Trolls for Hire
July 28, 2016 1:31 PM   Subscribe

 
Grange halls.

That is what the country needs.

Actual physical meetings spaces where those who care meet regularly to hash out agendas to present to elected officials.

It's the only thing that can't be ground down from afar.

And that is the one thing the Occupy movement indisputably got right.
posted by ocschwar at 1:34 PM on July 28, 2016 [13 favorites]


Mod note: This is about the Russian internet stuff adjacent to the election, and inasmuch as that's been an ongoing side topic in the DNC threads, I suggest we bring that sub-discussion over here so it can have its own thread.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 1:54 PM on July 28, 2016


"What Volkov said stuck with me as I continued to follow the trolls. Since the article appeared, last summer, the Internet Research Agency appears to have quieted down significantly. Many of the Twitter accounts stopped posting. But some continued, and toward the end of last year I noticed something interesting: many had begun to promote right-wing news outlets, portraying themselves as conservative voters who were, increasingly, fans of Donald Trump."

Well.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:22 PM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


And that is the one thing the Great Ape-Snake War indisputably got right.

every now and then I forget that I installed that 'Snake People' extension
posted by thelonius at 2:40 PM on July 28, 2016 [12 favorites]


Paranoia indeed. One begins to wonder whether every unknown older white lady who bursts into your friend's public facebook post to trash Michelle Obama or rah-rah for Trump, might be a Russian troll posing.

Perhaps the phones have been hacked, too, and all pollsters are actually calling Russian trolls who are sitting in a call center somewhere.

Now, if the Russian trolls figure out how to actually vote, that will be something.

It makes about as much sense as all the other explanations for anything.
posted by mai at 2:43 PM on July 28, 2016




Reddit's /r/politics forum has a disproportionate number of anti-Hillary/pro-Bernie people who suddenly pivoted to Trump.

Some post comments, but there seems to be a uniform 5,000 upvotees to any anti-Hillary thread, or one positive to her enemies. (Reddit promotes upvoted topics and hides ones with fewer upvotes or lots of downvotes. So even without English language skiills, a troll could have a big impact.)

Ironically, these people reflexively accuse anyone who disagrees of being a Correct the Record shill, and discredit all opposition generally as paid work by CTR employees, as a pre-emptive strike.
posted by msalt at 2:51 PM on July 28, 2016 [3 favorites]




There has been something unnatural, something off about Bernie and Trump support at Reddit. Something I don't remember happening in earlier elections.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:02 PM on July 28, 2016 [8 favorites]


I mean, Reddit was already a pretty popular place for super right wing Stormfront people, so I don't think we need to look to Russia to figure out what kind of hidden agenda might influence discussions in /r/politics. I look at stuff on Reddit all the time, but that site is literally the last place I would go for nuanced discussions of politics or society.
posted by teponaztli at 3:16 PM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


You thought this song was optimistic but it's really the nightmare anthem of the new world order.

Was pretty sure that was "Right Here, Right Now."
posted by octobersurprise at 3:34 PM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


I just try to keep in mind that anybody who disagrees with my political views is secretly an agent of a hostile foreign government.
posted by indubitable at 3:41 PM on July 28, 2016 [11 favorites]


[Reddit] is literally the last place I would go for nuanced discussions of politics or society.

True, I like it for birds and mushrooms and history and camping and weather and cute animal pictures, but you notice other things.
posted by Bee'sWing at 4:00 PM on July 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


I wonder if this will always be a feature of online political discussions going forward? Or will there be some ways to ferret out manipulation?

You'd think that Reddit might want to do something if, say, 70% of the traffic in /r/Politics came from IP addresses in Russia.
posted by msalt at 4:15 PM on July 28, 2016


I really expect more from the New Yorker. It would have been nice if a RuNet expert had penned the story, although Adrian Chen seems like a nice fellow. While Trump's remarks are weird and wrong, and Assange has no business appearing on RT, it seems really hard to believe that the Russians are attempting to influence the American election.

The meme is just another ugly part of an ugly election cycle. Mainstream GOP commentators such as David Frum have, for obvious, very political reasons, taken the "Siberian Candidate" meme and have run with it. But Frum and others have a political agenda (to stop Trump) rather than a commitment to carefully weighing and analyzing the facts.
posted by My Dad at 4:18 PM on July 28, 2016


To be fair, a commitment to carefully weighing and analyzing the facts kind of naturally leads to a strong desire to stop Trump.

