of time. I think a better obsession would be an obsession with US. Say looking at what's happening here and why did so many people voted how they did. It has nothing to do with KGB. But then again I've accused of being a "Russian shill" since I don't seem to like Clinton and don't tow the party line here. So you know, take these words with a grain of salt (or maybe a shot of vodka).
Public opinion and intervention are two different things. Free speech is protected while a foreign government working to benefit a candidate is not. If the US was using CNN to plant false narratives, that would be a similarly egregious offence.
Not only that, but according to Bloomberg[1], Clinton raised 1,1191M for her campaing and Trump raised 646.8M for his.
Anybody, who claims that RTs and Sputniks $274,100 spent during the campaign had a material effect on the elections should very well explain, how the Russians are getting orders of magnitude better ROI than everyone else. I'm all ears and I'm sure all the DC lobbyists too.
This RT/Sputnik thing is probably misdirection, but knowing how Trump/Russia/etc got such good ROI is not hard to understand. The election came down to around 20k votes in three states. Combine an unprecedented data mining operation (Cambridge Analytica) with microtargetting enabled by social media companies, as well as the viral nature of fake news, its easy to see how a small amount of money can sway a marginal amount of voters in key states.
Your comment does a good job of summarizing the unique aspects of the 2016 election.
But keep in mind that all of the projections based on data collection, historical trends, polling, etc., had Trump suffering a decisive loss up until several hours into election night.
In order for the description to give to be true, you have to believe that all of the pollsters, Nate Silver, etc., didn't know what they were doing. The thing is, they did actually know what they were doing.
Crediting Cambridge Analytica, RT, the Russian government, Donald Trump, or anyone else with some sort of strategic genius because Trump won is utterly ludicrous.
Trump's strategy was innovative in that it blended things that had traditionally been part of the Democrats' and Republicans' platforms, but at no point did anyone on Trump's side have any remote degree of certainty that it would succeed. Trump was outspent by 4:1 or even 5:1 by the Clinton campaign.
This is not because he had a far more efficient approach and enjoyed a comfy lead the whole time, but because he simply didn't have the support from donors needed to spend more than that (and wasn't willing or able to invest more of his own alleged wealth).
Trump's win was not really even a win in the sense that many of the voters in rust belt areas that he "won" from Hillary had voted for Obama previously. HRC's campaign felt that the rust belt was not an area where Hillary needed to do more campaigning, and it's not clear they were wrong in thinking that. Maybe Trump's gruff pro-American bluster was unbeatable there, and Hillary would have struggled to seem sympathetic to the economic struggles going on there.
But the point is that Trump simply chose a strategy of combining national defense "strong man" posturing with the typical rust belt "buy American" playbook that Democrats have been using for years. Yes it's a bit racist, but it was when Democrats used it too.
Trump's strategy almost didn't work, and everyone who expected it not to work was probabilistically right. It had very low chances of winning and came down to the moves made by both candidates in the final days before the election that drove turnout more than they influenced candidate choice.
Yes the leaked email stories hurt HRC, but I think that her refusal to address the issue head on when asked about it and to offer full transparency was a big mistake. It conveyed an elitism and arrogance that might very well have led a lot of former or lukewarm supporters to stay home.
My point is that it wasn't about the detailed analytics, it was about the big, slow trends of rust-belt economic hardship and the resulting resentments, and Trump managing to beat a very mediocre and uninspiring GOP field to win the primary with his populist message.
I'd actually been predicting the onset of an authoritarian, trade-protectionist trend for a while but I did not think Trump would beat such a strong and well-funded establishment candidate.
I say this because in all of the chaos about "Russian meddling" we are told to believe a story that involves too many evil geniuses and too little acknowledgement of big, slow trends.
I don't think the Russian narrative is about any evil geniuses, but simply that clear unbiased political analysis is still a requirement for an effective campaign. It didn't take an evil genius to realize that Trump's only path to victory was through the rust belt. In fact, I saw that fact mentioned multiple times in the weeks leading up to the election. Hillary's mistake was buying into the media narrative of a 90+% chance of victory (and probably not really understanding what that means--a 1 in 10 chance of losing is not something to hang your hat on when the stakes are this high). They should have been spending 100 to 1 in the rust belt and focusing their message towards the issues of that region.
I also don't buy it that Hillary "coming clean" about the emails would have been preferable to denying any serious wrongdoing. Everyone claims they value honesty and openness, but its probably an example of people saying one thing while acting entirely differently. Is it preferable to let a narrative form against her, or to simply use her own words against her to claim she's unsuitable to be president? I don't know, but its far from obvious that just copping to every claim against her regarding the emails was the right move.
There were many campaign missteps and ignoring the rust belt was chief among them. But ultimately she did have the election in the bag until Comey's 11th hour memo about more emails being found. There are a lot of external factors that caused her to lose, but it should never have been that close and it was because of her blind spot for the rust belt.
> "coming clean" about the emails would have been preferable
I'm not suggesting there was anything to come clean about. But there were emails indicating that some of the campaign finance stuff relating to the Clinton Foundation was not above board. Not only did HRC not address this issue, but she didn't claim that the organization was just like many other similar orgs, or offer to offer a full audit of where the dollars went. Those are the totally obvious responses to allegations that lines have been crossed.
True, doing that would have played into the idea that the story was real, but keep in mind that there were emails from a disgruntled loyalist who was mad at Chelsea threatening to reveal the scheme as fraud.
The news orgs generally ignored this story for some reason, so maybe that's why there wasn't a specific response to it offered by the campaign, but in my view it is not really clear whether it was completely above board or not. Per my earlier comment elsewhere in the thread, I am concerned that lifetime public servant Paul Ryan has a net worth of $8M, and that the Clintons are worth $250M after public service careers.
What are the odds that Paul Ryan obtained that money legitimately? I'd say they are quite slim. If emails about Ryan were found that indicated a likely corrupt source of the funds, I'd hope that some journalist somewhere would pick up the story and take it to fruition. I'd hope the same thing about any major US political candidate, if there is evidence that a massive ($250M) fortune might have been improperly won through deals that violate campaign finance law.
It's not that I don't think Ryan or Clinton are relatively good "knowledge workers" for the jobs they end up in, it's that the purpose of campaign finance law is to prevent interest groups from being able to buy their way in. If we let our "nice" politicians get bought by interest groups in ways that violate campaign finance law, we are allowing the corrupting incentives to exist that campaign finance law is meant to prevent.
Surely, by the same token, congress should pass a law requiring the publication of a decade or more of income tax history for any personal wealth or companies where the candidate as a majority shareholder. Note that in spite of the massive opposition to Trump's failure to offer up his tax returns, no such law has been discussed. Chances are quite a few officials or would-be officials would rather not be subject to additional transparency requirements.
Comey's involvement was truly odd. I thought he should have been more thorough/careful before he dismissed the possibility of any wrongdoing initially. How long does it take for a team of people to review a few thousand emails. I think it could be done in a weekend if there was any motivation at all to resolve the issue in a timely fashion. So Comey not only chose to allow his actions to impact the election, but allowed his agency's tarnishing of the campaign to drag on and on in a completely unreasonable way. So in my view his last-minute comments were one of several major blunders. He's been challenged over his decisions, but I have not heard him challenged on why it takes so long to review emails. Of the 20K emails most were spam just like in any inbox. So we're talking about a few thousand pages of reading that took months and months for no apparent reason.
At this point I have a hard time taking seriously any claims against the Clintons. These two have been investigated inside and out for around 25 years. If the only people reporting on "new explosive allegations" are lawznews or thefederalist or w/e, that's a good sign its bogus. The fact that seemingly reasonable people still buy into the new round of innuendo every time a Clinton pops their head up is disheartening. The credence you give this stuff needs to be much lower.
And as far as Clinton's personal wealth, 15 years of book deals and 100k speaking engagements will create quite a nest egg. Let alone starting their careers as high powered attorneys. There's nothing unexplained here.
Most of that was just politically motivated stuff. The difference is that the trove of emails was not filtered and research discovered the potentially implicating campaign finance stuff within that trove.
> 15 years of book deals and 100k speaking engagements
The personal wealth was likely done in a way that does not violate any laws. A donor can make a book deal happen with a $2M advance rather than violating laws by donating $2M. That's gray area but not surprising or concerning.
The potential area of concern is the way that the Clinton Foundation may have been used to collect donations from foreign governments in a pay-to-play arrangement. I'm not entirely sure whether it's reasonable that such things are illegal, but they are illegal so if someone is doing it we should all be concerned.
I'm pretty concerned about Paul Ryan's $8M as well. You didn't address this so I am guessing that you assume it all to be above board?
HRC was so confident in her upcoming landslide win she bought fireworks, and congratulated herself on her birthday as “future president”. Same time last year Trump was projected to have a 7% chance of winning, and that was by outlets that wanted to be perceived as impartial. Multiple accusations of sexual assault were leveled (all gone after the election), fake piss “dossier” (for which HRC paid in violation of campaign laws) was fabricated, the “free” press shat on Trump 24x7, etc, etc. Do you really, truly believe that it was $300K from the Russians, and not Clinton’s arrogance that tanked her prospects?
Campaign laws exist. It's absolutely possible that a small sum used illegally could have larger impact than a large sum spent legally.
(that said, I'm not an expert on campaign law and I'm not in a position to say what was/wasn't legal: I'm just trying to point out that it's not enough to look only at quantity spent)
Interference in foreign elections of the nature in which Russia has interfered and colluded with the Trump campaign is unprecedented to say the least. It's a whole new game.
Foreign intervention in elections up till then have been pure amateur hour.
Please don't parrot Trump's lies and Russian sponsored propaganda intended to distract from the Russia investigation. This is not the place for that. You're only embarrassing and discrediting yourself, and fooling nobody, while insulting everyone's intelligence.
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
— statement from the Trump transition team on Washington Post report that the CIA concluded that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump
Donald Trump’s staff dismissed U.S. intelligence conclusions that Russia actively interfered in the presidential election by noting the flawed intelligence cited by the Bush administration in making the case for invading Iraq nearly 14 years ago.
An alternative perspective came from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who pinned the blame on the Bush White House for misrepresenting the intelligence.
Nancy Pelosi @NancyPelosi:
The intel didn't state that Iraq had WMDs. The Bush-Cheney WH made that misrepresentation.
12:21 AM - Dec 11, 2016
Trump’s complaint about this semi-ancient history is a bit odd because a) the intelligence analysts who worked on Middle East WMDs are not going to be the same as analysts focused on Russian cyber-behavior; b) the intelligence collection for hacking in the United States by overseas powers would be different from assessing illicit weapons programs in the Middle East; and c) reforms were put in place after the Iraq War to make it harder for suspect intelligence to bubble up to the top ranks without careful scrutiny. (For instance, a new procedure required heads of intelligence agencies to vouch personally for the credibility of any of their own agency’s sources that are used in a major estimate.)
Moreover, the Bush administration appeared determined to attack Iraq for any number of reasons beyond suspicions of WMDs; officials simply seized on WMDs because they concluded that that represented the strongest case for an invasion. “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in 2003.
How does that wording that I quote or the fact that we've been in Iraq for such a long time contradict the point that "The intel didn't state that Iraq had WMDs. The Bush-Cheney WH made that misrepresentation."
Do you agree with the fact that it's the Bush-Cheney White House who perpetrated the fraud by cherry picking and hyping the evidence that supported their pre-conceived conclusions while ignoring evidence from the intelligence community that contradicted it (to the point of outing a CIA agent to end her career because they didn't like the evidence her husband presented them), but the only nit you have to pick is with the Washington Post's wording calling 16 years "ancient history"?
> How does that wording that I quote or the fact that we've been in Iraq for such a long time contradict the point that "The intel didn't state that Iraq had WMDs. The Bush-Cheney WH made that misrepresentation."
It doesn't, it's completely irrelevant. Just like your opinion that that history is ancient is completely irrelevant.
> Do you agree with the fact that it's the Bush-Cheney White House who perpetrated the fraud by cherry picking and hyping the evidence, but the only nit you have to pick is with the Washington Post's wording calling 16 years "ancient history"?
You're the one making the distinction between US intel and US gov. No one else is talking about that or cares.
US gov/intel/whatever told a lie and US media amplified it. Just like the Russia gov and media did now.
So your comment is completely irrelevant. You're just trying to distract from the point. And speak for yourself about not caring. You're just trying to get people to stop talking about it.
You can't gerrymander the discussion topic to support the propaganda you want to parrot. If you can refute my points, then give it a try, but declaring them off-topic just means you don't want to go there.
By parroting Trump's and Putin's propaganda, you're not convincing anyone to stop paying attention to and talking about the Russian investigation, so stop wasting your efforts.
You are extremely rude. But that aside, what am I "parroting" exactly? I didn't know that saying the Washington Post was pro-war propaganda was controversial in 2017.
You claim that I'm "parroting lies", but the article you linked confirms what I said: American intelligence claimed that there were WMDs in Iraq. Notably, it says that "Before the October 2002 NIE, some intelligence agencies assessed that the Iraqi government was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program", and that "The intelligence community consistently stated between the late 1990s and 2003 that Iraq retained biological warfare agents and the capability to produce more". It is reporting in greater detail what I briefly mentioned in my comment.
It is true that parts of these reports were exaggerated and parts were not given attention, but the same can be said of intelligence reports about Russian influence in elections. About your three points, none disproves my implication that the reports mentioned by Twitter are fake - if anything, b and c may make it more difficult to produce false reports, but certainly not impossible
Your attempt to refute the fact that the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that both RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election, by blaming the CIA for the Iraq War without mentioning the fact that Bush and Cheney cherry picked the evidence and railroaded the decision, is extremely disingenuous, and literally parrots Trump and Putin's propaganda.
You claimed that I lie, but you're lying before my very eyes. I neither blamed the CIA for the Iraq War, nor did I "not mention the fact that Bush and Cheney cherry picked the evidence", and most of all I didn't even "refute the fact that the US intelligence community's conclusion [is?] that both RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election".
* I didn't blame the CIA for the Iraq War, as you can verify by re-reading my comments.
* I certainly mentioned that the evidence was cherry-picked: I highlighted the mention [here](https://i.imgur.com/sLtW1al.png). I did not mention who cherry-picked the evidence, but it doesn't seem relevant to my point or yours.
* If I understand your first sentence correctly - it is incomplete, giving space to interpretation - you're claiming that I attempt to refute the fact that the US intelligence's conclusion is that RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election; I never refuted that the intelligence's opinion is such, nor did I attempt to refute that. I genuinely believe that these reports represent the intelligence community's opinion. Rather, I'm doubtful of the reliability of these reports, in light of the Iraq reports of 2003.
If they wanted to live up to their civic duty, they would kick Donald Trump off for bullying, and kick Melania Trump off for trolling that she would do something to stop bullying.
It seems like this is the bigger problem. Few people think RT/Sputnik are unbiased, but when you have some foreign intelligence agency micro-targeting voters it's hard to even judge the extent of the influence operations taking place.
They use pseudonyms and stock photos to seem like part of an in-group, then amplify divisive hashtags and messaging. They disappear from historical records when they delete the accounts, making it even harder to track their activity.
Reddit, twitter, facebook, and newspaper comment sections are all filled with disinformation and nobody seems to be doing much about it.
