The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby stickdog99 » Sat Apr 13, 2019 5:14 pm

More on the case of the Clemson professors/assistant professors and the evil Russian troll accounts

http://newsstand.clemson.edu/faculty-me ... er-trolls/

Michael Staton, College of Behavioral, Social and Health Sciences
July 20, 2018

Darren Linvill has earned an unusual moniker over the last eight months. He’s spent so much time studying the habits of those that would abuse Twitter to subvert political discourse, his colleagues in Clemson’s communication department now call him “the troll whisperer.”

Linvill and College of Business faculty member Patrick Warren have spent months studying the activities of social media accounts created by Russian agencies to negatively influence election cycles and political discourse. They’ve studied how these “trolls” achieve their goals and what the timing and frequency of posts have to say about their intentions and efficacy, and they’re getting national attention for their work.

Twitter has not supplied much detail regarding the scope of social media attacks coming from Russia, only giving specific numbers from the weeks prior to the election. Researchers working with NBC news identified a little over 200,000 tweets which they published online back in February. Linvill and Warren, however, have downloaded over 3 million individual tweets, a striking figure and well more than Twitter’s “official” revelations.

...

Linvill and Warren started with the initial list of over 2,700 troll accounts revealed by Congress in late 2017. They used the Social Studio’s tools to quantify the number of tweets coming from known trolls and chart the various identities they’ve assumed over the course of an account’s history.

Linvill also took the time to examine every account one by one to verify suspicious activity, and in the process has helped people falsely accused of being trolls clear their names with Twitter. Attempts by many journalists to reach Twitter about people who have been mislabeled trolls have been met with little-to-no success, but some of the names uncovered by Linvill have been removed from subsequent troll lists.

“We decided early on to not automate the entire process,” Linvill said. “It’s made our findings more valuable but it’s been incredibly time consuming.”

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has made the research especially challenging. The GDPR has forced businesses to erase data that is more than three years old in order to protect people’s privacy. This regulation has essentially put an unforgiving countdown on Linvill and Warren’s data; every day that passes is another piece of potential data falling out of their hands.

This cruel reality stung in June when the House Intelligence Committee released over 1,100 new handles designed to increase political polarization in the U.S. This forced Linvill to go back and add even more tweets to the already large list he had assembled before, and it meant countless pieces of data that could have been found before were lost forever due to the GDPR.

“This whole process has been like gathering data in front of a steamroller,” Warren said. “You know you’ve got to keep moving forward and you’re frantically picking up as many pieces as you can, but after a certain point you can’t go back for more.”

Linvill and Warren realized early on that these circumstances practically guaranteed their work would never produce the full picture of negative political influence via Twitter. They came to terms with it because of the potential value of what it suggested about the magnitude of the problem on a social platform that many were ignoring when it came to Russian interference in U.S. politics.

Those who are aware of Linvill and Warren’s work are as excited and dismayed by their findings as they are. In the end, Linvill says he’s glad he jumped down this particular rabbit hole, but some people have grown weary of his troll whispering.

“My wife has gotten tired of hearing about trolls,” Linvill said, laughing. “We never expected this list of trolls and tweets to keep increasing in the way that it has. But I had no choice; doing this was me fulfilling my patriotic duty.

Linvill and Warren view this work as ongoing; unfortunately, they don’t think the trolls are going to stop any time soon. And why would they? According to Warren, their efforts thus far have been wildly successful.

For the foreseeable future, the trolls will still be out there, albeit in a subtler, more effective form. Instead of sharing sensational or downright untrue posts that attack a side, they’re resorting to sowing doubt or galvanizing one side against another. It’s all the more reason to have well trained whisperers who continue to weed the trolls out and study their behavior.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby stickdog99 » Sat Apr 13, 2019 5:15 pm

This is a highly imaginative, unbelievably audacious, and completely transparent narrative. If any social media account "resorts to sowing doubt or galvanizing one side against another" in US politics, that account is by definition a troll account indicating nefarious Russian interference in US politics, at least until proven otherwise. It is now our patriotic duty to track and quantify all social media expressions of political dissent in order to identify any "troll" who would dare question our political establishment! And how can we possibly smoke out and hunt down all these Commie dissenters hiding in their internet caves when those damn Europeans won't even allow all businesses to keep all the information they collect about everybody forever!

If you support Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, or Tulsi Gabbard, you are a Russian troll until proven otherwise. If proven otherwise, you are the unwitting dupe of Russian trolls! If you question Big Pharma capture of US health policies, you are a Russian troll until proven otherwise. If proven otherwise, you are the unwitting dupe of Russian trolls! If you think you are part of the 99%, you are a Russian troll until proven otherwise. If proven otherwise, you are the unwitting dupe of Russian trolls! It is everyone's patriotic duty to unmask political dissenters and expose them as the trolls/dupes/communist sympathizers they are because dissenters' "interference" in US politics has been "wildly successful" in their nefarious efforts to "sow doubt" about our otherwise perfectly beneficent oligarchic overlords!

