Should Congress Force Social Media To Investigate Foreign Propaganda Trolls? (politico.com) 266
"I fought foreign propaganda for the FBI," writes a former special agent from its Counterintelligence Division. Now an associate dean at Yale Law School, he's warning that "the tools we had won't work anymore." An anonymous reader quotes Politico:
The bureau is now faced with huge private companies, like Facebook and Twitter, which are ostensibly neutral and have no professional or ethical obligation to vet the material they distribute. Further, foreign intelligence service propaganda agents are no longer human operatives on American soil -- they are invisible "trolls," often operating from a foreign country and behind social media accounts that make them impossible for the FBI to approach directly. Or, in the case of so-called bots -- software programs designed to simulate humans -- they might not even be people at all... [S]ocial media platforms can reach an almost limitless audience, often within days or hours, more or less for free: Russia's Facebook ads alone reached between 23 million and 70 million viewers.
Without any direct way to investigate and identify the source of the private accounts that generate this "fake news," there's literally nothing the FBI can do to stop a propaganda operation that can occur on such a massive scale... But Congress could pass legislation that requires social media companies to cooperate with counterintelligence in the same ways they do with law enforcement. For example, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires telecommunications companies to design their digital networks in such a way that would permit wiretaps for criminal cases. Similarly, requiring social media platforms to develop ways to vet and authenticate foreign users and proactively report potential bots to the FBI would enable the FBI to identify perception management operations as they are occurring. In addition to monitoring these specific FIS-based accounts, the FBI could publicly expose the source of particular accounts, ads or news...
"At this point, we have no choice: It's clear that our current counterintelligence strategy hasn't caught up to the age of asymmetrical information warfare," the former counterintelligence agent concludes. "Until it does, we'll be silently allowing our freedoms to be manipulated...."
Without any direct way to investigate and identify the source of the private accounts that generate this "fake news," there's literally nothing the FBI can do to stop a propaganda operation that can occur on such a massive scale... But Congress could pass legislation that requires social media companies to cooperate with counterintelligence in the same ways they do with law enforcement. For example, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires telecommunications companies to design their digital networks in such a way that would permit wiretaps for criminal cases. Similarly, requiring social media platforms to develop ways to vet and authenticate foreign users and proactively report potential bots to the FBI would enable the FBI to identify perception management operations as they are occurring. In addition to monitoring these specific FIS-based accounts, the FBI could publicly expose the source of particular accounts, ads or news...
"At this point, we have no choice: It's clear that our current counterintelligence strategy hasn't caught up to the age of asymmetrical information warfare," the former counterintelligence agent concludes. "Until it does, we'll be silently allowing our freedoms to be manipulated...."
No (Score:2, Insightful)
Free speech, anyone?
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Why would that be modded down? Free speech is precisely the issue. If one doesn't like what's being said, they can tune out. Nobody is being forced to listen or believe. It really is that simple.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is being forced to listen or believe. It really is that simple.
No, it isn't that simple. The advocates of censorship don't just want to avoid hearing the message. They also want YOU to not hear the message.
This isn't about controlling what the Russians do. It is about controlling what the American people see and hear. The Russians are just the boogeyman being used as the justification.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
1. As previous comments reminded you, freedom of speech is a fundamental human right - not reserved purely for US citizens.
2. One person's "propaganda" is another person's "truth", and vice-versa. If any nation ever allowed a police department like the FBI to tell its citizens which is which, it would automatically be a police state.
3. Why should anyone assume that US citizens - supposedly among the world's healthiest, best educated, and most intelligent - are unable to distinguish between truth and propaganda? Or, indeed, to exercise their own opinions and judgment about all the many statements that fall in the grey area in between?
In most parts of the world the very idea that any government department or corporations should be allowed - let alone expected - to tell citizens what to believe and what not to believe would be greeted with shocked dismay.
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While I agree with your first two points,
3. Why should anyone assume that US citizens - supposedly among the world's healthiest
We aren't
best educated
We aren't
and most intelligent
Honestly, on average, we Americans are probably of average intelligence
are unable to distinguish between truth and propaganda? Or, indeed, to exercise their own opinions and judgment about all the many statements that fall in the grey area in between?