This shouldn't matter or even be remotely relevant. Walled gardens and silos. We know those terms, and we know we need to encourage people onto my decentralized systems. Twitter, Google, Facebook, et. al. know they dictate the narrative just as much as the major news networks; maybe even more so. And there is so little hosting today that can scale that the big organizations can effectively censor whoever they want:
If we had more open platforms that didn't filter and sift through everything and run _fact checks_ (i.e. you're too stupid to do your own research so let's tell you what to think), yes we'd have a lot more garbage .. but we'd have a more unfiltered equal playing field where you'd also have much more of everything.
Twitter is just another example of a filtered world that needs to die off.
As much as I loathe walled gardens, and disagree with Twitter 90% of the time ...
This is a good instance of why some degree of regulation is important.
In unregulated systems, it's entirely possible that corporate and state actors can basically control election outcomes, utterly lie and mislead people towards some pretty crazy consequences.
The Rawandan genocide was largely propagated by guess who -> Radio Hosts.
'Mass Media' in Rwanda was Radio, and hosts calling the other side 'cockroaches that need to be exterminated' was a critical factor that led to the tipping point.
So much so that General Dallaire (Head of UN mission) left a bunch of Belgian soldiers in a building that was being attacked, in an attempt to get to the stations.
The idea that 'decentralized networks' will be 'free' is not quite right - they will still be controlled, but just in a different way, by anyone who has the means.
This is our fault as humans.
I know a lot of educated professionals who believe some crazy stuff, and it's very easy to misinform.
I don't like that Twitter has this control, but I don't see any reasonable alternative on the horizon yet.
When there is 'true decentralization' - you will have some groups calling for mass murder of others pretty quickly. And they will create all sorts of Hollywood style propaganda in support of it. ISIS would not exist without social media.
There would be a few ISIS-like groups in every civilized country if they were allowed to exist - sadly.
It's not a simple situation we have, unfortunately.
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"i.e. you're too stupid to do your own research so let's tell you what to think"
Nobody (including you) has enough time and wherewithal to 'do their own research' - that's the whole point of a free press. Do you have access to White House aids to find out 'what Trump said'? Do you have time to read 100's of papers on Climate Change? Etc..
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"yes we'd have a lot more garbage .. but we'd have a more unfiltered equal playing field where you'd also have much more of everything."
We'd have - and we already kind of do have - 99% garbage.
Even the mainstream press is kind of crap - why? Attention. CNN would devote more time to specific issues if it were up to them, but Americans just 'tune out'. Major news outlets have to keep it a little light and America focused or else nobody will watch.
>but we'd have a more unfiltered equal playing field where you'd also have much more of everything.
The internet has shown that an unfiltered playing field is toxic to the political knowledge of a populace. In an unfiltered playing field, virality gets the eyeballs and fake news is inherently viral. The truth necessarily loses.
Whatever twitter. You still let the President threaten war and attack individuals using your platform. We still haven't seen convincing evidence that the Russian interference mattered, or even mattered more than our direct assistance to Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s.
We have a sick and disintegrating society, blaming external enemies is way too easy.
I think the spirit of the TOS of humanity (e.g. Article II paragraph 4 of the UN Charter) would banish offensive war and the threat of war. These threats are _worse_ coming from the president. His being the president doesn't make these things more allowable, only our deference to hierarchy does.
Mere legalism is failing us, let alone the spirits of legalism. I'm not happy about it.
The constitution makes him the commander in chief and delegates war authority to congress. The AUMF signed after 9/11 was poorly drafted, contained no expiration, and has ceded control from congress to the executive in extraordinary ways. Nuclear authorities that allow one man to destroy the world have always been egregious since we instituted them.
Nonetheless, Commander in Chief ≠ Command of Twitter. A private entity doesn't have to indulge him and such dissent is protected by the 1st amendment.
I think you misunderstood what I meant by allowable. He can legally act using the powers of his office, but we can shun him. It's morally abhorrent and violates international law. It's only in a very limited sense that his behavior is "allowable" even if that sense is the one that ends up mattering practically.
This is what baffles me about the narrative. A candidate spent upwards of 1,3 billion on their campaign, had the backing of most mainstream media, celebrity endorsements, back-room deals, and literal paid-shills on social media (CTR) when they went against one of the most unpopular people in America. Yet <300,000 in foreign advertising is what got the public to vote for the hated candidate.
It doesn't add up in any way, and the whole thing is ridiculous on its face. The only money that matters here is the money media platforms milk off the outrage of people caused by making this a top story.
Folks like you are being willfully ignorant. It's very easy to understand how the Russian fake news operation got such a good ROI. The election came down to around 20k votes in three states. Combine an unprecedented data mining operation (Cambridge Analytica) with microtargetting enabled by social media companies, as well as the viral nature of fake news, its easy to see how a small amount of money can sway a marginal amount of voters in key states.
Incorrect. Viral media is incredibly cheap compared to traditional ad buys — their reach is reliably fast, global, and free beyond the means of production.
Don’t forget that much of the clickbait conspiracies that altered this election were written on WordPress blogs by individuals peddling “fake news” narratives, eg Obama wiretapping Trump, Pizzagate, Clinton Foundation trafficking Haitian earthquake victims, etc.
RT wasn’t just spending money on “sponsored Tweets” and that sort of thing. The Kremlin operates twitter bot armies that game propaganda visibility.
One thing literally no one on this thread thusfar has mentioned is that the Department of Justice has compelled RT and Sputnik to fill out the paperwork[1] for FARA[2] registration. The DOJ isn't going to just target journalists for FARA registration without some sort of (probably classified under a FISA order) information letting them know that indeed, this org is working as an agent for a foreign government. Thus far, RT has not complied.
If Twitter actually wanted to promote civic responsibility, they would ban Donald Trump for repeated ToS violations and try to encourage him to be a little more thoughtful about his proclamations to the world.
> For instance, he has the right to make violent threats in certain circumstances compared to normal citizens.
No one has the 'right' to make violent threats on twitter. It is a private service with a ToS.
There are no principled reasons to treat the president as a special case here. The practical reason is simply that it is often and free advertising for them and the terms of service dictate what they can do when breached; not what they must do.
> No one has the 'right' to make violent threats on twitter.
I never claimed this. My argument hinges on the fact that he has the right, in certain circumstances, to make violent threats as opposed to normal citizens.
The TOS is written for normal citizens because it is indeed illegal for normal citizens to do so. And I therefore agree with you that the TOS technically does not allow any violent threats on twitter.
I do not think it is unreasonable to allow the President to communicate his threats on Twitter, a modern means of communication. I think it's actually a good thing to allow, for this and all future presidents.
POTUS has no more rights by law than any other citizen to make violent threats. POTUS has _authority_ to enact those threats in certain cases whereas one typically doesn't.
For instance -- I have the right to say 'Nazis should be punched in the face' in most circumstances. It would violate Twitter TOS to tweet that however and they'd be well within their right to take that message down or ban the account.
The 'spirit' of the TOS is civility in most part, not legality. Donald Trumps twitter account isn't civil.
And if you disagree about that, or about the spirit of the TOS so be it -- that is why things like terms of service are held to the more objective letter, and not the highly subjective spirit.
> POTUS has no more rights by law than any other citizen to make violent threats.
> POTUS has _authority_ to enact those threats in certain cases whereas one typically doesn't.
The first quote deals with the threat. The second deals with "enacting the threats."
So if you claim that he has no right to make a threat, then how can he enact something that he has no right to say?
Regardless, I'm only speaking on his legal right to make threats. And yes, he does have a legal right to make violent threats.
And no, Twitter's TOS does not prohibit uncivil language with a broad brush. But I agree with you that it is not purely based in law, but civility certainly is based in moral law.
> that is why things like terms of service are held to the more objective letter, and not the highly subjective spirit.
> So if you claim that he has not right to make a threat, then how can he enact something that he has no right to say?
No, I'm claiming he has no more legal right to make threats than any other person. There is a large difference there. Largely speaking a persons right to make threats is protected under the first amendment.
There are very narrow instances where verbal or written threats become assault (or terrorism, or attempts to incite a riot, etc); and since one of the criteria there is ability to carry out threat, someone in a position of power has somewhat more liability here, not less.
Which is all besides the point -- twitter isn't a government entity; your first amendment protections don't apply to their ban hammer. Their rules and regulations are more restrictive in all cases than what is allowed by law.
> You mean as in the case that we're discussing?
I mean, yes? My point is that a) Trump is in technical violation of the TOS and b) The TOS constrains the behaviors of the users, not Twitter so they have no real obligation to enforce it.
> that is why things like terms of service are held to the more objective letter, and not the highly subjective spirit.
I replied.
> You mean as in the case that we're discussing?
Clearly your objection is that the TOS is not held in this case at all.
Which could indicate that they're failing to act or they are interpreting their TOS subjectively per his special role.
> No, I'm claiming he has no more legal right to make threats than any other person.
This is not about freedom of speech. This is about his position, that threats are sometimes part of negotiation and he can legally threaten (as an example).
Large classes of other people cannot, for instance, negotiate on behalf of the U.S.
A ToS which the tweets people are complaining that Twitter didn't ban Trump for did not violate. I mean, it should be obvious why Twitter doesn't consider support for war to violate the ToS clause on violence - otherwise, every publication which ran an op-ed supporting military intervention and linked it on Twitter would be violating the ToS. Not only that, there was a huge overlap between the people calling for Trump to be banned and the pro-nazi-punching (and pro-punching-anyone-who-wasn't-pro-nazi-punching) crowd who had been taking full advantage of the laxity of Twitter's "violence" clause in the ToS.
There underlying logic of the demands made no sense at all, but it didn't matter. Believing Trump had violated the Twitter ToS and should be banned was simply something you did if you weren't an evil Nazi Trump supporter.
Trump has violated that TOS aplenty[0]. The NK non-sense wasn't even the first thing I thought violated the TOS; he basically harasses someone new every few weeks punctuated by retweeting gifs of him punching CNN or knocking Clinton out with a golf ball.
> Censoring the speech of the President is probably not something that they want to get engaged with.
Then they shouldn't get engaged in censoring anyone's speech on their platform (unless, of course, the free market value of the President’s special treatment on Twitter is reported and treated in law as either a corporate gift by Twitter to Donald J. Trump or an in-kind campaign donation to his re-election campaign, or a campaign expenditure coordinated with the candidate. Of course, any of these has significant legal consequences.)
We have laws governing gifts of anything of value to political office holders and candidates for a reason.
The Saudis are locked in golden handcuffs. We provide them lavish lifestyles, they provide us irreplaceable energy resources. When the oil is gone those people go back to living in the dark ages.
Well, there is an explanation that doesn't make them look like complete fools:
Supporting the "Russians stole election with paltry spend on social media" narrative, they hope to encourage Americans to massively spend on social media to "steal" coming elections...
What I've seen proven wasn't massive. If people can be convinced that non-massive social media spending is as effective as is currently insinuated, they'll likely spend. Mission accomplished.
There "culture wars" are approaching cold civil war status. Great times to be a virtual arms dealer...
this is great news. There is journalism, and then there is agenda-based LIES. RT and their likes are lying to create chaos in the western world. They make up things out of nothing.
RT and Sputnik are weapons of information warfare. It would be rational for USA's society and government to end their toleration of Russian media in domestic space. The only legitimate reason for Russia to have US news media arms is to show public discord and private confusion. I don't know why this even needs to be discussed. There exist some foriegn nation's who's objectives and values align with the US, but Russia is not one of them.
This is profoundly disappointing, and is yet another indication that Twitter is clueless about being a platform and wants to be a content company. There have been many other decisions where Twitter was tone-deaf about its platform status, but this is perhaps the worst.
RT has had some great coverage of under-publicized issues in the US... issues involving the poor, failing infrastructure, hypocrisy, etc. Yes it's not flattering to the US that these stories are written, but they are true and newsworthy and should absolutely not be suppressed.
During the election, RT ran a unflattering stories about both major candidates. This is now being spun as "trying to sow discord" in the US. Journalism is supposed to shine a light on things that need to be improved, it is supposed to rally people to act to fix those problems.
If you read the major newspapers in the US, particularly in the section on world affairs, there is a steady stream of stories that address the dangers of living abroad, the corrupt politicians, the failing infrastructure, etc. These stories may or may not be true (many are obviously overblown to anyone who has visited those countries) but the purpose they serve is to help foster the idea of American exceptionalism.
Our papers don't have to run headlines like "Americans happiest citizens in the world" or "America has the cleanest water and the happiest children in the world" when it can simply run stories that make other nations (particularly political adversaries) seem far worse.
We still don't know much about the Hillary Clinton or Podesta emails as none of the few possibly troubling things (mostly campaign finance violation stuff) has been investigated. RT ran stories about that topic when it was fresh during the election, even when the major US papers were focused mainly on rude things Trump had said.
When RT first launched I was surprised that it was "allowed" to exist simply because of its origin. But after reading the reporting for several years I came to appreciate that it was offering a view of the US that was not really available from American news outlets. This makes RT valuable to the sharing of ideas and the creation of an informed public.
Twitter's decision to block the advertising is cowardly in so many ways.
>RT has had some great coverage of under-publicized issues in the US... issues involving the poor, failing infrastructure, hypocrisy, etc. Yes it's not flattering to the US that these stories are written, but they are true and newsworthy and should absolutely not be suppressed.
RT hasn't been blocked from twitter, it is still allowed to do all those things.
Now that Twitter has an algorithmic feed, perhaps content that is from banned advertisers gets penalized in the algorithm. It's all very shady and disappointing.
Okay, but that's a pretty big assumption. You can't go on a large tirade against twitter censoring alternative journalism without something to back it up.
If you were worried about this feeding into twitter's algorithm why wasn't that your main point?
Twitter can control the algorithm indirectly through selective banning of sock puppet or spam accounts, since many exist that help create virality for many different agendas.
For years now Twitter has allowed a lot of shady accounts to be created simply because they help its growth and engagement numbers. If a Russian hacker writes a bot that retweets scintillating stories about an American politician, and this leads to more Twitter users scrolling their feed and viewing ads, Twitter wins.
This is why the sock puppet ecosystem has been allowed to exist in spite of the very easy detection of various spam rings (they are easily detectable through simple graph analysis).
The problem for Twitter is that it can't say "oops the engaged users numbers we've been talking about for the past few years are all massively inflated, we just deleted 100M sock puppet accounts and it turns out that our service is a lot less popular and a lot less engaging than we thought".
So I'm not worried about Twitter tuning the algorithm since it has much easier ways of nudging the politics of the average user's news feed in whatever direction it wants.
The concern is that Twitter bowed to political pressure from US politicians and penalized a news organization that should be investigated and shut down by an appropriate legal process if it's actually doing something more propaganda-like than other news orgs.
Last time I checked, most news orgs (including CNN, the NYT, etc.) were all doing massive clickbait campaigns through many different advertising channels. RT is no exception.
This is a dangerous form of scapegoating and censorship that happens to be legal because Twitter is a private firm. But it's very ugly and reveals a fear of or complicity with various elected officials in the US.
NYT, CNN, etc. all use viral clickbait strategies. Using such strategies, one needs to "seed" the content on social media. Ads are an easy way to do this.
An increasing number of people get their news from social media, making the process of "seeding" very important to the publication process. Arguably a news org can't exist without this process working. They have to have someone on staff who can write the clickbait headline, and they have to have someone on staff who can place the ads on social media to seed the content.
By breaking RT's ability to do this, Twitter is exerting highly targeted editorial control over the content that hits its algorithmic feeds. Shameful stuff.