All true "liberal" Democrats need to close ranks against those who would dare question our corporate masters and the Democratic party elite who serve them! The real enemies of all true and loyal "liberal" Democrats are antiwar and anti-corporate protesters, free speech, political dissent of every conceivable stripe, forced vaccination objectors, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, any law that seeks to protect internet privacy, and above all the evil Russian trolls who have fooled so many Americans into mistrusting the goals and priorities of the Democratic party establishment and the "liberal media" that serves as its mouthpiece!
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby RocketMan » Wed Apr 17, 2019 3:55 pm



STEPHEN COHEN: You are absolutely right, only not right enough. This expression, which has become a truth in the media and for too many politicians that “Russia attacked America during the 2016 presidential election” is both exceedingly dangerous and a complete falsehood. Why is it dangerous? Because if a great power is attacked, that great power has to eventually attack back, counterattack. This is a ticking time bomb in relations with Russia. No attack on America occurred in 2016. I was awake, present, and observant. I saw no missiles descending on our country. No Russian paratroopers. No Russian submarines. No Russian combat planes. Nothing. It’s a complete fiction.

It’s a form, I guess, of hyperbole. Did the Russians meddle? Some Russians? I don’t know. I’m not even sure the Kremlin knew anything about it. But the Russiagate story is that Putin decided he wanted Trump to be in the White House. So he attacked American elections and rigged it. So Trump is now in the White House. I don’t know how many people actually believe this. But too many continue to say it, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC. Too many influential news outlets are putting out an exceedingly dangerous fiction which is a form of warmongering. It didn’t happen, but they won’t let go of it.

So I agree with you. There was no attack on America. But they’re keeping this up. Was there meddling? As you say, sure. So let’s do the–briefly–the history of Russian-American meddling in each other’s politics. Where would you like to begin? Should we begin with the American intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918? I mean, Wilson sent about 8,000 American troops to try to help overthrow the new red Communist government. Was that meddling? Really, is it meddling? You tell me. Sounds like meddling to me.

PAUL JAY: It’s armed intervention.

STEPHEN COHEN: It’s armed intervention. All right. What about, to leap forward, 1996? I was in Moscow, I observed it. Then-president of post-Soviet Russia Boris Yeltsin stood no chance of being reelected. No chance whatsoever. He was like 3 percent in the polls. But the Clinton administration desperately needed to keep him in power. So they meddled, big time. They sent electoral experts–not unlike, by the way, Paul Manafort. Guys who make a living advising other countries about how to rig elections. We’ve got lots of them who do this for big money. So they set up in the presidential hotel. You could see them. Clinton arranged, I think, it was $10 billion, I may be wrong there, IMF loan to Yeltsin so Yeltsin could pay pensions and salaries he hadn’t paid for five years. I mean, we did the whole–I mean this was a massive intervention into Russia’s election. And basically we kept Russia, Yeltsin, in the presidency. Is that meddling? Is that meddling?

PAUL JAY: Yeah, of course.

STEPHEN COHEN: What happened with Russian meddling in 2016, compared to the kind of meddling both sides have done, was jaywalking. The only reason it became one of the worst scandals, and I think most damaging in American history, because of the loathing for Trump and because the Clinton people couldn’t accept that she was defeated fair and square. So they made up a story. You know, there’s this book Shattered which tells about how they sat around and said we’ll blame it on the Russians. However, it’s exceedingly unpatriotic. It’s warmongering. It’s damaging our institutions of the presidency.

I mean, if it’s true–for example, let’s say it’s true that the Kremlin can put Trump in the White House. Then evidently our electoral system in this country is not reliable. And why not a governor, or a senator, or a member of the Congress that Putin likes? And what about the next one? I think it’s going to erode confidence in our electoral system on the part of American voters. And what about the presidency itself? I mean, people actually say that a Kremlin puppet sits in the presidency. Do they think that the damage done to the institution of the presidency is going to end when Trump leaves? And do they think Republicans aren’t going to do something similar to the next Democratic president?

And the media’s scandalous coverage of this, abandoning their own standards. I mean, you don’t get your virginity back quite that easily. I mean, they’ve got a lot to atone for, but at the moment they’re not even prepared to say they did anything wrong. Just the other day the heads of these–CNN, the executive editor of the New York Times and the Washington Post–all said they thought their coverage of Russiagate had been great. I mean, really? Really? I mean, that’s like a brain surgeon missing cancer, and then saying he thought he did a good job. I mean, it’s preposterous.