Anyway, I didn't mean to sound like typical Metafilter vs. Reddit. I've been a Redditor for years, which is why I think I've noticed a general uptick in white supremacist stuff out in the open (along with an increasingly large number of people calling it out, thank God). Nothing about my experience with that Reddit makes me think any of the hostility of this election season is outside what that site was already capable of.
posted by teponaztli at 4:25 PM on July 28, 2016 [4 favorites]


There's probably no way to be certain the source of the leaks. Assange and crew are exacting revenge, justifiably, in my humble opinion. And transparency is good.

HRC, after all, is a fan of the police state, and lead persecutor of Manning and Snowden, etc.

She may still be the better choice, but please don't pretend these won't still be issues when she's elected.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 4:32 PM on July 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


You'd think that Reddit might want to do something if, say, 70% of the traffic in /r/Politics came from IP addresses in Russia.

Not to get all "I'm behind 7 proxies!" but...well, they're usually behind a whole bunch of proxies. For instance, during the Estonian and Georgian cyberattacks, the Russian hackers would route their traffic with multiple hops through other nations (particularly Turkey). That's something within an intelligence agency's capabilities to detect, but I doubt Reddit's network infrastructure or support team could.
posted by zombieflanders at 4:34 PM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


To be fair, a commitment to carefully weighing and analyzing the facts kind of naturally leads to a strong desire to stop Trump.

You can still stop Trump with the facts instead than spinning tall tales about troll armies financed by a foreign power. But the tall tales, hyperbole and falsehoods make for a better media narrative. What is happening on both sides of the political spectrum in regard to Trump right now is toxic to democracy.
posted by My Dad at 4:38 PM on July 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


Assange and crew are exacting revenge, justifiably, in my humble opinion. And transparency is good.

Wait, encouraging foreign intervention in and sabotage of elections is good? You do know that's straight out of the imperialist handbook, right? And speaking of Snowden and transparency, this is what he had to say today:
Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped. But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.
Rather unsurprisingly, they're already branding him a quisling and a traitor to the cause, as most of these groups do. This comes on the heels of Wikileaks' linking to the personal information of most of the women in Turkey, opening them up to retribution for both political and personal reasons. And in their leaks of voicemails from the DNC servers yesterday, most of which were mundane stuff like staffers talking to their little children, they failed to redact the numbers of the callers. Other DNC leaks have included Social Security numbers and other financial information of innocent people. Not that this is anything new, as Wikileaks has previously published the personal information of informants in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving them and their families to be rounded up for imprisonment, torture, and execution. Assange's response was allegedly that merely allying themselves to America meant "they deserve to die."

That's not transparency, that's doxxing, and it's neither justifiable nor should it be encouraged. Assange has a long history of misogyny (and likely sexual assault), as well as subtle and not-so-subtle anti-Semitism. Wikileaks as an organization has tied itself to groups such as gamergaters and the alt-right movement as a whole, who are dedicated to harassing and terrorizing women, PoC, LGBTQ people, Jews and Muslims, and a pretty much any marginalized groups and their allies. They may have been a force for good in the past, but they're rapidly approaching the point at which they are extremists who are willing to let innocent people be attacked or even murdered merely for disagreeing with the Wikileaks agenda.
posted by zombieflanders at 4:58 PM on July 28, 2016 [25 favorites]


I stopped participating in Reddit during OWS, started on there in 2007, and still read the site every once in a while to keep up with what's going on in terms of the site culture and such. In my opinion, it has become insanely racist even in historically radically liberal city subs. I didn't leave because of racism, only to reduce my overall net exposure.

Russians or not, something is driving the shift. Insofar as its hard to understand how formerly radical/liberal sub's have been overrun with racism/sexism/classism in a way that wasn't as potent or apparent in 2008 or 2012 I can see why its appealing to guess that some sort of conspiracy drives the change.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 5:11 PM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


Russians or not, something is driving the shift.