>We still don't know much about the Hillary Clinton or Podesta emails as none of the few possibly troubling things (mostly campaign finance violation stuff) has been investigated
You have no way of knowing the details about any investigations past or present. Investigations are usually done in secret. We do know that the FBI investigated but the details of that are not public, only that no criminal activity was found. Also Any US Attorney General can start Grand Jury proceedings (also secret) at any time.
Twitter is an American company, and is publicly traded as such. They have a responsibility to appease shareholders. This isn't really about politics at all, or patriotism, it's about money.
Russia has long played up domestic strife in the US to disprove the notion of American exceptionalism. Embarrassment over America's portrayal abroad was a key reason the Kennedy administration grudgingly supported aspects of the civil rights movement.
On the other hand, there are plenty of international news organisations shining a light on the parts of America that Americans don't want to see, and none of those news organisations are operating under the direction of a foreign power. RT is quite clearly seen by the Russian government as a useful propaganda tool, and not a news outlet that would ever challenge the current Russian government's malfeasance.
> RT is quite clearly seen by the Russian government as a useful propaganda tool, and not a news outlet that would ever challenge the current Russian government's malfeasance.
Well I don't think we're likely to see the NYT or Fox or CNN challenging the US Government in any significant way. They are actually all consistently doing the US's bidding by helping sell various war efforts to their fans/viewers.
> Russia has long played up domestic strife in the US to disprove the notion of American exceptionalism.
So an editorial stance that rejects American Exceptionalism is now suspect? In my view the litmus test for RT is if the content stops at rejecting American Exceptionalism, or whether it goes further and attempts to make Americans believe things that are actually not true.
Considering how much content in a typical issue of the NYT reinforces American Exceptionalism, it's quite refreshing to read something now and then that dispenses with that. The idea of American Exceptionalism is very harmful to the democratic process in America and to the world in general. I think it's among the most devastating and harmful ideas ever if measured by the suffering it has caused.
The problem is that our own papers offer American Exceptionalism in high doses every single day.
We've literally just come off 8 years of Fox challenging the U.S. administration at every turn.
The Pentagon Papers is a rather historical example, but stands. I'd be interested in what you'd consider a refutation of your claim.
The issue with RT isn't that it challenges American Exceptionalism. You can find that natively, largely in the left and alterative press, or critics such as Chomsky or Hedges or Naomi Klein, among many others. (They also, typically, do argue that the NYT and Post are establishment organs. It's possible to make that claim without descending to RT's depths. Quite easily.)
It's that it has no interest in either the truth or advancing a positive alternative in doing so. Your litmus test is bogus.
Of the major US news media outlets, which do you think care about truth? It is rare for any to publish corrections, and in fact a NYT public editor recently resigned over the paper's unwillingness to be honest about its mistakes.
> We've literally just come off 8 years of Fox challenging the U.S. administration at every turn.
The two-party back-and-forth is importantly not at all threatening to the status quo, because the two parties share power. The role of Fox and MSNBC are to keep the public focused on silly, partisan issues like the validity of Obama's birth certificate.
What endangers the status quo is that the public might actually realize that there are much more important things to worry about and much different things the government should be spending money on.
Hence, third party candidates are not invited to the debates, and issues for the public to become outraged about are offered as entertainment: Big storms, white girls being kidnapped, female teachers having sex with students, the personal lives of celebrities, and generally bad things about living in other countries.
> The Pentagon Papers is a rather historical example, but stands. I'd be interested in what you'd consider a refutation of your claim.
The press has had varying degrees of quality and independence since the days when the NYT was indistinguishable from the local gossip rag. The pentagon papers is one of the high points of American journalism, but we should not assume that American journalism is still the same.
When Edward Snowden wanted to leak information about massive dishonesty and conspiracy by the NSA in domestic surveillance, he did not go to the NY Times. That tells us all we need to know. As it was, he went to journalists who ended up breaking the story in The Guardian, but who were fairly quickly made to know that the Guardian would not support the continued adversarial stance with the US Government needed to follow through with the analysis and selective publication of the bulk of the documents.
The journalists were reluctant to return to the US after reporters had been threatened and jailed.
Among the most notable examples is the way that the NYT distanced itself from Julian Assange after the allegations of rape from Sweden were publicized. It turns out that in Sweden if someone has consensual sex and then days later decides that he or she revokes consent, that falls under the definition of rape. Oddly in all of the coverage of Assange amid these allegations, the NYT did not think it relevant to mention this very important difference in the legal meaning of the word rape in Sweden vs the US.
I have no idea whether Assange acted improperly with those women, but we did not get a clear and accurate accounting of the nature of the alleged act from the NYT, as leaving that information out was helpful in the character assassination campaign the paper had undertaken against him, after determining that the Iraq War Logs, diplomatic cables, and Afghanistan War Logs contained virtually no relevant information and that the officials involved did not deserve any accountability for the revelations that the NYT's thorough coverage might have led to.
It happens all the goddamn time, but there are also reasonably stringent editorial controls that prevent blatant mistruths from getting through. RT never corrects the record after it has been shown to publish government-manufactured stories.
> When Edward Snowden wanted to leak information about massive dishonesty and conspiracy by the NSA in domestic surveillance, he did not go to the NY Times. That tells us all we need to know.
No it doesn't - it just describes the very particular evidence (the possession of which constituted a federal crime) and the knowledge that it was safer in the hands of journalists overseas.
> Oddly in all of the coverage of Assange amid these allegations, the NYT did not think it relevant to mention this very important difference in the legal meaning of the word rape in Sweden vs the US.
> we did not get a clear and accurate accounting of the nature of the alleged act from the NYT
Nothing you mentioned is being affected by this change. They are no longer to purchase advertisements, but you can still follow RT and get news updates from them.
Your post is just as much a political statement as Twitters, which is hilariously ironic.
What is concerning is that Twitter controls a massive platform and has revealed itself to be heavily biased and intent upon ideological control of the content that exists on its platform.
My statement is simply my opinion, I am not controlling anyone else's access to a platform or to information by holding that opinion. I encourage you to read some RT stories.
You will find that the reporting is generally solid but simply lacks the "Rah Rah USA USA" attitude that has become (embarrassingly) commonplace in our culture. I cringe when I see politicians wearing red or blue ties and American flag pins, as if doing that signals their devout patriotism.
It's a similarly shallow world view that leads people to overlook RT's reporting and focus on its state sponsored origin before evaluating its contribution to American political discourse.
I'd personally prefer if there were more anger about certain kinds of issues in the US -- such as the Flint Water crisis, lead in the water in many cities, foolish and corrupt infrastructure projects, etc.
> What is concerning is that Twitter controls a massive platform and has revealed itself to be heavily biased and intent upon ideological control of the content that exists on its platform.
Your entire post is making the assumption that Twitter did this because they just believed the US/Russia election meddling stories or something.
Maybe there was clear and documented malice involved? Who knows! Certainly not you. But, reading this and immediately thinking "Twitter has now admitted they are on the side of the Democrats and believes all these Russia stories" is foolish and fails to consider that maybe something weird _might_ be going on, and maybe Twitter actually made a good decision here.
Don't worry about me though, I read plenty of international news - but I'm not going to bother with state sponsored organizations like RT.
Then why not mention that in the announcement? The problem is that Twitter is not pointing to any specific content that it is willing to admit was harmful. Doing that would give us too clear a glimpse into the ideological view Twitter holds.
I rarely read RT myself, but like seeing stories that shine light upon problems with American institutions and infrastructure, as well as problems and hypocrisy around foreign policy and humanitarian issues.
We have concentration camps in Gitmo, a prison system where inmates are routinely victimized by rape, and yet there is this idea that any news org that doesn't aggressively cheerlead "USA USA" is harming our democracy. I'd like our democracy to develop the teeth necessary to fix/eliminate the prisons and camps, and evict some of the most corrupt officials -- Paul Ryan has been a public servant his whole life and mysteriously has a net worth of over $8M. The Clintons are worth over $250M after a few decades in public service. What is going on here, we have to be willing to see the ugliness of our system and the corruption that is all around us.
If RT helps us see that and take corrective action, all the better. Ironically I think those opposed to the sort of discord RT might cause are implicitly idealizing a compliant public like one might find in a well-controlled fascist state.
I feel an inflated sense of self-worth here. The only people who get swayed by twitter ads are bots that are programmed to. I bet Silicon Valley is eating up this national discussion around fake news and Russian ads.
Surely the only reason the country swung so strongly in the last election is because of hacking/Facebook/Twitter/Russia etc. It has nothing to do with things like economy and jobs /s
As a proponent of nationalism, I'm very pleased with this move. Now only if Canada, Japan and Europe could get in on it, so each major area would have its own social media. It's obvious that Twitter isn't going to block agents of the US Government for similar "offences".
So despite how pathetic and partisan this is, hopefully it'll have great long term secondary effects by siloing countries. Or at least a small step in that direction.
That's interesting, so at first Twitter wanted RT to spend more on the election, to do more exposes and journalism with the elections as a backdrop because having RT and others on their platform would be good for the company (and the electorate having more information?)
But this was before they were against it --now apparently they, Twitter, had made a bad calculus and RT might have benefitted the eventual winner more than the then presumed winner.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadThere's nothing stopping someone on US soil from exercising their first amendment rights in the same way to subvert an election. In fact I expect the next presidential election will be dominated by the same tactics from local organizations.
The susceptibility of Americans to shitty lies, conspiracy theories, and a lack of numeracy is a vastly greater threat to the integrity of the US government and much more difficult to fix.
This susceptibility is likely not particular to Americans. It's this difficult-to-fix nature that necessitates taking an indirect approach to solving this problem.
There was a podcast where locals in a small town in Eastern Ukraine said they leave the area immediately if a camera crew (for tv news I presume) shows up because they think wherever there is a camera crew in that town, the chances of some kind of bombing or another becomes very high. I mean there are various degrees of "fake" news. One could argue that "suits are back" [submarine] is fake news as well.
[submarine] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
How about a direct approach: Governments should stop lying 24/7 to their citizens; Corporate Media needs to get off (rather kicked off) the privileged 'Fourth Estate' pedastal; and education and mental health issues are taken [as] central and fundamental issues to address.
That would do it.
And far as I can deduce, civilization boils down to sanity and thoughtfulness. The rest is window dressing and 'product'. (I am /not/ dismissing the fruits here, but rather focusing on 'roots'.) What is necessary is sanity. What is necessary is the ability to think effectively. Individually and collectively. Everything else is secondary, and if the former are lacking, abundance in other dimensions only gets you so far and then it peters out.
You are telling me that this story and the great reporting about issues like this that the RT has published are horrible because they might impact American democracy?
The victims of the Flint crisis are some of the poorest Americans who do not have a voice in politics. For RT to report on issues of concern to the least empowered Americans may cause political change but that is not a bad thing. Papers that generate ad revenue from subscribers averaging over $100K per year in income simply won't write certain stories because nobody would care to read them.
Yes, IMO, they should. On net, they are not an honest "journalism" organization IMO and should suffer.
> Papers that generate ad revenue from subscribers averaging over $100K per year in income simply won't write certain stories because nobody would care to read them.
State media outlets can afford to lose tons of ad revenue for their cause. They create a remarkable simulation of the press that they exercise considerable editorial control over.
Once our government learns that the consequence for subverting the trust of their citizenry is chaos, things will get better. But not until then. These people work for us, not the other way around.
Other than the one thing for which there is some evidence, all of these are conspiracy theories so perhaps you're making your point but not in the way you'd like.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clint...
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/18/politics/fbi-dossier-carter-pa...
You've proven GP's point.
Edit: here is a source backing up the claims about Fusion GPS https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/07/11...
What's strange is that you cited as a source a newspaper article you don't agree with and which not only doesn't support but discredits your original claim. Then you spin wild conspiracy theories essentially claiming that Fusion GPS is an arm of the Kremlin without any sources.
Also, the entire point of providing links is to back claims, you need to now provided additional links to the ones you just made. (EDIT: Now provided. Thank you).
I'm still baffled why these reasonable concerns, no context being provided, is receiving a ridiculous number of downvotes.
According to this article in Mother Jones from October 31, 2016 (this is the first mainstream media article I have seen that directly references/quotes the dossier): http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave...
Steele denied in October 2016 that his "US company" client (the DNC) instructed him to go to the FBI. But then again, Mark Elias has been denying that the DNC funded this dossier for a year:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/10/25/fusion-gps-fallou... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/10/fbi-chief-gi...
In June 2016, a request to the Fisa court for surveillance of the Trump campaign was turned down. In July, the dossier was delivered to the FBI. In October, the Fisa surveillance request was granted. However, this Fisa court request was NOT about Carter Page - Page had been under FBI surveillance since a FISA court ruling in 2014: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-governm...
> requested the meeting with Donald Trump Jr under pretenses of having damaging info on Clinton
This is a major claim to make without any solid substantiation.
From your “edit” link:
> Fusion GPS says it had no involvement in the meeting although it did work on a lawsuit that involved Veselnitskaya for more than two years. The firm’s work on the Trump dossier was on a different timeline. Nevertheless, Trump’s legal team is already conflating the two issues as part of their defense of the president’s son.
In this case, there are plenty of factions which are capable of profiting from that chaos. It's not an accident, it's their preferred outcome. Mostly factions within the Republican party fighting against the "permanent state".
Seems bullish for advertising. I've chuckled at the fact Facebook tells its advertisers how amazing advertising Facebook is, while at the same time saying to the public that it's ludicrous to think Facebook had any impact on the election.
[1] I wouldn't say "won" but I would say "definitely helped" - there are a large number of other forces that contributed much, much more to the GOP win than Russia.
Like Hillary being the worst candidate in a lifetime.
Would a good candidate brag about grabbing pussies, and attack a gold star family?
But hey, email.
I mean, come on, a lot of us here know how web sites work. For a major country's spy agency, it would be trivially easy to automate account sign up and posting. Is it that hard to imagine? And when every dumb Joe on the planet is likely to believe the first thing they read that strategically appeals to their emotions? You do the math.
Who stands to benefit or avoid harm from such a belief? Arguably the people responsible for the national circumstances that lead the population to vote for someone like Trump.
Growing wealth inequality? No, it's Russia
Questionable foreign wars? No, it's Russia
Massively deprived communities across the states? No, it's Russia
Off-shored working/middle class jobs? No, it's Russia
The Russia narrative is extremely attractive to those whose policies have been very unpopular with a large segment of society. Providing this can be kept up through the Trump presidency than the Democrat (and Republican to some extent) lines do not need to change. More of the same. It is not that people don't like our policies, they were just duped by Russia.
To believe that the effects of certain policies have been just rosy for a large section of Americans, is naive. To try and dismiss their views and blame them for being unknown puppets of Russia, is cruel and wrong.
note: I am not suggestion that Russia were not involved in some way in the US election.
The problem is that you also need the gutted Voting Rights Act, rampant GOP gerrymandering, and the ridiculous favouring of Southern States by the Electoral College to get the win - and those have much more of an effect than a Russian finger on the scales.
Stop right there. This is not the place for that. We all know the who desperately claims that again and again, using those exact same weasel words, and he's a pathological liar, so you embarrass and discredit yourself by parroting him.
Right-oh, king of the internet. I'll do exactly as you command.
Your and Trump's implication is that you're not going to say it yourself (even though you do), so you don't have to prove or defend it or stand by it, and it's not your fault if it's wrong -- the only thing you're saying is that people have said it, but you won't say who, and you won't say where you heard it or if you believe it, and you won't say whether they're full of shit or not, but we're not allowed to question or criticize you because your statement that "people have said" may be literally true in some sense, and you're staying above it all by not talking sides, just reporting what people have said, so it's unfair to shoot you as the messenger if it turns out what "people have said" is wrong.