In most parts of the world the very idea that any government department or corporations should be allowed - let alone expected - to tell citizens what to believe and what not to believe would be greeted with shocked dismay.
Propaganda exists because it works. Americans are just as susceptible to propaganda as the rest of the world. I don't see any problem with our government attempting to prevent another government from using verifiably false information to influence our citizens. Now, should we be telling Facebook to perform these investigations? No, that should be the FBI's job, and I'm pretty sur
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1. As previous comments reminded you, freedom of speech is a fundamental human right - not reserved purely for US citizens.
Show me the document that codifies this right and that the entire world agreed with it. If that's not the origin of said human right, please describe in more detail the origin. Just saying X exists doesn't make it so.
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No, it's not enough.
People who came to the United States from actual police states (like my father who grew up in Egypt) would be able to describe the differences to you in minute detail. The fact that secret policemen are not breaking your door down this instant just for posting your comment is all the proof you need.
Although I want to say that I agree with all the specific points you made, but I don't think we're that far gone yet.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly. I don't know which to be more concerned about: foreign governments manipulating elections through organized propaganda or further scope creep of our intelligence services into the area of domestic surveillance.
No, wait. Yes, I do. The latter.
Russian electioneering happened once and is unlikely to happen again. There are too many people at too many companies studying what happened carefully and developing machine learning techniques and other strategies to ensure that it can't happen in the fut
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The US has lots of qualifications on freedom of speech codified into law. It starts in the US constitution ("Congress shall make no law....") and the infamous "the", and continues with lots of clarifying laws and court decisions.
You're correct that lots of other countries also have freedom of speech, with some restrictions, codified in their laws though.
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Can you give me a URL? I'd love to get my hands on some of those Soros bucks everyone keeps talking about.
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Free speech, anyone?
Precisely, how about making it clear to Zuckerburg, Dorsey, Pichai, Nadella, et al that EU restrictions on speech better not apply to US citizens, and if they do, those 4 companies should be banned from operating in the US?
I know, the First Amendment doesn't apply to private organizations, which are at liberty to ban whatever they like. However, when something starts out as an open (as in free speech) platform and then morphs into something else at the behest of governments outside the US and that gets u
False Advertising (Score:2)
For better or worse, it has long been established, that False Advertising is not protected by the Amendment.
Most social media companies promise — explicitly or implicitly — interaction with other people. Or, when it is with businesses or other organizations, the accounts are clearly marked as such — or are supposed to be under the terms and conditions of the usage. For example, this line from Facebook's Terms:
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
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Unless, of course, the comments on this thread are representative of US public opinion. In which case, so much the worse for the USA - it is no longer a free country, and the very idea of freedom is no longer understood.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
speech made not on US soil by non-citizens is covered by the 1A how, exactly?
Here's the 1st Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Can you point out where it says "soil" or "citizen"? Can you also explain how such restrictions are consistent with the phrase "no law"?
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I agree with your principle, but I think the law has been settled for a long time, i.e. the Constitution does not generally apply to non-citizens outside the country. To answer your question, I think it's implied in "the people", meaning "the people of the United States", as stated in the preamble.
In this particular case, you may be able to make the argument that the US Congress cannot limit what people can say or what they can hear. Meaning to censor non-citizen foreigners on social media would violate the
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Re-reading more carefully, "the people" part only applies to the peaceful assembly and petitioning the government. So you are completely right.
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speech made not on US soil by non-citizens is covered by the 1A how, exactly?
Here's the 1st Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Can you point out where it says "soil" or "citizen"? Can you also explain how such restrictions are consistent with the phrase "no law"?
Can you explain how one country would guarantee these rights in other countries for non-citizens of said country especially ones where they have laws that are not congruent with these principles? Nice try. It probably sounded good in your head as an abstract idea. In reality, when it comes to world affairs we only have the United Nations and not everyone is a member.
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The text says `make no law` not `shall guarantee` big difference. The amendment says what congress cannot do.
It makes no difference. You are quoting doctrines of the United States of America. Just because the United States decreed something doesn't apply to the rest of the world. Do you not understand what a country is and how laws made by those countries do not apply to other countries unless there is some sort of treaty between those countries or some mutual adoption of a some type of convention?
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Just because the United States decreed something doesn't apply to the rest of the world.
