By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--November 25, 2016
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The flood of "fake news" this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation. Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human "trolls" and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia. Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on "fake news" as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign. "They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests" said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. "This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media."You couldn't find better clickbait writing on the clickbait sites themselves. Boy oh boy, the left is really not going to let this go, is it? They can't imagine that Hillary lost fair and square, so they have to come up with some sort of rationale for why she and they got cheated out of her rightful birthright of the presidency. Of course, as Rob told you the other day, if you want to talk about "fake news," you have to start with the MSM itself. Consider the chutzpah required for the Washington Post to chastise voters for readings sites that "portrayed Clinton as a criminal," as if we needed to get that from clickbait sites financed by the Russians and not from the publicly available evidence of her wrongdoing and the words of James Comey himself.
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