There is absolutely no value to any sentence beginning with "People have said ..." Trump's words that you're literally parroting are the weaseliest of weasel words, the exact same words he used to self aggrandize and deflect responsibility for lying about a grieving mother in his vicious personal attack on a gold star family.
"She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me. But plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet. And it looked like she had nothing to say. A lot of people have said that."
"A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber."
"People have said they’ve never seen this ever before in China."
"When you look at really what’s happened since Charlottesville, a lot of people are saying – and people have actually written – ‘Gee, Trump may have a point.'"
'A lot of people are saying...': How Trump spreads conspiracies and innuendoes
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-lot-of-people-are-...
Following the country’s most deadly mass shooting, Donald Trump was asked to explain what he meant when he said President Obama either does not understand radicalized Muslim terrorists or “he gets it better than anybody understands.”
“Well,” Trump said on the “Today Show” Monday morning, “there are a lot of people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. A lot of people think maybe he doesn’t want to know about it. I happen to think that he just doesn’t know what he’s doing, but there are many people that think maybe he doesn’t want to get it. He doesn’t want to see what’s really happening. And that could be.”
In other words, Trump was not directly saying that he believes the president sympathizes with the terrorist who killed at least 49 people in an Orlando nightclub. He was implying that a lot of people are saying that.
At a rally in New Hampshire in September, a man in the audience loudly declared President Obama a Muslim and “not even an American,” then asked Trump to get rid of Muslim “training camps.”
“You know, a lot of people are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there,” Trump responded. “We’re going to look at that and plenty of other things.”
“Some people say it’s worse than stupidity. There’s something going on that we don’t know about,” Trump said in Hilton Head. “And you almost think — I’m not saying that, and I’m not a conspiracy person. . . . Half th...
Sean Hannity has said it. The quote is attributed. My bad for not spending 5 mins to google it first.
The fact that you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel of lying Trump sycophants as the source of your misinformation explains why you were so reluctant to say who those "people who have said" were. That totally undermines your argument and proves you're Putin's unwitting useful idiot.
So now we all know where you get the lies and weasel words and Russian propaganda that you parrot, and why the talking points you parrot are intellectually dishonest, worthless and not worth considering. Please go back to /r/TheDonald where you belong. This is not the place for parroting Sean Hannity or spreading Trump's birther conspiracy, pizzagate or crowd size bullshit.
There is also no corresponding scrutiny of American "news" outlets and the heavily biased stories that they run with impunity. We really don't have news anymore, it's just partisan entertainment. RT is at least as newsworthy as any of the major US news outlets, and I think quite appropriately focuses on issues of concern to the poorest and least politically empowered Americans.
We've seen similar levels of cognitive dissonance in the UK after Brexit. Russia, Low Information Voters, etc etc. It's all just excuses. Examine your policies and your candidates first.
Let me rewrite your post so it's more honest about where you got your misinformation from:
"Sean Hannity has said that the "Russia won the election" conspiracy theory is the Democrat's equivalent of "Obama was born in Kenya" birthers."
I'll leave it to you to explain why you didn't write that in the first place, and why anyone should ever take your seriously.
Individuals exercising their first amendment rights do not have the same reach as a propaganda apparatus of a major nation state. It's ridiculous to say that one person has the same reach as a government propaganda machine.
Not the sort of thing that a grassroots could easily manage; buying a few hundred ads was just a small part of the wider propaganda and sabotage.
Twitter has just been complete shit at figuring out what happened on their platform, anyways; half of their 'identifications' come from, "Facebook told us this account was a sockpuppet on their platform..."
Might RT simply have the goal of getting a foothold in American news reporting by serving an underserved market? If learning more about the drastic mishandling of the Flint Michigan water crisis stirs class conflict in America, are you telling me you think that is a bad thing? It's what is missing from our democracy!
What, exactly is the underserved market here? Who exactly are they serving with propaganda?
What is the propaganda you are referring to? You seem to assume all of RT's content is propaganda but can't name or link to any stories that qualify. Lol.
It's like Voice of America. They can break real stories of corruption and dysfunction, but I'd like to see them investigated and picked up by a more impartial source before I'm going to give them much headroom.
Which is another reason why local journalism is so important and criminalizing/demonizing it for being unflattering is so heinous.
One could argue their reach is more efficient than pulling out a million dollar 30 second ad aired to less people. Also consider the millions in marketing materials that RT don't need.
I think there's room for debate on what draws the line between "propaganda subverting the election" and "leveraging our modern scary-effective digital marketing techniques to spread your electoral message." Does it only count as an attack on democracy if a foreign state or individual is doing it?
Both parties made use of shops like Correct the Record in the last election, what does it mean when in addition to the campaigns, wealthy and influential individuals can exert even more reach in the next election? Is it only propaganda if the message is factually false or misrepresented, or is it enough to have enough money to spend or leverage over the platform that you crowd out all alternate dialogue? Is there a definable ethical spectrum for subversive digital messaging? I think there's plenty of subversive messaging online already, that's advertising. Personally, I think creating fake Americans on twitter to influence the American election crossed whatever the line is. It fails the smell test, it stinks of deception.
it's not purely about reach. A foreign government acting to affect elections to destabilize and weaken a country is very different from greedy citizens attempting to enrich themselves with political subterfuge. At the very least, rich American corporatists want to ensure the continuity of American hegemony; it's the cornerstone of their empires. Russian government interference is about deteriorating American hegemony; a system from which Twitter is a beneficiary.
e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-money-funds-...
It's still a false equivalence inasmuch as a rich American is spending money in a way to maintain the status quo; rich Americans like the Koch Brothers benefit from American hegemony. They spend their money to enrich themselves, but they still want the US to remain in power.
A rival government, however, does not want the US to remain in power. As an American company, Twitter benefits from American hegemony, and will act to protect it.
That's the kind of stuff RT publishes most of the time! Read through the historical headlines. This is a very embarrassing and inappropriate move by Twitter, likely intended only to curry favor with American elected officials.
I think the fact that the core of our democracy was attacked with a vast and sophisticated operation by a foreign government to potentially prop up a candidate both friendly to and quite possibly compromised by that foreign government should lead to MORE fury than is currently happening.
This is nothing new though. For decades (perhaps longer), democracies have been subverted and are, unfortunately, a liability for many countries. Patriots see it as their duty to protect their countries by insulating themselves against this subversion and consolidating power. It's a dangerous trend.
You may want to investigate the voter ID / disenfranchisement question.
No one is arguing if it's new. The point is it was massive, sophisticated, and targeted. It was an organized attack. We can debate the history of election subversion some other time, but there is a real threat happening right now. Let's focus on that, yes?
What are you talking about?
The son of the candidate openly admitted to meeting with Russian foreign agents in order to secure a quid pro quo agreement (and that doesn't even touch on Flynn and Manafort). We have evidence of pen testing on voting infrastructure, we have copious amounts of evidence of psychological operations currently on-going from Russian services via social media.
This isn't about clinton, this is about defending the core of our democracy from foreign powers. It's obscene to try and shrug it off with such shallow cynicism.
Yet the "dossier" that was paid for via a quid pro quo arrangement is not of concern? IMHO both are very concerning.
> pen testing on voting infrastructure
Have you heard that an un-patched windows computer connected to an open internet connection will be pwned in minutes? This is only possible because of massive "pen testing" being done on all IP addresses.
So of course companies that manufacture voting equipment and have public IP addresses for web or email servers will be "pen tested".
Where will that traffic originate from? Probably in one of the many places where there is a lot of cyber fraud. Russia/Ukraine is one of those places. Without very hard, detailed evidence it is not reasonable to conclude that any such efforts were connected to the Russian government.
We have not been given any evidence, we've simply been told to believe this highly politicized narrative. I'm not ready to do that until there has been actual evidence.
> psychological operations currently on-going from Russian services via social media.
So you consider RT publishing stories about the Flint Water Crisis to be highly detrimental to the orderly nature of American society? News orgs are supposed to publish true stories that point out problems that need to be solved. It's sad and reminiscent of highly compliant citizens of a facist regime that anyone can take seriously the idea that stories in RT about Flint MI or about Laquan McDonald are endangering American stability.
Paid to an american firm by both the GOP and Dem campaigns. That is not the same as a quid pro quo with the intelligence service of a foreign government that is actively trying to interfere in an election
>So you consider RT publishing stories about the Flint Water Crisis to be highly detrimental to the orderly nature of American society? ...
That came totally out of no where. I'll let you argue that with your self all you want.
You can't throw around concerns about divisiveness or "sowing destablization" without asserting your view on stories that are true and legitimately concerning.
I suppose you think those are harmful to keeping everyone happy with their lot in life too?
Also, how are you going to "fix" people being dumb? We've been trying to figure that one out for a long time and it's going to take a while to make progress on that front.
Please explain where the "pollution" occurred. Over the past few years I have read RT from time to time and most of the stories were simply about negative aspects of American life that do not get much exposure/focus from American news organizations because they are not flattering. Things like the Flint Michigan water crisis, other areas of failed infrastructure, etc.
For many Americans, reading RT would be likely to create valuable awareness of important issues and make that person more likely to vote in his/her own best interest in the next election.
To say that RT has "polluted" the marketplace of ideas you really have to back that statement up with what you think "pure" ideas are that Americans should be exposed to before casting their vote.
Are you reading the Russian language articles they put out?
https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage_en...
https://euvsdisinfo.eu
What are the "memes" (per Dawkins' definition) that RT intends to publicize? Which of those are false, which are true but misleading, and which are actually true?
Does publishing stories that might make some voters angry with the status quo constitute being "fake news"?
Is RT "fake news" simply because of its origin? Or because of its content? Or because of the timing of its content? Specific examples please.
Under whatever definition you would use to classify RT as fake news, are any American news orgs (NYT, WaPo, CNN, Fox News, WSJ, etc.) also fake news? How do you draw the line? Is it based on content that is false, true but misleading, or true?
Do you believe that certain ideas are dangerous for Americans to believe? Should reading the writings of some of history's dictators be banned? Should violent music lyrics be banned?
All their articles related to Ukraine: Donbass, Crimea, MH-17.
They're repeating same lies designed by Kremlin hosts.
I'm not looking to RT for useful coverage of issues in the Ukraine, but when it writes about the Flint Water crisis or police brutality, it might actually have a less biased view than the American press. I hope this isn't actually the case but I fear it may be.
Specific examples, please: Exactly what have they gotten right that she got wrong? What have they covered that she missed? When have they brought attention to it when she ignored it? Who have they interviewed who she wouldn't invite to her show?
You yourself just insisted on specific examples, so I would expect you to provide the same courtesy and evidence to back up your own claims that you demand of other people. Why didn't you?
If you don't have any evidence for your claim, just say so, and don't try to deflect instead. Better yet, don't make claims you're not willing to provide any evidence to support, in the same breath that you demand other people to provide specific examples!
I used the example of the Flint Water crisis not to compare RT's coverage to the coverage offered by US media, but to use an example of a very embarrassing thing about the US that is the sort of thing that RT is inclined to publish.
Most people consider it quite reasonable that Maddow covered the Flint water crisis. But there are many other similar issues that do not get any press coverage by the US "news and entertainment" media.
One thing I will say about the US media's coverage of the Flint Water crisis is that a great effort was made to focus only on the problem in Flint, and a small number of officials who acted irresponsibly in the matter.
In reality, many elected officials make similar judgments all the time across all areas of government. It's just rare that we have something as reliable as a simple water pollution test to observe the harm that was caused.
So the real issue with the Flint water crisis is how did incentives come to exist that led Flint's infrastructure to fail so horribly? Where else in the US are similar incentives causing the decline of other important infrastructure? What can we as citizens do to help fix the incentives so that our leaders take it upon themselves to fight for proper upkeep of key infrastructure?
And, even more pragmatically, how many city water supplies are tainted by lead and other chemicals? Have all tests been administered and interpreted properly, etc. I recently learned (for example) that lead level testing in many cities has been highly inaccurate and has led to artificially low readings. This stuff has a tremendous public health impact.
It would be great to have a news organization (RT or other) whose goal it was to publish embarrassing things about the US, its failing infrastructure, and its corrupt politicians. For some reason we are told (by the charlatans) that in order to be patriotic we must defend those things against any foreign assault.
In reality, we in the US would benefit tremendously from increased scrutiny of our nation, its leaders, and its infrastructure. Why is Paul Ryan worth $8M after earning a paltry public servant's salary for his entire career? I'd like to know, and I think chances are if the truth were discovered he'd be run out of office with pitchforks.
Were you aware that Rachel Maddow got an Emmy for her coverage of the Flint water crisis? Or is that a big surprise to you?
Since you apparently were not aware of Rachel Maddow's coverage of the Flynt water crisis or the award she won for it, why don't you watch her Emmy-award-winning reporting for the answers to those questions you asked me to deflect from answering the questions I asked you first, to see if she's already answered some of your questions?
MSNBC’s complete coverage of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan – the health threat to residents, and the response from Governor Rick Snyder and others: http://www.msnbc.com/flint-michigan-water-crisis
Rachel Maddow wins Emmy for Flint water crisis coverage: http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2017/10/rachel_mad...
"Maddow persistently reported on the city's lead-in-water crisis in December 2015, weeks before Gov. Rick Snyder declared Genesee County in a state of emergency."
"A month later, the cable news host visited Flint, holding a live town hall broadcast at the Brownell/Holmes STEM Academy on the city's north side to speak with residents, educators, researchers and politicians, including Mayor Karen Weaver, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha and Virginia Tech Professor Dr. Marc Edwards."
"Maddow also spent time speaking with Flint residents, including master plumber Harold Harrington and activist-turned-mayoral candidate Arthur Woodson."
Since you presume to know so much about RT's "less biased" coverage of the Flint water crisis, then please tell me exactly when RT started to cover the Flynt water crisis, how many minutes of coverage they gave it, and what awards they won for their coverage, if any.
How does their coverage compare to Rachel Maddow's, and how is it "less biased" as you claim without proof? Give me SPECIFIC examples of how they were better and less biased. Links to evidence please, not diversions.
To quote your own words: "you really have to back that statement up". I will. Won't you?
Some more specific examples and links to evidence for you:
This article shows when other media outlets like MSNBC started covering it, but it doesn't mention anything about RT. You seem to think you know what the facts are in regard to that, so will you please share them with us? Again: Post evidence for your claims, don't just make more claims without evidence again!
ANALYSIS: How Michigan And National Reporters Covered The Flint Water Crisis: https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2016/02/02/analysis-ho...
"Among national media figures, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow stood out for her extensive coverage in December 2015, when she devoted far more time to the situation in Flint than every other major television network combined."
"More Than 68 Minutes devoted to the crisis on MSNBC's primetime programming in December and the first four days of January -- all of which took place on Rachel Maddow's show. That was far more than all the other broadcast and cable networks' primetime coverage of Flint, combined."
The evidence is overwhelming:
I think I had heard about Maddow's Emmy but forgotten about it. Please note that I did not claim that RT's coverage was superior to any other specific coverage, just that RT tends to cover many more of that kind of embarrassing, unflattering story that generally is not part of the major media/entertainment companies' coverage.
My point was not about the Flint crisis specifically, it was about the importance of those unflattering kinds of stories to the democratic process.