"Millenials" are the typical excuse for everything these days, aren't they?
posted by My Dad at 5:43 PM on July 28, 2016


I do agree with you: Reddit is disgusting. The local subreddit for my town is filled with hateful comments about First Nations and homeless people. Even r/gifs, one of the tamer subreddits, is filled with racist and violent commenters.
posted by My Dad at 5:45 PM on July 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


Wait, encouraging foreign intervention in and sabotage of elections is good?

The DNC sabotaged themselves with their shitty behavior re: the Bernie campaign outlined in some of those emails. Your comment reads like you're mad that the rest of us found out about it. Well, that and 2 paragraphs of unsourced ad hominem, as if the behavior of Wikileaks staff has anything to do with the substance of the leak.
posted by indubitable at 5:45 PM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


it seems really hard to believe that the Russians are attempting to influence the American election.

Huh, I thought the expert money had come down on 'yes, it was pretty definitely the Russian state behind the DNC email leak'. Is that in doubt, or is there somehow room to think Russia did that without an intent to influence the election?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 5:57 PM on July 28, 2016 [3 favorites]


Is that in doubt

Yes, it is most certainly in doubt. The people I work with who know about Russia and RuNet say that opposition groups use the same argument — Putin is paying trolls to influence online debate etc — without focusing on why they, as opposition groups, are unpalatable to Russian citizens.

“When you need something to be true, you will look for patterns; you connect the dots like the stars of a constellation. Your brain abhors disorder. You see faces in clouds and demons in bonfires. Those who claim the powers of divination hijack these natural human tendencies. They know they can depend on you to use subjective validation in the moment and confirmation bias afterward.”

posted by My Dad at 6:13 PM on July 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


In the earlier months of the Donald Trump campaign, many people I knew asked me to comment on the similarities between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Recently I have been asked to comment on direct connections between Trump and Putin. And now, with the release of nearly 20,000 emails apparently stolen from the Democratic National Committee’s email server by Russian hackers, has come the suggestion that Putin may actually be interfering in the US election to help get Trump elected. These ideas—that Trump is like Putin and that he is Putin’s agent—are deeply flawed.
posted by My Dad at 6:14 PM on July 28, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm sorry, I was looking for some kind of rebuttal or new evidence that makes articles like this one in Vice no longer accurate, not an opinion that it can't be true because it would be too convenient.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 6:23 PM on July 28, 2016 [16 favorites]


The evidence that Russia had anything to do with the leaks is not good. Marcy Wheeler has recently written a few articles on it that are pretty good if folks are inclined to study the case outside the official channels.

I do my best not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. With the lack of accountability among US leadership, it really is hard to know who to trust. That's why transparency of any kind is a godsend. Some secrets do need keeping, yes, but with the abuse of classification, the persecution of whistle blowers, and all the rest since 911, there's no way to keep our leadership accountable.

It's turned me into a Richard Stallman acolyte! I never saw that coming.

Imperialism, in all forms, is poison. It's Woodrow Wilson on a bad day. Our meddling in other countries is paternalistic - it's white man's burden bull. For every little bit of good done there, tremendous harm is also done. My concern is cleaning house. Maybe after that, we can start thinking about policing other people.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 6:25 PM on July 28, 2016


I just try to keep in mind that anybody who disagrees with my political views is secretly an agent of a hostile foreign government.


Right? I've honestly never experienced something that had me reaching for an aluminum foil hat like this has...
posted by alrightokay at 6:28 PM on July 28, 2016


I'm sorry, I was looking for some kind of rebuttal or new evidence that makes articles like this one in Vice no longer accurate, not an opinion that it can't be true because it would be too convenient.

Sorry I couldn't change your opinion. By the way, the only source Vice has (and they're all secondary sources) is Crowdstrike. They don't seem like a totally unbiased source of information, unlike, say, the EFF.

"Overall, the Washington Post story actually read more like a promotion for CrowdStrike's incident response offerings than actual security news."


Got any other sources besides a collection of second-hand links from Vice?
posted by My Dad at 6:38 PM on July 28, 2016


Wait, so by this theory, Assange was given the e-mails by the Russians to damage the DNC and Hillary's Campaign - I thought the e-mails didn't show any impropriety of substance? Another nothingburger?