That is not what is happening here. The FBI is not going after the Russians, they are going after Facebook, an American company located in California. Can the federal government censor Facebook just because the text being censored was written by non-citizens? According to the US Constitution, they have no authority to do that.
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Just because the United States decreed something doesn't apply to the rest of the world.
That is not what is happening here. The FBI is not going after the Russians, they are going after Facebook,
All posters of anti-American propaganda via Facebook reside in the United States then?
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It seems to me the American constitution says things about "inalienable" rights. They're not very inalienable if they only count when you're a US citizen on US soil, are they?
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
It seems to me the American constitution says things about "inalienable" rights.
Nope. That is the Declaration of Independence, which carries no force of law.
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It seems to me the American constitution says things about "inalienable" rights.
Well, the Declaration of Independence does, but that's not considered to be legally binding in the same way as US Constitution.
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speech made not on US soil by non-citizens is covered by the 1A how, exactly?
Ain't it something like how foreigners who're not in the US have the right to come here nonetheless - an argument the Left was using during the travel ban?
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speech made not on US soil by non-citizens is covered by the 1A how, exactly?
The First Amendment has nothing to do with whether or not the speech was made by citizens or not, nor to do with where the speech was made. The first words of the Amendment are "Congress shall make no law..." The Amendment applies to the U.S. Government, and by later amendments to States as well. (It doesn't apply to foreign legislatures or governments, but they may have their own Constitutions with similar protections.) Since the article is talking about a proposed law passed by Congress, the First Ame
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Indeed. The Constitution does not give the federal government any authority to censor speech (which is what the FBI is trying to do). To the contrary, it specifically and unambiguously denies the federal government any such authority.
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The 1st amendment expressly limits the government's ability to curtail any speech.
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our continent-sized nation
You shitting me? You're not even the largest country on the continent.
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There is no agreed upon "number" of countries in the world, because not everyone agrees that everyone else is a country. You counting Taiwan? Palestine (Gaza and West Bank together or separate)? Is Crimea still a country or not? The Russians might say no, but others disagree.
Obligatory CGP Grey. [youtube.com]
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The numbers & statistics may say that it's theoretically gone down, but Newt says otherwise!
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Charity (and other things) begin at home. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Charity (and other things) begin at home. (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's start with our own media and politicians who can say whatever they want without any accountability. This is the new millennium "boy who cried wolf". With the deluge of fake news, misinformation, disinformation and unsubstantiated information that we are bombarded with daily people are now disbelieving of anything and everything. Before we concern ourselves with foreign "information" we need to first get our own house in order.
No clue why you were down-modded - what you're saying makes perfect sense to me. I understand that the 'intelligence community' needs to concern itself with foreign influences; but really, as you've pointed out, the more direct, present, day-to-day threat to democracy and social well-being comes from within. Yammering about vague foreign threats is just one more circus act distracting the populace from how they're being lied to and screwed over by corporations and by their own governments.
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He should be down-modded for using a fixed width tag for something other than math/code.
Re:Charity (and other things) begin at home. (Score:4, Insightful)
I miss the old days when we could get some reliable information from the MSM and make up our own minds, rather than this general collection of very politicized opinions with almost no facts.
Nowadays I am getting my info from many many locations and doing my best with it. Seems like a luxury item now to have a news organization actually do some real ground pounding legwork investigative journalism.
Define foreign propaganda (Score:2, Informative)
We all know where this is headed, classifying what we don't like as trolls and foreign propaganda, even if it doesn't fit the definition. The former happens here all the time.
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Geolocation databases are bullshit.
The more value they provide, the more accurate they'll become. There will be huge financial pressure and a lot of competition to get geolocation right if every post will depend on it. As for VPN's, you can detect that, too. And simply identify it as such. Not much value in hiding behind a VPN if your posts also say that you are posting through a VPN which ends in UK (even though you are most likely posting from Novosibirsk).
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Nothing? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is nothing they can do? I'm sure they could post a rebuttal, from their official account, and people would share it in response. Facebook already adds "contested" tags to some stories, with links to sources that contest it. Have they asked about being added to that system?
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I'm sure they could post a rebuttal...
Yes, that is the only appropriate response to "propaganda". Anything beyond that is excessive.