So we have a major problem here. And the myth–there was no Russian attack. The Russians meddled. Mainly what made the meddling different from the kind of meddling that went on, for example, when there were Russian-backed American communist parties, for example, in this country, is social media. It was a social media thing.

And a final point. Let’s say that the Russians–they didn’t–launched a major social media attack to distort the thinking of American voters, and were successful. Because that’s one of the premises, right? People are saying that, right?

PAUL JAY: Yeah.

STEPHEN COHEN: What does that say for American voters? What contempt people have for American voters. So-called American Democrats have contempt for American voters. And now what are they doing? They’re out busy censoring social media so that we won’t get any information that might disorient an American voter. You can’t–if you don’t believe that the electorate will reach a rational decision in voting by whatever interests individual voters have, you’re not a democrat. I don’t mean a member of the Democratic Party. You’re not a democratic person. If you don’t believe in voters you can’t be a democratic person. Then you’re an authoritarian.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby Sounder » Wed Apr 17, 2019 5:45 pm

This:


STEPHEN COHEN: What happened with Russian meddling in 2016, compared to the kind of meddling both sides have done, was jaywalking. The only reason it became one of the worst scandals, and I think most damaging in American history, because of the loathing for Trump and because the Clinton people couldn’t accept that she was defeated fair and square. So they made up a story. You know, there’s this book Shattered which tells about how they sat around and said we’ll blame it on the Russians. However, it’s exceedingly unpatriotic. It’s warmongering. It’s damaging our institutions of the presidency.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby RocketMan » Thu Apr 18, 2019 1:14 am

This I thought also a propos...

https://therealnews.com/stories/is-russ ... phen-cohen

Incidentally, as we talk, this young Russian woman, Marina Butina–sometimes pronounced here BuTIna, but it’s BUtina, B-U-T-I-N-A–has been sitting in an American prison for more than six months, most of it in solitary, for doing nothing other than what many Americans do in Russia, and that is go around talking about how good the American political system is to Russia, Russians. She went around bragging on Putin and the Russian political system here. For that she’s been kept in prison, and was, as Russians say, finally broken. Literally. That’s how Russians break people. They lock you away to you confess. We call confession a plea. So she–and she’s still in prison, even though she pled.

What did she plead guilty to? Coming here and advocating Russian perspectives without registering as a foreign agent. This is a Soviet practice, Paul. One of the things that worries me is that Russiagate has generated too many Soviet-style practices by American authorities. The use of informers. People who were sent to inform on members of Trump’s team, like Papadopoulos, for example. Holding people’s families hostage. I mean, Mueller held General Flynn’s son hostage, essentially, until Flynn pled. And Flynn never should have pled guilty. Never. In fact, he said the other day he regretted it.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Apr 18, 2019 1:10 pm

From a Seth Abramson tome linked in SLAD's thread:

154/ Wow: Mueller establishes that the *whole Seth Rich storyline* concocted by WikiLeaks—pushed by Sean Hannity—was a *concerted* effort by WikiLeaks to *hide* that it was working with Russian military intelligence. Going to break from lawspeak a moment and say Assange is hosed.


I was moderating a Bernie-related discussion group on the very day that the MSM caught wind of a "dead DNC staffer." There were numerous, immediate speculations within two hours that matched the later theory and clearly drawing on individual organic readings of the known facts.

I suspect that there's going to be an extraordinary number of "loose ends" very very neatly wrapped up in the next 48 hours by those writing about the report.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby RocketMan » Thu Apr 18, 2019 1:16 pm

It's sometimes a little fuzzy, what's a ridiculous conspiracy theory and what is plausible speculation, out here on the fringes.

If I can believe Dick Cheney is capable of offing Paul Wellstone, I sure as shit am also capable of believing the Macbeth, excuse me Clintons, are capable of offing Vince Foster. A case which still reeks to high heaven, btw, despite some of the odious people who propagate alternative theories about that.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 18, 2019 1:26 pm

I am so glad you are reading my thread liminalOyster, I will be updating/editing that post so to not keep bumping the thread until it is necessary. I hope you can find more useful information
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:14 pm

seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 18, 2019 1:26 pm wrote:I am so glad you are reading my thread liminalOyster, I will be updating/editing that post so to not keep bumping the thread until it is necessary. I hope you can find more useful information


Of course, I read many of your threads. I almost commented on that one, actually, to ask you to think about breaking up some of your single posts into individual ones so they are a bit easier to follow. I thought this comment was more appropriate here so as not to distract from Abramson's larger tome.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 18, 2019 2:17 pm

Of course, I read many of your threads.