Is the damage that there are e-mails ('more e-mails! Hillary can't control her security!') or was there indeed impropriety from the DNC?
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 6:52 PM on July 28, 2016 [2 favorites]


The DNC emails show clear advocacy for one of the nominees. The rest is up for interpretation.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 6:57 PM on July 28, 2016


And the manner in which those emails were released demonstrate clear bias for another candidate. Assange has clearly signaled his biases and prejudices, and so doing risks turning Wikileaks into another Breitbart-type org.
posted by Existential Dread at 7:05 PM on July 28, 2016 [10 favorites]


It wasn't just advocacy, they were planning a campaign to have surrogates question Sanders' religious beliefs — specifically, to paint him as an atheist to a Southern Baptist audience. You might argue that this kind of ugly, underhanded action is a part of national political campaigns (like Karl Rove's infamous push poll in South Carolina about John McCain's "black baby"), but usually it's coming from other campaigns, not the controlling body of the party running the primary.
posted by indubitable at 7:06 PM on July 28, 2016


Now, if the Russian trolls figure out how to actually vote, that will be something.

The USA has had that welcome mat out for years now:
Half the country uses laughably tamper-friendly voting machines with no paper trail and use tally systems that can be rewritten untraceably, operated by amateurs. The only anti-vote-fraud measures that legislators bother to work on are corrupt disenfranchisement schemes. Half the country clings like a drowning man to a log to a childhood fantasy that election shenanigans only happen in other countries - so much so that any suggestion of election monitoring by the UN or other neutral party is met with fury.

If Russia actually went ahead and tried to manipulate US elections directly, for all we know their biggest problem might be how to avoid accidentally tripping over other parties already busily doing exactly the same thing...

That could make a pretty good movie actually; in the genre of a Guy-Ritchie comedy-heist where all the different criminal gangs are constantly inadvertently messing each other up as they all unwittingly pursue the same goal. Tallies have been tampered with, but the only people who know, only know it because they tampered first and the results are the wrong fake results... :)
posted by -harlequin- at 10:13 PM on July 28, 2016 [15 favorites]


"to paint him as an atheist to a Southern Baptist audience"

This is known as a "big lie" - repeat a lie often enough, and your audience will believe it.

The email says nothing of the sort.
posted by Yowser at 11:54 PM on July 28, 2016 [6 favorites]


What is your interpretation of the email, if not that?
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 1:21 AM on July 29, 2016


This is known as a "big lie" - repeat a lie often enough, and your audience will believe it.

The email says nothing of the sort.


Is this some kind of meta humor? You know, like how we're in a thread about people who name call on the internet to obscure fact? Here's the email in question:
From:MARSHALL@dnc.org
To: MirandaL@dnc.org, PaustenbachM@dnc.org, DaceyA@dnc.org
Date: 2016-05-05 03:31
Subject: No shit
It might may no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.
posted by indubitable at 5:44 AM on July 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


One email where someone spitballs an admittedly terrible idea, that clearly was never followed up on, is hardly "planning a campaign".
posted by Roommate at 6:14 AM on July 29, 2016 [13 favorites]


The email leaks show machine politics. I suspect it has always been this way, and am grateful for a little sanitizing light shed on the problem.

I was a HRC defender in a deep red state for a long time. Despite the long record of anti-union behavior, I supported the Clintons. After her turn in State, I can no longer count myself a supporter.

I've also been highly critical of Obama since his second year. I mean, how long does it take to realize the opposition is not negotiating in good faith? Long enough to let majorities pass by and do nothing.

Worse, the Democrats sanitized the worst excesses of the Bush years. The single exception was the rejection of torture.

Mostly I'm tired of the hippy punching.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 7:09 AM on July 29, 2016


The DNC wants a Democrat to win. Of course they want all the candidates running to be on point.
posted by Yowser at 9:02 AM on July 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


On who's point? The people's? The donor's? The democratic base?

I am kinda loving the resurgence of the red scare. I think it no mistake this is happening when the left is making waves.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 9:37 AM on July 29, 2016


The email says nothing of the sort.

You've got to be splitting your hairs pretty fine to say that.