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Not true.
They can add a tag that says "Paid Russian Post" (or Paid Chinese) etc.
Say contested is very different than telling the source.
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You are suggesting that we don't even call out the bad guys for fear of getting it wrong and making it worse? Would you refuse to name a criminal out of fear of putting an innocent person in jail?
That's stupid. I can see refusing to prosecute for fear of getting it wrong, but refusing to even call them out?
That's true cowardice.
Call them out, take reasonable steps to make sure you get it right, and the net affect will be positive.
Re:Nothing? (Score:4, Insightful)
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They don't create many fake accounts. Look at the ones found so far, they rely on hundreds of thousands of useful idiots following them.
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Meaningless and would lead to... (Score:5, Informative)
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Mod parent up - foreign propaganda can consist of genuine emails, and local propaganda can consist of faked national guard documents.
Truth is not something that is given to you, it is something you need to claw for with great personal effort.
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Uh, or maybe just if you're one of a bunch of people spending hundreds of thousands on ads, pretending to be from American political organizations, and operating out of an FSB front in St. Petersburg?
ditto
Missing continuation... (Score:2)
How is this any worse than domestic propaganda? (Score:4, Informative)
I see fake news on TV all the time. The worst of the stories get retracted -- eventually. The worst fakers get fired or reassigned (Dan Rather, Brian Williams, etc.) But there is a steady stream of anonymously sourced stories, presented as "news", only to magically disappear when it becomes obvious that somebody made it up.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.... [washingtonexaminer.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06... [dailycaller.com]
http://elections.huffingtonpos... [huffingtonpost.com]
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Sigh. One more time: those are not examples of fake news, they are examples of reporters trying to report the truth and failing.
Fake news is when you tell a deliberate lie. Fake news is not when you make an honest mistake; it is not selective news; it is not spin; it is when you tell a falsehood, a porky pie, a fib, an invention, a deliberate misstatement, disinformation. Donald Trump seems to be easily confused about this term, and many of his followers as well, but it is really not so difficult. Not true
Re: How is this any worse than domestic propaganda (Score:2)
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FTFY. Even if the Air Guard memos were faked - which were a fraction of the case that Bush skipped out on his Guard commitments - the source only forged the truth. And this was a source, not something that Rather pulled out of his ass - and we don't see wingnuts demanding that every media person who ever covered Bush's claims on Iraq be fired, as those were indisputably lies.
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1) They were never demonstrated to be fake
2) Even if they were forged, it was a forgery of the base commander's actual views
3) And even then Rather had nothing to do with the production of the report, most of it not based on memos from the base commander
4) When are you fuckheads going to demand every media person who repeated Bush's Iraq lies be fired
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All of which was able to be done on typewriters made in the 70's. The rest of your post is continued fucking of a decade old dead chicken.
Wingnut translator: "don't highlight the fact we are hypocritical, brain dead partisan hacks who created a standard that
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Wingnuts questioning a document doesn't mean it's a forgery - just ask Obama's birth certificate. The authenticity of the documents one way or the other was never proven, and never will be as the source provided copies, not originals.
Who cares? If the Declaration of Independence at the National Archives turns out to be a forgery of the original - but one that is completely accurate - does that mean it shouldn't be quoted?
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I constantly call out Russiagate for the unhinged McCarthyism it is, so in your attempt to call bullshit here you only got it all over your face. Now, back to the topic, it's a fact that Bush skipped out on his Air Guard service, which in itself
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Fakiest fakest fake false equivalence. Rather reported on a story made by a producer, who (as a fraction of the case that Bush went AWOL on his Air Guard commitments) included memos from a source. Memos that, even if forged, were accurate representations of the base commander's thoughts on Bush.
Contrast that to all the media reporters and pundits who breathlessly repeated Bush's claims on Saddam's WMD's, which were built on more bu
No (Score:2, Insightful)
Hold on a second... (Score:2)
Legit question: have we been doing the exact same thing to other nations? If so, this is really a problem of your own making. Either way, sanctions are an option but if you are doing the exact same thing, they are going to be uninclined to comply.
Education (Score:3)
Gee, maybe the powers that be will actually have to encourage the training of critical thought in the population at large, so people can approach the marketplace of ideas with some discernment.