How many times do I have to ask you for evidence? You're the one who first demanded specific examples, then reneged multiple times when asked to provide the same thing yourself.
You want to have it both ways: in your mind, RT's extremely biased and politically motivated reporting of the Kremlin's official position on Ukraine doesn't disqualify their non-award-winning coverage of Flynt that you can't even produce examples of, but the bias you perceive when Rachel Maddow dares to criticize Trump by reporting his own words and deeds in her coverage of the Russian scandal totally disqualifies all of her award-winning reporting on the Flynt water crisis. Bullshit, comrade.
That's totally dishonest and hypocritical of you. You asked for specific examples, and now that I gave you some you don't want to discuss them, and still refuse to prove any specific examples of your own. I gave you those specific examples that you asked for. So I wish you would provide the same when asked again and again. I'll give you another try, now.
Please give me links to those RT articles about the Flynt water crisis that you claim are unbiased and better than Rachel Maddow's coverage, and give me links to Rachel Maddow's reporting on the Flynt water crisis that show she's biased.
Otherwise admit you don't have any evidence, even though you demand it from other people. Your stonewalling and deflecting and false equivalencies means it's true you have no evidence, and you're ignoring the evidence I gave you, but you don't have the intellectual honesty to admit it.
At least you've admitted that you're guilty of whataboutism, even though you don't understand what the term actually means.
Your own words:
"OK I'm guilty."
"Specific examples please."
You're really trying to have it both ways, aren't you, comrade?
The issue here is that we have an entire generation that was raised in an environment where having stupid beliefs didn't matter, since news came from mostly "expert" sources, which is now living in a world where a big part of the information you give and receive comes from sites like Facebook or Twitter. If it's an education problem, it's unsolvable: you can't easily teach 50 year old the way they thought about media their entire life was wrong.
It seems like a fair portion of the US government now strongly believes that Russian social media propaganda is attempting to destabilize the United States government, with Twitter being a dominant platform for spreading the disinformation. So I'm sure there was quite an incentive to block some of this in some form.
The US has its own propaganda networks, of course. Russia's response to them tends to be far harsher. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/moscow-turns-off-voice-...)
So you expect companies to have jingoistic political allegiance to the jurisdiction that they happen to have been founded in? That is actually quite scary.
> strongly believes that Russian social media propaganda is attempting to destabilize the United States government
The key word here is "destabilize". If the NYT were to write a story about the water pollution in Flint Michigan and also break a story that officials covered up polluted water in 20 other major US cities, would that cause "destabilization"? I certainly hope it would! More than a few people should not win office again after such a fiasco.
The purpose of journalism is to be adversarial to powerful interests, and to share the truth (even if it's unflattering) with the public, so that corrective actions can be taken... corrective actions may involve changing the status quo.
As for "disinformation", nobody has pointed out what stories should be considered disinformation, and whether they were completely false, or if they were true but misleading.
Russia shutting down VOA is not terribly relevant here. The VOA is obviously propaganda if you listen for 10-15 minutes, while RT has focused on some important issues for the poorest Americans that do not get reliable coverage from other big media outlets.
We'll never know is how much Twitter management agreed to drop RT/Sputnik advertising based on what they felt was right (due to whatever reason), what was right or good for the business, or whether they did this largely due to pressure from the government. The main thing we know is that Twitter's corporate reaction here is obviously different than, say, Twitter's corporate reaction to their role in the Arab Spring.
Most of the time, in general, I think RT / Sputnik do report actual events, but with a very heavy pro-Kremlin slant (so not unlike VOA in this regard). However, they dip enough of their toes into the Infowars style conspiracy theory stuff (in part because relying on native disaffected groups is part of their strategy -- http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2015/57133... ) that I wouldn't trust an article only sourced there at all. If RT "broke" that officials covered up polluted water in 20 other major US cities, for instance, I'd look elsewhere to confirm that story.
Of course, as would I. It is not my understanding that the allegations of disinformation have to do with fake stories RT has allegedly broken. If so the number of stories to read to gauge the accuracy of the claims would be much smaller :)
I think this is the current boogey-man to go after. I think it's a useful tool for politicians (DNC, Hillary Clinton, Democrats and Republicans - none of them wanted Trump where he is today) to bury their heads in the sand and say that it wasn't their fault that they got the election so wrong. They can point to Russia and ignore their own shortcomings that in my opinion put people off of voting for what they "should" have voted for. Given the choice of a deeper soul-searching or blaming someone else, humans usually choose to point the finger at someone else.
Did Russia/Russians attempt to influence the election? Absolutely. I'm sure most major powers in the world did, in one way or another. They'd be silly not to at least consider it, in the same way that I'm sure the United States attempts to serve its own interests via other countries' elections. But I don't think it's anywhere near as effective as politicians seem to want to make it appear.
Right, you can't do any of that because then your shareholders would know about your hugely inflated growth numbers and your stock would collapse. I wonder, Twitter is so much worse for society than anyone ever knew, and they have been so quiet and complacent in the Russian takeover of the USA, that maybe they have acted illegally? Is it possible Twitter has been lying about bot account numbers and inflating their userbase counts to increase share value?
Okay, kick off the ads made by Russian enemies of the USA, that's a good move. But why did you allow it in the first place? Because of the money, and because nobody thought at Twitter than Russians buying political ads is a bad idea? The purchased ads weren't even the main issue - it's the millions and millions of bots echoing racist and hateful things to divide and wreck the US.
Fuck twitter.
This isn't enough. Apologize for the Russian takeover that you let happen. Don't donate that money to some cause about civic debates in the future. America is under attack right now. Give that money to someone who can stop the Russians because it's not you or your civic debates.
Did Google run political ads that were purchased by other countries and intended to deceive the US electorate? If so then YES + a lot more than apologize.
> Paper apologizing for people writing on it?
There's no need for this. This is a major issue and I'm taking it very seriously. The "it's a joke bro" attitude here on HN, in your comment, all over reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc., is sickening. It plays right into the Russian books - make the Americans argue about it and make jokes and make fun of the people who care!
Just from a quick search [1], yes. I don't think megous's comment has a "it's a joke bro" attitude. You're criticizing a company that provides a free service for taking the due diligence to prune its paying clients of anyone that they don't think should be a paying client. This has nothing to do with inflated growth numbers, it's about Twitter making the decision that they do not want state-funded Russian companies advertising on their platform. The bots issue is a completely different thing that I'm sure Twitter has an entire team of devs devoted to. It's not as easy as flipping a switch. They need to make sure they aren't banning real users of their service just because language and posting patterns used by those bots are based on those of real users.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/09...
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html
"This actually isn't a slippery slope because $REFUTATION" is better than "That's just a slippery slope fallacy".
Have you ever considered that those so-convincing bots aren't actually bots at all and might be so convincing because they're actual people? Always makes me chuckle how quick people are to call others machines or paid-actors because an unsavoury opinion is held.
I also use the term bot lightly, to include 'human being following orders' from a government or other organization.
> Always makes me chuckle how quick people are to call others machines or paid-actors because an unsavoury opinion is held.
WHAT? How dare you accuse me of this? "because an unsavoury opinion" what is this? That has nothing to do with this. I am accusing accounts of being bots because they are created automatically, they don't tweet normally like humans do, they follow clearly discernible patterns, etc. These bots are focused on sewing hatred and racism in the US.
I would never do what you are insinuating and it's insane that you think I would. Russians are using technology and paid actors to influence public opinion in the US. This is not based on some "unsavoury opinion" I didn't like in a tweet. This is the reality.
if you compare the amount of money allegedly spent by "the russians" VS the amount of money spent by "the americans" themselves, talking about "the russian takeover" of Twitter or Facebook is pure hysteria.
Americans need to stop blaming the Russians for all their problems. Most Russians could not give a damn about US, most are way too busy making hands-meet right now.
The Russians didn't create or foster a divisive environment where everything is about insignificant petty differences. The Russians do not own CNN, ABC, MSNBC or Fox news who are making billions out of exploiting american divisions on every matter possible. The Russians didn't create that society of outrage and entertainment, the Russians didn't shape american society.
The amount of money is a single metric and not what we should use to base every decision on or understand an entire complex issue from a single source (money). The Russian ads were very well crafted to be easily sharable and to be viral. The amount of money they spent has little to do with how much influence they have.
Your entire post is "whataboutism". What about the Americans being bad? What about CNN being bad? What about ABC being bad? What about most Russians just trying to make ends meet? What about MSNBC? What about Fox news?
I don't care.
The Russians are actively doing this on Twitter, right now. The others are bad too. That doesn't mean anything at all about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Whataboutism, a classic Russian distraction tactic, by the way.
I also wonder what about lobbyism in general. Why is this allowed and the other not. Because it’s good for economy? What if it’s still bad for society?
I think we can both agree that we don't want @jack to be the arbiter of that...
And yes, it's not unreasonable for nation-state actors to take steps to thwart American intervention in whatever.
Though often, the state in question is not elected, which begs a serious question of legitimacy -> if you're going to make a 'moral equivalence' argument of tit-for-tat interference ... it's hard to do if one side is a dictatorship. :)
Political opposition figures, business figures and members of the press are murdered or imprisoned arbitrarily.
Media networks and large businesses are arbitrarily confiscated.
Primary media channels are direct forms of state propaganda.
State agencies are deeply systematically corrupt - always in the control of the friends of Putin, taking massive kickbacks, using state power to force deals. Sochi is a good example of how these shennanigans work. See the CBC expose on Sochi construction - kickbacks were up to 85% on construction (i.e. state pays $500M for a building, most of it goes back to the buyer, a 'friend of Putin'), and 15% goes into actual construction.
So it's not 'North Korea' but it's not a normal democracy, not by a stretch.
One could surely argue that America's democracy is somewhat corrupted as well.
I guess it's all a matter of manner and degree :)
I mean industry lobbyism by mega-corporations with the single goal of growth and financial gain without respecting the effects on society and nature (which in turn has an impact on society in terms of health and wellbeing)...
What would they call walking the plank: transplanking? Going down with the ship: defloating?
Reminds me of my company’s HR department, where employees don’t quit, they “separate.” We don’t train, we “in-service”. Etc.
https://twitter.com/M_Simonyan/status/923519609269116928
edit: as questioned by comments below, there is no confirmation this is authentic yet.
this is not a confirmation but...
Now they are embarrassed.
Hacker News is a community. You don't have to use your real name, of course, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEMA_camps_conspiracy_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theo...
Even president 45 fell for this admittedly pathetic troll:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/22/politics/donald-trump-retw...
It does seem like there are a fair bit of analysts in United States intelligence (Clint Watts being on that side of the fence, essentially) who strongly believe that RT or Sputnik are less media sources, and are instead funnels of disinformation propaganda designed to destabilize the United States government. Whatever your personal opinion of these media sources are, in this light, Twitter's action here is hardly surprising.
For example: https://www.rt.com/op-edge/272920-us-army-jade-helm/
Which gets us back to the issue of Russian propaganda through social networks.
Washpo admit they got it wrong, at least.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/12/...
Why is it that you treat one case as "look at their evil propaganda" and the other as "oh gee practices could be better"?
Let me be honest with you. I'm European so I shouldn't really have a stake here. But I look at the world and what I see is that US media is infinitely more influential in Europe than Russian media. Infinitely more influential in Europe than even European media, and that concerns me. So your "oh gee practices could be better but we're the good guys trust me" doesn't fly with me.
Can you say the same for RT and Sputnik?
What about Fox News? Did they apologize?
> have engaged in considerable soul searching.
It is my opinion that absolutely nothing changed. It's still the same people with the same interests.
Thanks for the link, I'll read it.
What do you mean?
Both the NYTimes and the Washington Post published major editorials saying how they got it wrong. I'm sure other papers followed as well, but they were some of the more notable.
And it was hardly one story - it was a whole narrative about how they trusted that the White House was giving them information in good faith, and how they should have paid more attention to signs that faith was misplaced.
And yes - that faith was misplaced, and yes they should have paid more attention.
It is my opinion that absolutely nothing changed
Well, both papers became much more doubtful about any claims from the Bush administration after that.
And you may have noticed they were pretty harsh on Obama's claims of how easy health care would be. They also seem to be asking questions about some of the Trump administrations claims - or at least he seems to think they are being very unfair to him.
Your representations (in this thread and elsewhere) simply fail to accurately reflect the facts.
"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"
In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58127-2004Aug...
There is still the question though: have other nations participated in this creation of news? Probably so, so perhaps the spot light shouldn't be on Russia only, but more generalized into this problem. But, the problem exists nonetheless and taking action is reasonable.
If they were being reasonable they would be listing a lot more organizations that spread propaganda than just RT.
This looks completely reactionary.
The ultimate goal would be to have the elections questioned by the losers (whoever the winner was) in order to diminish US influence abroad as the winner would be busy with internal affairs. It was probably a bet against Hillary winning since she had a more hawkish international vision.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/julian-assange-wikileak...
So why didn't wikileaks mention that?
They can't publish what they don't receive.
Consider something. Let's use Trump as an example, since the discussion of 'why aren't they releasing stuff on [the other side]' is generally connected to him. Imagine somebody had a treasure trove of leaked and compromising information on Trump. And they then submitted this information to Wikileaks. As the weeks and months passed by, it became clear to them that Wikileaks was not going to publish this information. Do you think they would not submit this to other media outlets? US media outlets would do absolutely anything for this sort of information.
I'm curious to see where my logic may be failing me.
Other outlets are accepted [by general public] to have already been compromised wrt bias.
Up until the Trump campaign - Wikileaks was considered to be an unbiased leak of private and/or confidential information.
The name "Wiki" even intentionally evokes the name Wikipedia, the (slightly biased) generalist source of information that appears at the top of many of our search results.
In many cases, Wikileaks is actually worse. Seeing MSNBC or Fox News flash on the screen, we know the bias put forth by the company. We don't know Assange's bias. Correction, we do now.
To be honest, I'm curious to see how your logic even equated Wikileaks to other media outlets in the first place.
If I take your response as the answer then it would imply you believe that somebody would choose to simply not publish substantive leaks if they couldn't get them published by wikileaks. However, I'm sure you don't believe that, so that must be a straw man - leading me to believe that you probably are simply choosing to not answer the question.
Your entire Parent post is centered around a false equivalency between MSM outlets and Wikileaks.
Here's a similar assumption I'll throw your way: Parent personally slighted you and/or your belief system, and caused you to react this aggressively to my comment.
If I were to employ the same non-sequitur logic you used about myself further, I would reckon you are a shill.
I'm just asking why you think this and in particular why our hypothetical leaker would not simply contact another organization for publication if Wikileaks failed to do so? Many of the biggest leaks in recent times have not come from Wikileaks. The Panama Papers were published by Süddeutsche Zeitung. Snowden's NSA and global surveillance leaks were brought to the public attention through contact with Glenn Greenwald.
I'd actually even take this a step further. Wikileaks is under an implicit, but mandatory, obligation to publish such materials if they were given them. Imagine our leaker did simply take the materials to e.g. Glenn Greenwald and published our hypothetical groundbreaking leaks. A condition of said leaks could also be publication of the fact that they were provided to Wikileaks who chose to not publish them. That would, overnight, destroy Wikileaks as an organization.
The minute anyone can prove that WL withheld anything newsworthy to suit its own political goals, WL is done. This has not happened. Further, anyone who leaked something big about Trump to WL (such as his taxes) would clearly want to see them exposed, and would not sit by and wait for Trump to win while the damning materials went unpublished.