thanks

the reason I post so much in one post is because I am trying not to have that thread constantly at the very top ...I do try not to annoy. I am cognizant

I would actually like to do single posts but that would be way too annoying for a couple people here..(it would make searching my posts so much easier) some one is actually publicly advocating for me to be banned just for that reason ...can you imagine what would happen if I posted 20 times more individual posts! :)

and apparently rumor has it that I am not sufficiently self aware :shrug:


here's one more maybe you would want

Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby stickdog99 » Thu Apr 18, 2019 4:19 pm

liminalOyster » 18 Apr 2019 17:10 wrote:From a Seth Abramson tome linked in SLAD's thread:

154/ Wow: Mueller establishes that the *whole Seth Rich storyline* concocted by WikiLeaks—pushed by Sean Hannity—was a *concerted* effort by WikiLeaks to *hide* that it was working with Russian military intelligence. Going to break from lawspeak a moment and say Assange is hosed.


I was moderating a Bernie-related discussion group on the very day that the MSM caught wind of a "dead DNC staffer." There were numerous, immediate speculations within two hours that matched the later theory and clearly drawing on individual organic readings of the known facts.

I suspect that there's going to be an extraordinary number of "loose ends" very very neatly wrapped up in the next 48 hours by those writing about the report.


Yeah, can you hear the glee in Abramson's voice?

Yeah, the REAL villains in this story are the whistle blowers who leak true information that exposes the crimes of US oligarchs! Never again shall we allow the free dissemination of such embarrassing information!

All those documents proving corruption, criminality, and illegal invasions of the privacy of all US citizens were classified and STOLEN. Exposing government wrongdoing is the true crime here! Thank God we finally caught the real criminal in all of this!

LOL at how Mueller managed to conclude that suspecting something highly suspicious somehow PROVES Wikileaks was a *concerted* effort to *hide* that it was working with Russian military intelligence. What crazy train of logic underlies that bizarre claim? Only evil Russians could ever be so diabolical to notice Seth Rich's death was suspicious? Only evil Russians could have possibly leaked the DNC's private (and therefor classified?) correspondence? I mean, because we all know the US corporate media would NEVER do something so despicable as to tell the truth to the US public.

And if Wikileaks "concocted" the whole timeline, why did they need the Russians to do so, and how in the hell could their concoction of this timeline be used a means to obscure their COLLUSION with the Russians?
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby stickdog99 » Thu Apr 18, 2019 4:37 pm

seemslikeadream » 18 Apr 2019 18:17 wrote:
Of course, I read many of your threads.


thanks

the reason I post so much in one post is because I am trying not to have that thread constantly at the very top ...I do try not to annoy. I am cognizant

I would actually like to do single posts but that would be way too annoying for a couple people here..(it would make searching my posts so much easier) some one is actually publicly advocating for me to be banned just for that reason ...can you imagine what would happen if I posted 20 times more individual posts! :)

and apparently rumor has it that I am not sufficiently self aware :shrug:


here's one more maybe you would want

Image


To me, what gets lost in all this glee of rooting for anything that makes Trump look bad and the Democrats look comparatively good is that suddenly telling the truth about the crimes any US oligarch (or oligarchic beneficiary) has become the true crime because RUSSIANS DID IT!

Since when should any US citizen be rooting for the criminalization of the free dissemination of true information that exposes the corruption and mendacity of any of our political representatives, regardless of the team they play for?

Even if Guccifer is an actual agent of Putin, doesn't the disclosure of the truth about how our leaders actually operate serve the greater interests of democracy? Doesn't the criminalization of the disclosure of the truth about how our leaders actually operate oppose the greater interests of democracy?

Yes, Trump is the greater of the evils, by far, but the greatest of the evils is allowing your hatred of Trump to blind you into supporting even further criminalization of the disclosure of the truth. The greater battle is the battle of whistleblowers of all stripes vs. corrupt oligarchs of all stripes. How is it that corporate media has managed to turn so many otherwise well-meaning Democrats against their most cherished overriding principles over just two short years of conditioning?
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby RocketMan » Fri Apr 19, 2019 4:51 am

YES, stickdog99. EXACTLY.

What was in the e-mails?

What did Assange publish?

And why is it so essential to fudge these questions up with "RUSSIAN HACKING" and "ASSANGE SMELLS BAD"?
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby RocketMan » Fri Apr 19, 2019 10:19 am

Good distillation.
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Re: The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject

Postby JackRiddler » Fri Apr 19, 2019 10:33 am

But don't forget the top 1%ers to 3%ers of empire power elite, deranged natsec bomber psychos and henchperson intellectuals and media actors who saw xenophobic panic stories and a revival of Cold War enemy images as a solution for the public's apathy about imperialism and perpetual wars.
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