"I found election interference and no one cared"

December 30, 2019 11:37 PM

"Goldsmith is the Vietnam Veterans of America’s chief investigator, a job the organization created for him after he showed an uncanny ability to sniff out online scams and fake accounts that exploit or target American veterans. In this role, he has had to deal with the apathy of decision-makers and the intransigence of social media companies. He’s also worked to overcome a lack of understanding among veterans about how their community is being targeted, and he’s done it all with little support. [...] With the 2020 US election fast approaching, his concern is that if the public, the government, and the platforms can’t come together to protect a widely respected community like veterans from information operations and exploitation, then perhaps they can’t protect the election itself."

Article by Jane Lytvynenko for Buzzfeed News. Goldsmith's full report is available at Vietnam Veterans for America.

posted by J.K. Seazer (5 comments total)

Great article, thanks. We should all care more about this but it's so omnipresent that it's difficult to care. This guy has my respect for still caring and still fighting. I've been getting weird anonymous messages on Tumblr recently, related to Jewish stuff. It's a fandom account. I miss when astrofurfers stuck to comments on news articles, now it seems they are determined to reach people who don't follow the news. It's all really frightening and enraging. I hope the fact that this guy is fighting *for veterans* will get the current administration to care about his issue, but why should they when they benefit from misinformation. I hope good people in the FBI and can continue to stay on this... In advance of the primaries, everyone who spends time in online spaces needs to be vigilant about this.
posted by subdee at 5:39 AM on December 31, 2019 [9 favorites]

This is horrifying. You would think the FBI would be acting to protect veterans from this sort of abuse.
posted by suelac at 11:24 AM on December 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

...And if not the FBI then the VA. Or maybe local police. Or maybe just...people not sucking?
posted by wenestvedt at 5:38 PM on December 31, 2019

This is a state-level actor carrying out en masse the sort of harassment or petty crimes which might be dealt with in the physical world by something like a neighborhood watch. I don't know how to counter it but it seems like it's effective because the latter-day internet has developed with large-scale centralization around big tech and without an analog to the neighborhood.
posted by XMLicious at 9:32 AM on January 1, 2020 [5 favorites]

There’s a neighborhood watch on fandom tumblr, depending on the fandom, but they spend their time harassing artists and writers of “immoral” content and sometimes spread posts written by propagandists uncritically. The issue is that you need some knowledge of history and a high degree of reading comprehension to distinguish between real posts written by real people and propanga posts written by trolls, and sadly the reading comprehension of the average user of a site built for reblogging memes, photos and short text posts with no sources is not very high.
posted by subdee at 4:04 AM on January 2, 2020 [1 favorite]