Assange stated that the data was requested by Cambridge Analytica knowing they were hired by the Trump campaign for normal opposition research. I consider withholding that information alone (the fact that the guys Trump's campaign hired attempted to break the law and were rebuffed) as quite impactful. Trump is quite tight with Brad Parscale, as he was the "Campaign Digital Director" in charge of these things.
They released a bunch of info claimed to be mails from the inner echelons of the AKP (ruling Islamist party) that turned out to be an archive of a public Yahoo group used by random Turks to bitch about things including politics.
If they'd have hired a basic Turkish speaker to look at the leak, they'd have avoided being burned. Instead, they decided to get into a spat with an actual journalist and researcher who's been working against Erdogan for years and tried to paint them as Erdogan shills.
They all do the same stuff.
That said, what has WikiLeaks published that has turned out untrue?
[fixed Pedestal/Podesta autocomplete]
http://www.newsweek.com/republicans-trump-russia-dossier-cli...
Allegedly also partially "funded by an unknown Republican during the GOP primary."
> That said, what has WikiLeaks published that has turned out untrue?
I don't think anybody is arguing that WikiLeaks is posting fake news or untrue information - the argument is that WikiLeaks is curating the information it releases in order to send a specific message.
No, not like that at all.
The claim there is: All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA's human ("HUMINT") and electronic ("SIGINT") spies in the seven months leading up to France's 2012 presidential election.
That's dramatically different to actively trying to (a) make US citizens lose faith in the US election system and, (b) influence the election outcome.
Reading the CIA leak, it seems like pretty sensible questions. The ethics of spying during an election could be argued, but I think it is entirely reasonable for every country to be trying to understand similar things listed in that document ("What policies do they promote to help boost France's economic growth prospects?", "What are their opinions on the German model of export-led growth?" etc).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
[2] http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/3...
The US interferes with elections and those states combat those attempts. Other states interfere with US elections, and we must combat those attempts as well. Welcome to the game, not playing is not an option.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-38168281
I don't disagree with your characterization, but I'd also characterize cable news, the NYT, WaPo, etc. that way. These big "news and entertainment" companies do not offer any meaningful political dissent whatsoever.
You're the one who demanded specific examples, but then failed to provide any yourself, after being asked repeatedly.
What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow is an actress and not a journalist? What is your evidence that Rachel Maddow has zero journalistic acumen?
Specific examples!
By the way, have you looked up the definition of whataboutism yet, to which you have openly confessed of being guilty? It's not a "buzzword". It's not "juvenile". And it definitely doesn't mean "Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason" as you falsely claim. It's a logical fallacy particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda, comrade.
You also seem to be willfully misunderstanding why I brought up the Flint Water Crisis, which was simply to point out an example of the kind of embarrassing story that RT seems to focus on when reporting on US domestic issues. I brought up the Flint Water Crisis simply because it's one that most people are familiar with and the importance of journalistic coverage of the situation is obviously important to the democratic process.
I don't think Rachel Maddow is relevant at all to this discussion. If her coverage of the Flint issue was exemplary, that's great. It is not germane to my use of the Flint example at all. The fact that you and most people are aware of the Flint Water Crisis is because it happens to be one of the rare stories like this that did get significant big media coverage. Thankfully, Maddow determined that covering the story would not alienate her advertisers!
As for your dogged effort to keep this discussion about whataboutism and the minutia surrounding its definition, I have reviewed the definition and it seems to be relevant only to debates where there are two sides and one side uses the technique as a logical fallacy in an attempt to persuade or in order to distract from the truth of his opponent's argument.
The remarks I made that led to my being accused of whataboutism were some questions I asked about scenarios that seem to me to warrant a similar approach to determining the harms/benefits of journalism. Please re-read that last sentence again several times as it is critically important to my point.
I am not asking those parallel questions to distract attention from the claim you make that RT's reporting has caused destabilization, simply asking you to clarify (by applying your analytical approach to some similar scenarios) a more general rule for categorizing journalism as being harmful or helpful through the lens of political "stability" (a term which is highly loaded and rarely used without significant bias).
I understand how the technique you describe as whataboutism is sometimes used in a persuasive argumentation scenario argued by two partisans. But in this case you are the only partisan. I consider the Russian government and the US government fairly morally similar, and I'm not interested in arguing the minutia of how the US is slightly better, because I don't disagree. My concern is whether RT helps or hurts the marketplace of ideas and the search for truth in the American political discourse, and my argument is that it helps in many obvious ways, while the specific harms that you and others claim exist cannot be supported by links to specific articles, etc. The many articles about embarrassing aspects of the US are very easy to find on RT, and I view those as helpful to American democracy rather than "destabilizing".
Since you seem to be one who views "stability" as a good thing no matter what, I was hoping that you would clarify when journalism that can be perceive to create destabilization is good vs when it is bad. Your simplistic view seems to be that regardless of all other factors, if the journalism was done by a journalist whose salary is paid by a foreign government, the journalism is bad and unhelpful, no matter any other factors. But by this definition the VOA is also all bad and unhelpful, so I think it's a pretty useless definition.
Again, since I think you might be trolling, I don't want to spend too much time trying to be thoughtful in my reply. In my view, propaganda is everywhere, and the reader must understand how to filter it from the truth. That is a core responsibility of citizenship. I'll often cross-reference NYT stories with a similar story in the Globe and Mail, since om...
Isn't it enough that the weaknesses of our own media needs work that we don't help to undermine with those who actively chip away at the basic tenets of an open society?
Exactly the point.
Look, there's this thing in western jurisprudence called "mens rea". It's what differentiates, say, first degree murder from manslaughter.
In this case, RT and Sputnik are clearly motivated by the desire to manipulate the US election. As you've already conceded, those other outlets are not. As a result, these represent different acts, and therefore it is not unreasonable for them to warrant different responses.
And what you're suggesting is that Twitter take sides in this, support US propoganda and suppress others... How is this different than RT?
Some are starting to talk about some of our mainstream journalists as belonging in a "special kind of journalistic hell(3)."
1-https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-f... 2-https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-... 3-https://www.salon.com/2016/09/20/betraying-snowden-theres-a-...
What a strange game. The only move to win is to cheat.
Please define the word destabilization. Does that mean changing the status quo? Would the NYT be guilty of destabilization if it published an expose revealing that officials in 20 US cities hid significant drinking water pollution from their citizens for years? Surely once published the article would destabilize politics in those cities significantly.
Similarly, suppose the NYT published Donald Trump's taxes, revealing information that was likely to create a multi-year impeachment effort. Would that destabilize the US? It's hard to argue it would make things more stable.
Did the NYT's publication of Judith Miller's reporting on Saddam's WMD that helped sell a war effort that killed and displaced millions of people and cost trillions of dollars cause "destabilization"?
Newspapers are supposed to publish information that leads to political change. That is the point of having a free press, so that ideas can be shared that can be vetted by the public and acted upon to make society better.
Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason? OK I'm guilty.
Your point would be a lot stronger if you are able to convey a consistent world view for analyzing those scenarios, or by explaining how the scenarios are different. I mention them because I think they are similar and ought to be analyzed similarly, but I'm open to persuasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destabilisation
Secondly, your whataboutism is an effort to change the subject away from the topic, a private company concluding that it didn't want RT+Sputnik's advertising money. It then ventures into not very good equivocation (Judith Miller was not the Times; indeed, she was forced to resign by the Times).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
Given this, I accept no burden of proof. It is what it is.
Of course Judith was forced to resign once the sloppy reporting was fact checked by people who did not work at the NYT. The NYT had to let Judith go to save face after it helped defeat the anti-war activists and other people who were cautious to believe George W. Bush's claims about Saddam.
Keep in mind that for a major company like the NYT firing one reporter is not a big deal at all. It should be shocking that simply firing one person is enough to make the journalistic scandal of the millennium go away.
If you think about it, your assertion that the alleged political motives of RT are inappropriate hinges upon your judgment that it is in Russia's national interest to undermine the legitimacy of powerful interests in the US, and (apparently) thus to weaken the US or put it at some sort of disadvantage.
I realize you are convinced that my views and comments fit some schema you feel duty-bound to try to refute, but I think that if you examine your belief system on the matter you will find that you simply feel loyalty to the status quo power structure in the US, which is closely aligned with its government. Thus you oppose any sort of disruptive or revolutionary behavior or ideas that might threaten this status quo that you are fond of.
Note that the status quo in the US is corporatism and militarism, and that there is really not a leftist movement of any stature in the US. HRC and Trump are both slight permutations of a more authoritarian version of Bush or Obama, since the nation has turned more toward authoritarianism as time has gone on.
Only if you view this authoritarian, militaristic course of action as being strongly in the US national interest is it possible to believe with full certainty that RT publishing stories that might appeal to the American far left or the most disempowered Americans is a bad thing. For only then does the amplification of those ideas/movements, etc., threaten anything that is a force of good.
In my view, the biggest weakness in the US is that there is very little dissent and we put far too much trust in our leaders, and apply far too little scrutiny to our institutions (public and private), allowing significant diversion of resources to various groups who benefit from the status quo.
Politicians should fear journalists and should fear the public finding out about their excesses, their side deals, and the true stories of how they became millionaires on $150K public servant salaries. If RT helps expose these fraudulent people for what they are, the US will be far better off for it. And yes, a consequence of some toppling of the existing power structures would probably be less global militarism, but I think it's hard to argue that our laying waste to so many countries abroad is remotely in the US national interest, but no disrespect intended if you do feel strongly that Trump's action in Yemen, etc., is bold and necessary to the world order.
Go learn the real definitions of the terms you're tossing around, instead of making up your own.
You're the one who actually claims to be guilty of whataboutism: "OK I'm guilty."
Are you proud of that? Do you wear it as a badge of honor? Those were your own words. Don't contradict yourself now by denying that you're not trying to misdirect.
As I pointed out in that more detailed comment, I was asking some questions about similar scenarios to try to understand the analytical approach that you are applying that lets you confidently judge certain journalism as harmful.
To further ruin the joke by over-explaining it, he wasn't literally asking you to define whataboutism, because you'd just given an excellent example of it, so his question was rhetorical, and your answer was not only redundant but also incorrect.
Your and his arguments could be labeled as “Tory” but it would be useless for me to point that out; id rather attempt to reach common ground or understanding.
You've also proven you don't know what the definition of whataboutism is. The fact that you don't happen to know the definition doesn't mean it's a "buzzword".
It's a logical fallacy particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda (which is the main point of this discussion).
Please look up the real definition before trying to incorrectly define it and confess to being guilty of it, because you don't even understand what you're confessing to.
The definition you gave was wrong, even though you are guilty of doing it yourself, and what you're doing is logically fallacious and intellectually dishonest.
I looked at the definition of whataboutism on Wikipedia, and now I think I understand what you are attempting to argue.
If person A says "Russia treats political enemies badly" and then person B replies "Well, the US puts its political enemies in Gitmo", you would call that a scenario where person B should have said something specifically to refute person A's statement, but instead made a parallel assertion that does not have any direct relation to the statement made by person A.
In your view, in order to refute the claim made by person A, someone would have to provide evidence that in fact Russia does not treat political enemies badly.
When someone is heavily partisan and makes the comment of person B above, the intent might be to deflect attention from person A's point. If you view person A and B as adversaries each trying to be objectively right in some highly logical world, then only a strict logical refutation of person A's point would suffice. The definition of whataboutism descries it as a logical fallacy, which is quite telling.
The truth is, both claims may be true. Person B's statement does not refute person A's statement, but it is not meant to. In reading through the comments that you and the other person claimed were whataboutism, I think your interpretation was that I was asking rhetorical questions that I thought had an obvious answer which should logically refute your assertion.
In fact, I was simply introducing a few scenarios that seem similar to me so that I could better understand how it was so easy for you both to make very broad (and seemingly impulsive) statements with strong implications about the "appropriate" political consequences of journalism.
I was hoping that one of you would explain to me some method of analysis that offered insight into all of those scenarios in addition to this Russia stuff.
It seems that you did not mean to make broad statements about journalism, only about RT specifically because RT is obviously guilty by virtue of its association with the Russian government.
To me that is not obvious, and so when I hear words used like "destabilization" or "terrorism" (these are both propaganda words and I heavily discount any statement containing either one) I have to wonder if perhaps the person making the argument has more of a persuasive motive than a desire to understand the situation or phenomenon in question.
You're trolling in bad faith, demanding people provide specific examples then refusing to provide any yourself, and making untrue blanket statements about cable news and then trying to excuse your ignorance by claiming you don't actually know anything about cable news and never watch it. Yet you claim to know so much about RT, but never provide any links to back up any of your claims about it, even after being repeatedly asked. You said that Rachel Maddow's coverage of Flint was suspect because she made an overreach in her coverage of Russia, yet you have no problem with RT broadcasting Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine and don't think that reflects on their coverage of Flynt, to which you conveniently can't find any references, so we just have to take your word.
Your arguments have no merit, because you're being intellectually dishonest and trolling. And this is not the place for that. Take it somewhere else where it will be appreciated like /r/The_Donald, if you're not going to stop it here.
You're the one who didn't know what the word "whataboutism" meant, and who posted an incorrect definition, yet with your very own words, you actually explicitly confessed to being guilty of whataboutism: "OK I'm guilty."
So do you still stand by your confession that you're guilty of "whataboutism", now that you've bothered to skim (but not understand) one article about it?
There is nothing "silly" or "made up" about the word "whataboutism". That's proven by the fact that there is a 15 page Wikipedia article with 116 citations in it, including references to "whataboutism" in the Oxford Living Dictionaries and Cambridge Dictionary.
What's "made up" is your incorrect definition that you gave for it: "Counter-factual scenarios that reveal your opinion to be illogical and cherry-picked for some emotional reason".
What exactly is so "silly" about this -- it seems pretty serious and on-topic to me, comrade:
Tactic: Propaganda technique
Type: Tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy)
Logic: Logical fallacy
Active period: Cold War–present
Prominent usage: Soviet Union propaganda, Russian propaganda, Russian annexation of Crimea, Russian military intervention in Ukraine, Donald Trump,
Related: Ad hominem, And you are lynching Negroes, The pot calling the kettle black, Red herring, The Mote and the Beam, Clean hands
Changing the subject is NOT winning the argument.
Get it?
Consider the international broadcasters like Voice of America, the BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle. These organisations are state-funded, broadcast to dozens of foreign countries via shortwave or satellite and often have explicit foreign policy goals. A government beaming news reports into a foreign (and often hostile) country is at the very least suspicious.
We know as a fact that the US has engaged in major international astroturfing campaigns, using large clusters of VPN nodes and thousands of bogus personae to influence public debate in foreign countries. There's a not-unreasonable argument that this capability is mainly being used to combat "extremism", but there's a huge amount of disagreement about what exactly constitutes "extremism".
Perhaps it's time for an international convention on psychological warfare? At the very least, it would be useful to have some kind of high-level debate on where we draw the line between providing an alternative viewpoint and engaging in hostile propaganda activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice
To me it makes perfect sense that when a foreign state actor is determined to be hostile to your country by your intelligence community, that you are going to stop accepting money from them.
Also seems (if RT is telling the truth) that the paid RT election propaganda on twitter was actually twitter's idea that they pitched to RT, so perhaps twitter got greedy and is complicit (as opposed to just having ran ads indiscriminately) and now they're trying to wash their hands to avoid a PR disaster.