And more to the point, that's not going to be the reaction of many Sanders supporters that Clinton needs to stay enthusiastic and firing up their friends, and not feel like the deck was rigged against them by an establishment that does not care to represent them. DNC should publicly clean house.
posted by anonymisc at 10:12 AM on July 29, 2016


Masha Gessen: The Trump-Putin Fallacy.
This is precisely what makes the Trump-as-Putin’s-agent line of reasoning so unhelpful. Trump’s foreign policy statements are perfectly consistent with his character and thinking. The man is uninterested in anything he doesn’t understand. He is incapable of strategic planning, and he has a particular distaste for paying debts. Of course he doesn’t see any reason for the United States to fulfill its obligations to other countries and organizations—just as Trump personally wouldn’t fulfill his obligations to other people, or to organizations. Yes, that happens to be exactly what Putin would want him to say. But the idea that Putin is somehow making or even encouraging him to say these things is a work-around for the inability to imagine that the Republican Party’s nominee is saying them of his own accord.

Trump is not a foreign agent.
The whole thing is worth reading. Gessen points out that Trump is scary enough without being Putin's agent.
Lack of imagination is one of our greatest handicaps as humans and as citizens. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, one of the richest men in the world, could not imagine that Putin would put him in jail, and this was one of the reasons he ignored repeated warnings and stayed in Russia. Then he spent ten years in a Russian prison. David Cameron could not imagine that his fellow citizens would vote to secede from the European Union, so he called for a referendum. Soon after the vote last month, pundits in both the UK and the US regrouped and started reassuring themselves and their audiences that the UK will not really leave the EU—because they can’t imagine it. I have spent much of this year arguing with my American friends about Donald Trump. Even after Trump had won enough delegates to lock up the Republican nomination, reasonable, well-informed people insisted that some Republican savior would swoop in and reclaim that party. There was little, if any, evidence in favor of that kind of outcome, but for a brief moment many Americans seemed to believe in the unlikely rather than the obvious. Why?

“I just can’t imagine Trump becoming the nominee,” many said at the time. But a lack of imagination is not an argument: it’s a limitation. It is essential to recognize this limitation and try to overcome it. That is a difficult and often painful thing to do.

Now that Trump has become the Republican nominee—and has pulled even or even slightly ahead of Clinton in the most recent polls—it is time to force ourselves to imagine the unimaginable. Forget Putin. Let us try to imagine Donald Trump being elected president of the United States.

The day after the election, the stock market will crash. Then, there will be a lull. For one thing, Trump will not have taken office yet. But life will seem conspicuously unchanged. The stock market will recover some. On inauguration day, there will be large anti-Trump protests in some American cities. But in some others, including Washington, there will be large celebrations that will make your skin crawl. On the other hand, they will not be wearing black shirts, and that will make what has happened seem a little less real. In some cities, there will be clashes. The police will do their jobs, and this will be reassuring.

After all, you will think, the American presidency is a strangely limited institution. It doesn’t give Trump that many ways to radically alter the everyday lives of Americans. But that is exactly the problem. President Trump will have to begin destroying the institutions of American democracy—not because they get in the way of anything specific he wants to do, like build the wall (though he will probably have moved on to something else by that point), but because they are an obstacle to the way he wants to do them. A fascist leader needs mobilization. The slow and deliberative passage of even the most heinous legislation is unlikely to supply that. Wars do, and there will be wars. These wars will occur both abroad and at home. They will make us wish that Trump really were Putin’s agent: at least then there would be no threat of nuclear war.
A Hungarian perspective which I thought was quite interesting, from Katalin Balog: An inconsistent triad: Trump, Sanders, Clinton.
In the last 30 years, I have witnessed, criss-crossing the Atlantic, first, my native Hungary's transition from communism to democracy and capitalism, and, for the past 6, its about-face: the sudden dismantling of the institutional system of liberal democracy, as well as the rapid spread of crony capitalism, the establishment of a "mafia state". In 2014, its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, proudly called Hungary an "illiberal state". The institutions of liberal democracy proved to be too fragile, the careful checks and balances too foreign to take root in Hungary, in a climate of growing corruption, mass unemployment, and rising inequality. So my state of mind has been, more than anything else, a shock of recognition at Donald Trump's precipitous rise and the rapid transformation of the culture of political discourse in the Republican party and beyond. This is how democracy has been lost in Hungary; it started with a profound transformation of political discourse. Trump's debasement of the public sphere, the normalizing of taboo-breaking racist, sexist, xenophobic speech, the defiant, hateful rejection of "political correctness" has strong echoes in the post-socialist political-cultural scene in Hungary. I have already been there.