Naaah. They'd much rather have sheeple they can trivially manipulate themselves. If they get derailed by some foreign power's propaganda, they can be put right again by doubling down on their own propaganda. I'm sure it'll be fine [msecnd.net].
what else is new? (Score:2)
So... just like all our other media then?
Nothing new (Score:5, Insightful)
This is nothing new. The only difference is modern technology and connectivity makes the reach and impact greater. There have always been propaganda in the form of shortwave radio broadcasts, printed text (leaflets, magazines, books), one on one contact and even television. It's just that in the past a person had to more actively seek out these communications to be exposed to them. Now it is coming through in our more normal day-to-day lives.
The problem is that the bulk of the Western public is naive and takes too many things at face value. There's an innocence, if you will. A big part of that is not having been (too terribly) deceived by government to the point it led to things like mass imprisonment or death.
Misinformation and gullibility is rampant on social media and it needs to be addressed more fundamentally, but unfortunately social media represents one of the truest forms of democracy, and the results shed light on the fact that the "average" person is simply not very intelligent when it comes to certain matters.
For example, the people constantly sharing Facebook posts that say crap like "We ordered too many luxury RVs and they are last year's model so we have to give them away", and all the various permutations thereof ( http://www.snopes.com/luxury-r... [snopes.com] ). It really takes a special kind of naivety to share something like that.
The one that is particularly annoying to me at this moment are people sharing pictures of this traffic jam from Rita (Texas, 2005) claiming it is from the Irma hurricane hitting Florida right now (and then it typically includes other stuff like "this is why so many people have to shelter in place and not evacuate"): http://www.hurricanescience.or... [hurricanescience.org] That is a much more subtle type of misinformation, but it is still "fake news".
So no, in answer to the question, we don't need government / corporations / etc trying to protect the American people from foreign propaganda. We need to educate the populace in a more general way to identify and filter out manipulative "fake news" and other garbage of the sort.
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Heh. Good luck with that. We've been trying for over twenty years, and Fox News and MSNBC are still on the air.
First Amendment (Score:4, Insightful)
Just a reminder:
That isn't qualified by saying "except for foreign political views the US government doesn't approve of".
The First Amendment is as much a guarantee to be able to receive information freely as it is to speak freely.
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Like when we sold weapons to the Bahrain dictatorship to brutally put down their Arab Spring protests, while at the very same time bombing Gaddafi to protect his Arab Spring protestors?
The problem is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Should be forced to allow all political views. (Score:2, Insightful)
Twitter bans popular, but "offensive" accounts.
YouTube is creating a system to isolate "bad" videos (commenting disallowed, won't find in search, possibly can't be embedded/linked). Jordan Peterson lost his YouTube *and* GMail account because someone thought he made offensive videos (complaints eventually got it back, but what about people without clout?).
These companies have made open platforms for the public at large to use them. It would be simple enough to say that anyone who makes offers such a servi
MSM Is Perceived As Fake News (Score:3, Insightful)
Quick clamp down on the internet! Free speech must only be allowed when its to OUR tune. God forbid we actually educate our citizens on what is really going on so they won't be so easily persuaded by the enemy. This here is when the internet goes to shit folks, when it challenges those in authority. It was a good run while it lasted.
This could be interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Before 2008 nobody in the US gov cared about foreign propaganda. Now they worry about people saying things they don't like. That's the same thing USSR was worried about all the time since post-WW2 at least... people must not speak freely, or they will tell things the Nomenklatura cannot allow to pass over as truth.
IMHO, this means that US propaganda (yes, there is) is not working anymore. American people, or at least a significant part of it, has stopped thinking what the deep state (and the media, and the elites) wants they to think. The writing is on the wall. Now the million dollar question is: what american people is going to think? What will they held as truth, what will they value most, what will they ask to their government?
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It is so called Status Quo Bias, a social and psychological phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
DARPA grant needed to fix previous DARPA grant (Score:4, Insightful)
The network we built to survive nuclear war has been weaponized against us and DARPA is giving out grants now to study how its child turned into a killer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
Russia is trying to incite civil war and very few people see how. Their end game is not a glorious Trump presidency but a demoralized and ineffectual United States that no longer intrudes in their sphere of influence.