Link: https://twitter.com/M_Simonyan/status/923519609269116928
I think it's not just about being state-funded, but "powerful interests" funded. Large corporations want to control public opinions just as much. US government doesn't sponsor CNN directly, but it itself as a business as well as its advertisers are vested in having one political outcome vs another. They are far from neutral.
As to the topic at hand, it all started with a PR campaign promoted by Clinton and the media organizations which backed her candidacy (to the point of handing her debate questions beforehand or smearing or silencing her opponents) that Russians significantly altered the results of the election, up to and including flipping the result completely.
We've heard for months Russians, Russians, Russians, "17 Intelligence agencies", piss dossier blackmail, secret meetings or coded gestures being signaled at some dinners and so on. It is a story many want to believe, because it explains their view of the world -- "my compatriots could not have possibly have voted how they did", or "my candidate was so good and experienced there is no way people could have voted for any other candidate". So there is a desire to believe in these conspiracy theories, simply because they provide an explanation for what happened.
As you said, Russia is interfering with elections, so are Americans, Chinese, anybody with money is going to trying to influence election results in US. They'd be stupid not to.
And I agree in general with the idea of identifying and stopping the influence as much as possible, so good on Twitter here. What is suspicious is this continuous obsession with Russia. I think it is a distraction and a waste of time. I think a better obsession would be an obsession with US. Say looking at what's happening here and why did so many people voted how they did. It has nothing to do with KGB. But then again I've accused of being a "Russian shill" since I don't seem to like Clinton and don't tow the party line here. So you know, take these words with a grain of salt (or maybe a shot of vodka).
You can check Sputnik and RT here: https://euvsdisinfo.eu
Anybody, who claims that RTs and Sputniks $274,100 spent during the campaign had a material effect on the elections should very well explain, how the Russians are getting orders of magnitude better ROI than everyone else. I'm all ears and I'm sure all the DC lobbyists too.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-presidentia...
But keep in mind that all of the projections based on data collection, historical trends, polling, etc., had Trump suffering a decisive loss up until several hours into election night.
In order for the description to give to be true, you have to believe that all of the pollsters, Nate Silver, etc., didn't know what they were doing. The thing is, they did actually know what they were doing.
Crediting Cambridge Analytica, RT, the Russian government, Donald Trump, or anyone else with some sort of strategic genius because Trump won is utterly ludicrous.
Trump's strategy was innovative in that it blended things that had traditionally been part of the Democrats' and Republicans' platforms, but at no point did anyone on Trump's side have any remote degree of certainty that it would succeed. Trump was outspent by 4:1 or even 5:1 by the Clinton campaign.
This is not because he had a far more efficient approach and enjoyed a comfy lead the whole time, but because he simply didn't have the support from donors needed to spend more than that (and wasn't willing or able to invest more of his own alleged wealth).
Trump's win was not really even a win in the sense that many of the voters in rust belt areas that he "won" from Hillary had voted for Obama previously. HRC's campaign felt that the rust belt was not an area where Hillary needed to do more campaigning, and it's not clear they were wrong in thinking that. Maybe Trump's gruff pro-American bluster was unbeatable there, and Hillary would have struggled to seem sympathetic to the economic struggles going on there.
But the point is that Trump simply chose a strategy of combining national defense "strong man" posturing with the typical rust belt "buy American" playbook that Democrats have been using for years. Yes it's a bit racist, but it was when Democrats used it too.
Trump's strategy almost didn't work, and everyone who expected it not to work was probabilistically right. It had very low chances of winning and came down to the moves made by both candidates in the final days before the election that drove turnout more than they influenced candidate choice.
Yes the leaked email stories hurt HRC, but I think that her refusal to address the issue head on when asked about it and to offer full transparency was a big mistake. It conveyed an elitism and arrogance that might very well have led a lot of former or lukewarm supporters to stay home.
My point is that it wasn't about the detailed analytics, it was about the big, slow trends of rust-belt economic hardship and the resulting resentments, and Trump managing to beat a very mediocre and uninspiring GOP field to win the primary with his populist message.
I'd actually been predicting the onset of an authoritarian, trade-protectionist trend for a while but I did not think Trump would beat such a strong and well-funded establishment candidate.
I say this because in all of the chaos about "Russian meddling" we are told to believe a story that involves too many evil geniuses and too little acknowledgement of big, slow trends.
I also don't buy it that Hillary "coming clean" about the emails would have been preferable to denying any serious wrongdoing. Everyone claims they value honesty and openness, but its probably an example of people saying one thing while acting entirely differently. Is it preferable to let a narrative form against her, or to simply use her own words against her to claim she's unsuitable to be president? I don't know, but its far from obvious that just copping to every claim against her regarding the emails was the right move.
There were many campaign missteps and ignoring the rust belt was chief among them. But ultimately she did have the election in the bag until Comey's 11th hour memo about more emails being found. There are a lot of external factors that caused her to lose, but it should never have been that close and it was because of her blind spot for the rust belt.
I'm not suggesting there was anything to come clean about. But there were emails indicating that some of the campaign finance stuff relating to the Clinton Foundation was not above board. Not only did HRC not address this issue, but she didn't claim that the organization was just like many other similar orgs, or offer to offer a full audit of where the dollars went. Those are the totally obvious responses to allegations that lines have been crossed.
True, doing that would have played into the idea that the story was real, but keep in mind that there were emails from a disgruntled loyalist who was mad at Chelsea threatening to reveal the scheme as fraud.
The news orgs generally ignored this story for some reason, so maybe that's why there wasn't a specific response to it offered by the campaign, but in my view it is not really clear whether it was completely above board or not. Per my earlier comment elsewhere in the thread, I am concerned that lifetime public servant Paul Ryan has a net worth of $8M, and that the Clintons are worth $250M after public service careers.
What are the odds that Paul Ryan obtained that money legitimately? I'd say they are quite slim. If emails about Ryan were found that indicated a likely corrupt source of the funds, I'd hope that some journalist somewhere would pick up the story and take it to fruition. I'd hope the same thing about any major US political candidate, if there is evidence that a massive ($250M) fortune might have been improperly won through deals that violate campaign finance law.
It's not that I don't think Ryan or Clinton are relatively good "knowledge workers" for the jobs they end up in, it's that the purpose of campaign finance law is to prevent interest groups from being able to buy their way in. If we let our "nice" politicians get bought by interest groups in ways that violate campaign finance law, we are allowing the corrupting incentives to exist that campaign finance law is meant to prevent.
Surely, by the same token, congress should pass a law requiring the publication of a decade or more of income tax history for any personal wealth or companies where the candidate as a majority shareholder. Note that in spite of the massive opposition to Trump's failure to offer up his tax returns, no such law has been discussed. Chances are quite a few officials or would-be officials would rather not be subject to additional transparency requirements.
Comey's involvement was truly odd. I thought he should have been more thorough/careful before he dismissed the possibility of any wrongdoing initially. How long does it take for a team of people to review a few thousand emails. I think it could be done in a weekend if there was any motivation at all to resolve the issue in a timely fashion. So Comey not only chose to allow his actions to impact the election, but allowed his agency's tarnishing of the campaign to drag on and on in a completely unreasonable way. So in my view his last-minute comments were one of several major blunders. He's been challenged over his decisions, but I have not heard him challenged on why it takes so long to review emails. Of the 20K emails most were spam just like in any inbox. So we're talking about a few thousand pages of reading that took months and months for no apparent reason.
And as far as Clinton's personal wealth, 15 years of book deals and 100k speaking engagements will create quite a nest egg. Let alone starting their careers as high powered attorneys. There's nothing unexplained here.
Most of that was just politically motivated stuff. The difference is that the trove of emails was not filtered and research discovered the potentially implicating campaign finance stuff within that trove.
> 15 years of book deals and 100k speaking engagements
The personal wealth was likely done in a way that does not violate any laws. A donor can make a book deal happen with a $2M advance rather than violating laws by donating $2M. That's gray area but not surprising or concerning.
The potential area of concern is the way that the Clinton Foundation may have been used to collect donations from foreign governments in a pay-to-play arrangement. I'm not entirely sure whether it's reasonable that such things are illegal, but they are illegal so if someone is doing it we should all be concerned.
I'm pretty concerned about Paul Ryan's $8M as well. You didn't address this so I am guessing that you assume it all to be above board?
(that said, I'm not an expert on campaign law and I'm not in a position to say what was/wasn't legal: I'm just trying to point out that it's not enough to look only at quantity spent)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clint...
Foreign intervention in elections up till then have been pure amateur hour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention
The US intelligence community also concluded that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/12/...
“These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” — statement from the Trump transition team on Washington Post report that the CIA concluded that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump
Donald Trump’s staff dismissed U.S. intelligence conclusions that Russia actively interfered in the presidential election by noting the flawed intelligence cited by the Bush administration in making the case for invading Iraq nearly 14 years ago.
An alternative perspective came from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who pinned the blame on the Bush White House for misrepresenting the intelligence.
Nancy Pelosi @NancyPelosi: The intel didn't state that Iraq had WMDs. The Bush-Cheney WH made that misrepresentation. 12:21 AM - Dec 11, 2016
Trump’s complaint about this semi-ancient history is a bit odd because a) the intelligence analysts who worked on Middle East WMDs are not going to be the same as analysts focused on Russian cyber-behavior; b) the intelligence collection for hacking in the United States by overseas powers would be different from assessing illicit weapons programs in the Middle East; and c) reforms were put in place after the Iraq War to make it harder for suspect intelligence to bubble up to the top ranks without careful scrutiny. (For instance, a new procedure required heads of intelligence agencies to vouch personally for the credibility of any of their own agency’s sources that are used in a major estimate.)
Moreover, the Bush administration appeared determined to attack Iraq for any number of reasons beyond suspicions of WMDs; officials simply seized on WMDs because they concluded that that represented the strongest case for an invasion. “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in 2003.
Do you agree with the fact that it's the Bush-Cheney White House who perpetrated the fraud by cherry picking and hyping the evidence that supported their pre-conceived conclusions while ignoring evidence from the intelligence community that contradicted it (to the point of outing a CIA agent to end her career because they didn't like the evidence her husband presented them), but the only nit you have to pick is with the Washington Post's wording calling 16 years "ancient history"?
It doesn't, it's completely irrelevant. Just like your opinion that that history is ancient is completely irrelevant.
> Do you agree with the fact that it's the Bush-Cheney White House who perpetrated the fraud by cherry picking and hyping the evidence, but the only nit you have to pick is with the Washington Post's wording calling 16 years "ancient history"?
You're the one making the distinction between US intel and US gov. No one else is talking about that or cares.
US gov/intel/whatever told a lie and US media amplified it. Just like the Russia gov and media did now.
It is true that parts of these reports were exaggerated and parts were not given attention, but the same can be said of intelligence reports about Russian influence in elections. About your three points, none disproves my implication that the reports mentioned by Twitter are fake - if anything, b and c may make it more difficult to produce false reports, but certainly not impossible
* I didn't blame the CIA for the Iraq War, as you can verify by re-reading my comments.
* I certainly mentioned that the evidence was cherry-picked: I highlighted the mention [here](https://i.imgur.com/sLtW1al.png). I did not mention who cherry-picked the evidence, but it doesn't seem relevant to my point or yours.
* If I understand your first sentence correctly - it is incomplete, giving space to interpretation - you're claiming that I attempt to refute the fact that the US intelligence's conclusion is that RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election; I never refuted that the intelligence's opinion is such, nor did I attempt to refute that. I genuinely believe that these reports represent the intelligence community's opinion. Rather, I'm doubtful of the reliability of these reports, in light of the Iraq reports of 2003.
They use pseudonyms and stock photos to seem like part of an in-group, then amplify divisive hashtags and messaging. They disappear from historical records when they delete the accounts, making it even harder to track their activity.
Reddit, twitter, facebook, and newspaper comment sections are all filled with disinformation and nobody seems to be doing much about it.
http://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-c...
If we had more open platforms that didn't filter and sift through everything and run _fact checks_ (i.e. you're too stupid to do your own research so let's tell you what to think), yes we'd have a lot more garbage .. but we'd have a more unfiltered equal playing field where you'd also have much more of everything.
Twitter is just another example of a filtered world that needs to die off.
This is a good instance of why some degree of regulation is important.
In unregulated systems, it's entirely possible that corporate and state actors can basically control election outcomes, utterly lie and mislead people towards some pretty crazy consequences.
The Rawandan genocide was largely propagated by guess who -> Radio Hosts.
'Mass Media' in Rwanda was Radio, and hosts calling the other side 'cockroaches that need to be exterminated' was a critical factor that led to the tipping point.
So much so that General Dallaire (Head of UN mission) left a bunch of Belgian soldiers in a building that was being attacked, in an attempt to get to the stations.
The idea that 'decentralized networks' will be 'free' is not quite right - they will still be controlled, but just in a different way, by anyone who has the means.
This is our fault as humans.
I know a lot of educated professionals who believe some crazy stuff, and it's very easy to misinform.
I don't like that Twitter has this control, but I don't see any reasonable alternative on the horizon yet.
When there is 'true decentralization' - you will have some groups calling for mass murder of others pretty quickly. And they will create all sorts of Hollywood style propaganda in support of it. ISIS would not exist without social media.
There would be a few ISIS-like groups in every civilized country if they were allowed to exist - sadly.
It's not a simple situation we have, unfortunately.
---
"i.e. you're too stupid to do your own research so let's tell you what to think"
Nobody (including you) has enough time and wherewithal to 'do their own research' - that's the whole point of a free press. Do you have access to White House aids to find out 'what Trump said'? Do you have time to read 100's of papers on Climate Change? Etc..
----
"yes we'd have a lot more garbage .. but we'd have a more unfiltered equal playing field where you'd also have much more of everything."
We'd have - and we already kind of do have - 99% garbage.
Even the mainstream press is kind of crap - why? Attention. CNN would devote more time to specific issues if it were up to them, but Americans just 'tune out'. Major news outlets have to keep it a little light and America focused or else nobody will watch.
Anyhow. A big, fat existential issue ...
The internet has shown that an unfiltered playing field is toxic to the political knowledge of a populace. In an unfiltered playing field, virality gets the eyeballs and fake news is inherently viral. The truth necessarily loses.
We have a sick and disintegrating society, blaming external enemies is way too easy.
I for one think the President should be allowed to do this. It may be illegal for a regular citizen to do this, but not for the President.
The letter of the TOS vs. the spirit of the TOS.
He's(or she's) a special case, no?
Mere legalism is failing us, let alone the spirits of legalism. I'm not happy about it.
You mean the constitution right?
Nonetheless, Commander in Chief ≠ Command of Twitter. A private entity doesn't have to indulge him and such dissent is protected by the 1st amendment.
So yes, in deference to the constitution.
> Commander in Chief ≠ Command of Twitter. A private entity doesn't have to indulge him and such dissent is protected by the 1st amendment.
I don't know who you're arguing with here.
Yes, he has legal rights. And they exist whether I like his actions or not. I don't have those legal rights...
It’s quite a remarkable thing to be in the eye of the storm of a mass hysteria.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-...
Don’t forget that much of the clickbait conspiracies that altered this election were written on WordPress blogs by individuals peddling “fake news” narratives, eg Obama wiretapping Trump, Pizzagate, Clinton Foundation trafficking Haitian earthquake victims, etc.
RT wasn’t just spending money on “sponsored Tweets” and that sort of thing. The Kremlin operates twitter bot armies that game propaganda visibility.
[1] http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/3...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Ac...
Censoring the speech of the President is probably not something that they want to get engaged with.
He's a special case. So I would argue that some of the terms should not apply to him.