Whatever you think of American foreign policy, or the Democratic establishment, or the breaking up of the big banks, and even if you think capitalism itself is unacceptable, you better realize that something fundamental is at stake that you ought to take a stand on: you ought not pretend that this is politics as usual.
I'll be watching the FiveThirtyEight tracker pretty closely. Current polls-plus prediction: Clinton 61.7%, Trump 38.3%.
posted by russilwvong at 11:50 AM on July 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


I am kinda loving the resurgence of the red scare. I think it no mistake this is happening when the left is making waves.

So you're not even aware that Putin is a right-wing hyper-capitalist autocrat? Or that no one believes that this was tied the left in the country, let alone a left-of-center social Democrat like Sanders? Or do you just not know what a red scare is?
posted by zombieflanders at 11:59 AM on July 29, 2016


I'm aware that Putin is a hyper-capitalist autocrat and that the email leak is not being blamed on Sanders. My reference to the red scare was too vague.

Let me make my statement more clear. I'm finding humor in the resurgence of cold war rhetoric that happens to correlate with the US left finding it's voice. I happen to think that is no mistake. The left is the natural enemy of late capitalism.

Does that answer your questions?

All the presidents I've been alive and aware for have been variations of Reagan. Trump, who I'm not a fan of so that that point is clear, is an exception, not because he's a fascist, but because he is breaking from the Reagan consensus. I think the few Republicans who are defecting don't dislike him because of his rancid racist views, but because he is new money, he has no class, he didn't go to the right schools, and because he doesn't properly respect the way things have been done for the last forty years.

Ideally, I'd love to see the Democratic party finish it's take over of the right wing, and a new party to represent the left, say one that takes labor's concerns seriously.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 12:48 PM on July 29, 2016 [1 favorite]




Maybe you Yanks will stop with the voting machine bullshit and go back to pencil and paper? Just a thought.
posted by Yowser at 9:09 PM on July 29, 2016


While Trump's remarks are weird and wrong, and Assange has no business appearing on RT, it seems really hard to believe that the Russians are attempting to influence the American election.

You need to think like a Russian. What are their interests, what motivates them? NATO is the thorn in their side. Anything that weakens NATO is a major win for them. Trump wants to disband or radically alter NATO. That would be a huge bonus for Moscow, worth risking a lot for.
posted by scalefree at 9:21 PM on July 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Previously
posted by alrightokay at 10:23 PM on July 29, 2016


Let me make my statement more clear. I'm finding humor in the resurgence of cold war rhetoric that happens to correlate with the US left finding it's voice. I happen to think that is no mistake. The left is the natural enemy of late capitalism.

Possibly, but I find the easiest explanation is the Cold War rhetoric is just fairly convenient to deploy, since the Cold War hasn't been over that long. It was only 8 years ago when Beijing held the Summer Olympics and the Chinese economy was growing by 10 or 12%. And back then there seemed to be an article every other day talking about China as this unstoppable machine that churned out skyscrapers and gymnasts and space rockets. And quite a lot of these articles were either all about a US-China faceoff for the 21st century, or were just fearmongering about US decline and the threat of China's rise.
posted by FJT at 9:32 AM on July 30, 2016


I am wondering how many Russian trolls astroturfed for Britain to leave the EU and went undetected, given Putin's quarrel with Europe over Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions.
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:29 PM on July 30, 2016


Given that the left fears Russian hackers now, and the right thinks the Establishment is out to get them -- could we actually get some movement on reforming our egregious voting methods? I don't think there's ever been any good evidence of fraud, but as -harlequin- points out, our system really is inviting manipulation. Heretofore it's been treated as conspiracy-mongering to even point out such things (even here), but now that we seem to mostly all agree that (a) it is quite possible, and (b) at least one major power has both the means and intention to meddle in elections, as well as (arguably) having apparently done so -- it seems like there could actually be movement on this now. Let's put our national phobias about election fraud, Russia, and the Establishment to work on something useful for a change. At the very least, it can be another cudgel to use on state-level Republicans who refuse to pay for fixing our terrible machines.
posted by chortly at 11:28 AM on August 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


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