We're a nation of useful idiots now. Our partisan hatred makes us more willing believers in the alleged atrocities of our enemies. Credulity is vulnerability. Patriotism now requires skepticism of atrocities by political opponents and criticism of real misbehavior by our allies that feeds weaponized narratives.
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Russia is trying to internally destabilize the EU and US, I doubt they are aiming for civil war in countries with nukes though.
On the other hand globalists tried to push the EU into incorporating an economic basket case for geopolitical reasons and against EU citizen's economic interests, like most EU expansions in recent history, helping kick all this shit off.
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I found this fake antifa manual circulating among US civil war / confederate history buffs in the days before Charlottesville. They are livid and eating up the red meat of each new outrage.
http://imgur.com/gallery/BcZOg [imgur.com]?
Someone went to a lot of work making that, and they fully understand right-wing paranoid fantasies. This is too much effort for so many pages of such poor satire. It's not designed to convert/convince but to incite latent fear and hate. If that isn't the Kremlin thumbing its nose at us, then
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There a lot of kids and people who never grew up on the right with a lot of time on their hands, blaming Putin for this bit of larping is a stretch.
If you want it to look authentic instead of clear satire you wouldn't put that bit of not distributing to cis white males for a start, they are the majority of Antifa after all.
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The majority of Antifa (a loose assembly of people who protest anyone they perceive as fascists) consists of white people born biologically male who exclusively fuck women (ie. cis white males). So when an "Antifa manual" says "do not distribute to cis white males" you know apriori it's a joke.
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Maybe because it's the most deranged conspiracy theory since the idea Obama's parents knew in the 60's that he'd be president, and planted a fake birth announcement in a Hawaiian newspaper to back up the Kenyan's fake birth certificate?
The story goes that Putin was crafty enough to dug up dirt (which all happens to be true) on Hillary (who was already campaigning on shooting down Russian jets in Syria) and gave it to Wikileaks to torpedo her
Whatever (Score:2)
Congress can't even keep their own in house processes corruption free.
Get back to me about dictating what everyone else is doing when they get their own shit together.
What law is being broken? (Score:4, Insightful)
there's literally nothing the FBI can do to stop a propaganda operation
And since it is not illegal, why should they want the power to try?
There are no laws apart from fraud, libel and slander that dictate that everything everyone says has to be true. And if there was, then no politician would last 5 minutes before having their ass hauled off to jail.
The FBI seem to have created their own "issue" here, defined it as bad and then decided that someone else should have the duty and the obligation to fix it for them. Well, that isn't how democracies work. If something is illegal, have the law enforcement deal with it. If it isn't illegal then either make it so, or let is go.
But trying to prevent people saying stuff, just because you don't like it, is not the way to go.
No, Duh (Score:2)
Scary (Score:2)
It must be worrying when your own propaganda machine is being neutralised. The horror.
American paid trolling is a way bigger problem (Score:2)
Two issues (Score:2)
There are two separate issues here.
First, do foreign propaganda trolls have free speech rights in relation to the federal government?
Second, if they don't, can social media be forced to investigate said trolls?
I'm a little iffy on the first part, but my theory is that anything that would bring a foreigner of any sort under US jurisdiction in the first place would also put them under the protection of the constitution, with the attending protections to free speech as provided in the first amendment.
The secon
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...and how do we know that CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc aren't the very kind of foreign propaganda trolls the article mentions, trying to discredit our own independent media outlets?
"Everything you know is wrong." - Weird Al
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Young pup. That quote is from "Happy" Harry Cox. Quid Malmborg in Plano.
Our media routinely discredit theirselves (Score:2)
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When and where was that? Seriously, it was way before my time, and I'm old. Were you watching TV or news reals? Couldn't have been TV.
Re:Hypocrites (Score:4, Funny)
You think maybe we should stop interfering in everybody else's elections before we demand everyone else stop interfering in ours?
No. You can do both at the same time.
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Slashdot is fine, anywhere where free speech and relative anonymity (ie. it takes more than a minute to dox someone) exist political incorrectness has no lack of representation, nor does it need Putin.
I maybe lose a little more karma than I gain by being offensively politically incorrect, but it's pretty even handed.