For instance, he has the right to make violent threats in certain circumstances compared to normal citizens.
Whether I personally agree with his threats or tact is not important.
Now when he does something that he does not have the legal right to, I'll let the courts handle that one.
No one has the 'right' to make violent threats on twitter. It is a private service with a ToS.
There are no principled reasons to treat the president as a special case here. The practical reason is simply that it is often and free advertising for them and the terms of service dictate what they can do when breached; not what they must do.
I never claimed this. My argument hinges on the fact that he has the right, in certain circumstances, to make violent threats as opposed to normal citizens.
The TOS is written for normal citizens because it is indeed illegal for normal citizens to do so. And I therefore agree with you that the TOS technically does not allow any violent threats on twitter.
I do not think it is unreasonable to allow the President to communicate his threats on Twitter, a modern means of communication. I think it's actually a good thing to allow, for this and all future presidents.
Again, letter of the TOS vs. spirit of the TOS.
For instance -- I have the right to say 'Nazis should be punched in the face' in most circumstances. It would violate Twitter TOS to tweet that however and they'd be well within their right to take that message down or ban the account.
The 'spirit' of the TOS is civility in most part, not legality. Donald Trumps twitter account isn't civil.
And if you disagree about that, or about the spirit of the TOS so be it -- that is why things like terms of service are held to the more objective letter, and not the highly subjective spirit.
> POTUS has _authority_ to enact those threats in certain cases whereas one typically doesn't.
The first quote deals with the threat. The second deals with "enacting the threats."
So if you claim that he has no right to make a threat, then how can he enact something that he has no right to say?
Regardless, I'm only speaking on his legal right to make threats. And yes, he does have a legal right to make violent threats.
And no, Twitter's TOS does not prohibit uncivil language with a broad brush. But I agree with you that it is not purely based in law, but civility certainly is based in moral law.
> that is why things like terms of service are held to the more objective letter, and not the highly subjective spirit.
You mean as in the case that we're discussing?
No, I'm claiming he has no more legal right to make threats than any other person. There is a large difference there. Largely speaking a persons right to make threats is protected under the first amendment.
There are very narrow instances where verbal or written threats become assault (or terrorism, or attempts to incite a riot, etc); and since one of the criteria there is ability to carry out threat, someone in a position of power has somewhat more liability here, not less.
Which is all besides the point -- twitter isn't a government entity; your first amendment protections don't apply to their ban hammer. Their rules and regulations are more restrictive in all cases than what is allowed by law.
> You mean as in the case that we're discussing?
I mean, yes? My point is that a) Trump is in technical violation of the TOS and b) The TOS constrains the behaviors of the users, not Twitter so they have no real obligation to enforce it.
> that is why things like terms of service are held to the more objective letter, and not the highly subjective spirit.
I replied.
> You mean as in the case that we're discussing?
Clearly your objection is that the TOS is not held in this case at all.
Which could indicate that they're failing to act or they are interpreting their TOS subjectively per his special role.
> No, I'm claiming he has no more legal right to make threats than any other person.
This is not about freedom of speech. This is about his position, that threats are sometimes part of negotiation and he can legally threaten (as an example).
Large classes of other people cannot, for instance, negotiate on behalf of the U.S.
We're not arguing about the same thing here.
There underlying logic of the demands made no sense at all, but it didn't matter. Believing Trump had violated the Twitter ToS and should be banned was simply something you did if you weren't an evil Nazi Trump supporter.
0: https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ban-donald-trump/
Then they shouldn't get engaged in censoring anyone's speech on their platform (unless, of course, the free market value of the President’s special treatment on Twitter is reported and treated in law as either a corporate gift by Twitter to Donald J. Trump or an in-kind campaign donation to his re-election campaign, or a campaign expenditure coordinated with the candidate. Of course, any of these has significant legal consequences.)
We have laws governing gifts of anything of value to political office holders and candidates for a reason.
Oh wait, https://qz.com/519388/this-saudi-prince-now-owns-more-of-twi...
So that won't happen -- and everything now makes sense ...
Except they invest everywhere, SoftBank Vision fund included
http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/21/technology/saudi-softbank-te...
Supporting the "Russians stole election with paltry spend on social media" narrative, they hope to encourage Americans to massively spend on social media to "steal" coming elections...
There "culture wars" are approaching cold civil war status. Great times to be a virtual arms dealer...
Wish youtube banned RT aswell.
RT has had some great coverage of under-publicized issues in the US... issues involving the poor, failing infrastructure, hypocrisy, etc. Yes it's not flattering to the US that these stories are written, but they are true and newsworthy and should absolutely not be suppressed.
During the election, RT ran a unflattering stories about both major candidates. This is now being spun as "trying to sow discord" in the US. Journalism is supposed to shine a light on things that need to be improved, it is supposed to rally people to act to fix those problems.
If you read the major newspapers in the US, particularly in the section on world affairs, there is a steady stream of stories that address the dangers of living abroad, the corrupt politicians, the failing infrastructure, etc. These stories may or may not be true (many are obviously overblown to anyone who has visited those countries) but the purpose they serve is to help foster the idea of American exceptionalism.
Our papers don't have to run headlines like "Americans happiest citizens in the world" or "America has the cleanest water and the happiest children in the world" when it can simply run stories that make other nations (particularly political adversaries) seem far worse.
We still don't know much about the Hillary Clinton or Podesta emails as none of the few possibly troubling things (mostly campaign finance violation stuff) has been investigated. RT ran stories about that topic when it was fresh during the election, even when the major US papers were focused mainly on rude things Trump had said.
When RT first launched I was surprised that it was "allowed" to exist simply because of its origin. But after reading the reporting for several years I came to appreciate that it was offering a view of the US that was not really available from American news outlets. This makes RT valuable to the sharing of ideas and the creation of an informed public.
Twitter's decision to block the advertising is cowardly in so many ways.
RT hasn't been blocked from twitter, it is still allowed to do all those things.
If you were worried about this feeding into twitter's algorithm why wasn't that your main point?
For years now Twitter has allowed a lot of shady accounts to be created simply because they help its growth and engagement numbers. If a Russian hacker writes a bot that retweets scintillating stories about an American politician, and this leads to more Twitter users scrolling their feed and viewing ads, Twitter wins.
This is why the sock puppet ecosystem has been allowed to exist in spite of the very easy detection of various spam rings (they are easily detectable through simple graph analysis).
The problem for Twitter is that it can't say "oops the engaged users numbers we've been talking about for the past few years are all massively inflated, we just deleted 100M sock puppet accounts and it turns out that our service is a lot less popular and a lot less engaging than we thought".
So I'm not worried about Twitter tuning the algorithm since it has much easier ways of nudging the politics of the average user's news feed in whatever direction it wants.
The concern is that Twitter bowed to political pressure from US politicians and penalized a news organization that should be investigated and shut down by an appropriate legal process if it's actually doing something more propaganda-like than other news orgs.
Last time I checked, most news orgs (including CNN, the NYT, etc.) were all doing massive clickbait campaigns through many different advertising channels. RT is no exception.
This is a dangerous form of scapegoating and censorship that happens to be legal because Twitter is a private firm. But it's very ugly and reveals a fear of or complicity with various elected officials in the US.
There you go using that word again. I'd like to re-iterate that no longer accepting advertisements != censoring RT journalism.
An increasing number of people get their news from social media, making the process of "seeding" very important to the publication process. Arguably a news org can't exist without this process working. They have to have someone on staff who can write the clickbait headline, and they have to have someone on staff who can place the ads on social media to seed the content.
By breaking RT's ability to do this, Twitter is exerting highly targeted editorial control over the content that hits its algorithmic feeds. Shameful stuff.
You have no way of knowing the details about any investigations past or present. Investigations are usually done in secret. We do know that the FBI investigated but the details of that are not public, only that no criminal activity was found. Also Any US Attorney General can start Grand Jury proceedings (also secret) at any time.
https://www.recode.net/2016/8/11/12417064/twitter-stock-owne...
On the other hand, there are plenty of international news organisations shining a light on the parts of America that Americans don't want to see, and none of those news organisations are operating under the direction of a foreign power. RT is quite clearly seen by the Russian government as a useful propaganda tool, and not a news outlet that would ever challenge the current Russian government's malfeasance.
Well I don't think we're likely to see the NYT or Fox or CNN challenging the US Government in any significant way. They are actually all consistently doing the US's bidding by helping sell various war efforts to their fans/viewers.
> Russia has long played up domestic strife in the US to disprove the notion of American exceptionalism.
So an editorial stance that rejects American Exceptionalism is now suspect? In my view the litmus test for RT is if the content stops at rejecting American Exceptionalism, or whether it goes further and attempts to make Americans believe things that are actually not true.
Considering how much content in a typical issue of the NYT reinforces American Exceptionalism, it's quite refreshing to read something now and then that dispenses with that. The idea of American Exceptionalism is very harmful to the democratic process in America and to the world in general. I think it's among the most devastating and harmful ideas ever if measured by the suffering it has caused.
The problem is that our own papers offer American Exceptionalism in high doses every single day.
The Pentagon Papers is a rather historical example, but stands. I'd be interested in what you'd consider a refutation of your claim.
The issue with RT isn't that it challenges American Exceptionalism. You can find that natively, largely in the left and alterative press, or critics such as Chomsky or Hedges or Naomi Klein, among many others. (They also, typically, do argue that the NYT and Post are establishment organs. It's possible to make that claim without descending to RT's depths. Quite easily.)
It's that it has no interest in either the truth or advancing a positive alternative in doing so. Your litmus test is bogus.
Of the major US news media outlets, which do you think care about truth? It is rare for any to publish corrections, and in fact a NYT public editor recently resigned over the paper's unwillingness to be honest about its mistakes.
> We've literally just come off 8 years of Fox challenging the U.S. administration at every turn.
The two-party back-and-forth is importantly not at all threatening to the status quo, because the two parties share power. The role of Fox and MSNBC are to keep the public focused on silly, partisan issues like the validity of Obama's birth certificate.
What endangers the status quo is that the public might actually realize that there are much more important things to worry about and much different things the government should be spending money on.
Hence, third party candidates are not invited to the debates, and issues for the public to become outraged about are offered as entertainment: Big storms, white girls being kidnapped, female teachers having sex with students, the personal lives of celebrities, and generally bad things about living in other countries.
> The Pentagon Papers is a rather historical example, but stands. I'd be interested in what you'd consider a refutation of your claim.
The press has had varying degrees of quality and independence since the days when the NYT was indistinguishable from the local gossip rag. The pentagon papers is one of the high points of American journalism, but we should not assume that American journalism is still the same.
When Edward Snowden wanted to leak information about massive dishonesty and conspiracy by the NSA in domestic surveillance, he did not go to the NY Times. That tells us all we need to know. As it was, he went to journalists who ended up breaking the story in The Guardian, but who were fairly quickly made to know that the Guardian would not support the continued adversarial stance with the US Government needed to follow through with the analysis and selective publication of the bulk of the documents.
The journalists were reluctant to return to the US after reporters had been threatened and jailed.
Among the most notable examples is the way that the NYT distanced itself from Julian Assange after the allegations of rape from Sweden were publicized. It turns out that in Sweden if someone has consensual sex and then days later decides that he or she revokes consent, that falls under the definition of rape. Oddly in all of the coverage of Assange amid these allegations, the NYT did not think it relevant to mention this very important difference in the legal meaning of the word rape in Sweden vs the US.
I have no idea whether Assange acted improperly with those women, but we did not get a clear and accurate accounting of the nature of the alleged act from the NYT, as leaving that information out was helpful in the character assassination campaign the paper had undertaken against him, after determining that the Iraq War Logs, diplomatic cables, and Afghanistan War Logs contained virtually no relevant information and that the officials involved did not deserve any accountability for the revelations that the NYT's thorough coverage might have led to.
It happens all the goddamn time, but there are also reasonably stringent editorial controls that prevent blatant mistruths from getting through. RT never corrects the record after it has been shown to publish government-manufactured stories.
> When Edward Snowden wanted to leak information about massive dishonesty and conspiracy by the NSA in domestic surveillance, he did not go to the NY Times. That tells us all we need to know.
No it doesn't - it just describes the very particular evidence (the possession of which constituted a federal crime) and the knowledge that it was safer in the hands of journalists overseas.
> Oddly in all of the coverage of Assange amid these allegations, the NYT did not think it relevant to mention this very important difference in the legal meaning of the word rape in Sweden vs the US.
> we did not get a clear and accurate accounting of the nature of the alleged act from the NYT
That's bollocks. If you bother to look, they're there: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/world/europe/29iht-letter2... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/world/europe/19assange.htm...
Your post is just as much a political statement as Twitters, which is hilariously ironic.
My statement is simply my opinion, I am not controlling anyone else's access to a platform or to information by holding that opinion. I encourage you to read some RT stories.
You will find that the reporting is generally solid but simply lacks the "Rah Rah USA USA" attitude that has become (embarrassingly) commonplace in our culture. I cringe when I see politicians wearing red or blue ties and American flag pins, as if doing that signals their devout patriotism.
It's a similarly shallow world view that leads people to overlook RT's reporting and focus on its state sponsored origin before evaluating its contribution to American political discourse.
I'd personally prefer if there were more anger about certain kinds of issues in the US -- such as the Flint Water crisis, lead in the water in many cities, foolish and corrupt infrastructure projects, etc.
Your entire post is making the assumption that Twitter did this because they just believed the US/Russia election meddling stories or something.
Maybe there was clear and documented malice involved? Who knows! Certainly not you. But, reading this and immediately thinking "Twitter has now admitted they are on the side of the Democrats and believes all these Russia stories" is foolish and fails to consider that maybe something weird _might_ be going on, and maybe Twitter actually made a good decision here.
Don't worry about me though, I read plenty of international news - but I'm not going to bother with state sponsored organizations like RT.
Then why not mention that in the announcement? The problem is that Twitter is not pointing to any specific content that it is willing to admit was harmful. Doing that would give us too clear a glimpse into the ideological view Twitter holds.
I rarely read RT myself, but like seeing stories that shine light upon problems with American institutions and infrastructure, as well as problems and hypocrisy around foreign policy and humanitarian issues.
We have concentration camps in Gitmo, a prison system where inmates are routinely victimized by rape, and yet there is this idea that any news org that doesn't aggressively cheerlead "USA USA" is harming our democracy. I'd like our democracy to develop the teeth necessary to fix/eliminate the prisons and camps, and evict some of the most corrupt officials -- Paul Ryan has been a public servant his whole life and mysteriously has a net worth of over $8M. The Clintons are worth over $250M after a few decades in public service. What is going on here, we have to be willing to see the ugliness of our system and the corruption that is all around us.
If RT helps us see that and take corrective action, all the better. Ironically I think those opposed to the sort of discord RT might cause are implicitly idealizing a compliant public like one might find in a well-controlled fascist state.
of course it wasn't. their view is literally Kremlin narrated propaganda. how american news outlets are supposed to know that stuff?
Surely the only reason the country swung so strongly in the last election is because of hacking/Facebook/Twitter/Russia etc. It has nothing to do with things like economy and jobs /s
So despite how pathetic and partisan this is, hopefully it'll have great long term secondary effects by siloing countries. Or at least a small step in that direction.
Also the news of the ban: https://www.rt.com/news/407861-twitter-policy-rt-accounts/
But this was before they were against it --now apparently they, Twitter, had made a bad calculus and RT might have benefitted the eventual winner more than the then presumed winner.