cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/405394
A former Florida police officer who relocated to Moscow is one of the key figures behind it.
Dozens of bogus stories aimed at influencing US voters and sowing distrust ahead of November’s election. Some have been roundly ignored but others have been shared by influencers and members of the US Congress.
For example, one of these stories was published on a website called The Houston Post – one of dozens of sites with American-sounding names which are in reality run from Moscow - and alleged that the FBI illegally wiretapped Donald Trump’s Florida resort.
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We’ve found whole buildings full of paid online trolls in Russia poisoning the dialogue and it’s like the whole media industry agreed to stop talking about it. Now they don’t even need humans to do that.
Because all the US media is run by wealthy Republicans.
The civil war was in abatement, but it never did end.
Abeyance, I think you mean.
That’s a finer choice perhaps, but abatement isn’t incorrect here
“Gone are the days of Russia purchasing ads in roubles, or having pretty obvious trolls that are sitting in a factory in St. Petersburg,” said Nina Jankowicz, head of the American Sunlight Project, a non-profit organisation attempting to combat the spread of disinformation.
Ms Jankowicz was briefly director of the short-lived US Disinformation Governance Board, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security designed to tackle false information.
“Now we’re seeing a lot more information laundering,” she said - using a term referring to the recycling of fake or misleading stories into the mainstream in order to obscure their ultimate source.
“Information laundering”
A story which originated on DC Weekly, claiming that Ukrainian officials bought yachts with US military aid, was repeated by several members of Congress, including Senator J D Vance and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Yep. Perjury Traitor Greed in the mix with an ex-Marine Florida Cop on the lam in Moscow. That is correct. Yes. Who had that on their bingo cards? Everyone? Cool. Cool cool cool.
They’re masquerading as local lemmy users too. I see you comrade.
I have noticed a lot more down votes in certain political posts the past few months thats for sure
At this point we should just rename it to Lenny
Hah! ;)
It’s easy to start thinking everyone that doesn’t think like you is a bot. I try to always assume I’m talking to real people, anything else is a bad habit imo.
Functionally, when someone will not engage in good faith, what’s the difference between a human and a bot?
If someone is not arguing cordially and supporting their position with facts, I don’t care if they’re human or not, they’re a bot.
Sure, but many people seem to suffer when it comes to distinguishing facts from opinion and interpretation.
For example, it’s a fact that Biden had a very poor performance in the debate. No one is really disputing that, though there have been various justifications offered for it. All good up to this point, but it falls apart when it comes to interpreting what that means for the Democratic campaign. Some are of the view that it’s too late to change the candidate and have Biden stand down, and that to do so would tank our chances of beating Trump. Others, myself included, feel like the hit he has taken is likely terminal, and that our best chance is to have him bow out and spin up a new campaign as soon as possible, in order to have the best shot at viability. Personally, I think the longer the delay on doing so, the more it becomes a situation of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Either way, absent someone with a functional crystal ball or some time travelers that can give us a definitive answer, both stances are subjective and fallible interpretations of what the best course of action would be, based on facts. Yet, in the couple of hours I browsed Lemmy after my post-work nap today, I easily saw a dozen people accusing posters who stated Biden should step down of being trolls, Russian agents, useful idiots, and/or arguing in bad faith for merely stating an opinion. I’ve seen people who think Biden is the best shot get called stupid for holding that view, but it rarely seems to have the same power to kill a conversation dead in its tracks as, “You disagree with me, ergo you must be a Russian shill.”
To deny these disinformation campaigns, both foreign and domestic, are real is to be deluded, yet so is dismissing any and all criticism of the party or views that don’t hew to the party orthodoxy as being pure propaganda. Heck, even for people who have fallen wholeheartedly for such propaganda, you ignore them and dismiss them at your peril. If you don’t successfully reengage with them and manage to bring those individuals back into the fold, they could quite easily make up the margin that ultimately could swing the election. According to this NPR article, the last two elections were essentially decided by less than 80,000 votes each in a few swing states. Unless Democratic strategists have a surefire method that’s guaranteed to juice their votes by millions in those states, they really can’t afford to be leaving anything on the table if they want to win.
I’ve seen so many arguments where both sides claim the other is arguing in bad faith tho
I agree. In a way, I’d prefer the majority of the bad takes I see to be from bots or paid actors, but from listening to family and coworkers long enough, it’s easy to see you don’t need to script or pay people to get terrible opinions. Just give them a platform and they’ll unfortunately provide themselves to no end.
If it was fake, it’d be easier to write them off. It’s much harder to accept that we share the same reality.
At any given time 17-40%, roughly, of any social media platform posters are automated bots. Plenty of legitimate uses, such as media manager applications, or automatic reposters, curation, etc.
And IIRC this also included the front-ends for Mechanical Turk style human gopers and 50-cent Army posters, etc. so maybe not so legitimate…
Oh look another story for Republicans to pretend never happened
Florida police officer moves to Moscow?
wikipedia articles about him have been deleted twice:
I mean, it sounds on brand to me 🤷♀️
It’s been a decade. Do we have any fucking national security? What the fuck?
Nah. Our stupid ass government only recently started hiring hackers who smoke weed. But even then, there’s too much stupid red tape.
“Both the NSA and the DOD have a ton of talented hackers, yet when it comes to actually performing disruptive cyber operations, for some reason we as a country are just frozen and scared,” Caceres says. “And that needs to change.”
He points to ransomware actors, mostly based in Russia, who extracted more than a billion dollars of extortion fees from victim companies in 2023 while crippling hospitals and government agencies. North Korea–affiliated hackers, meanwhile, stole another $1 billion in cryptocurrency last year, funneling profits into the coffers of the Kim regime. All of that hacking against the West, he argues, has been carried out with relative impunity. “We sit there while they hack us,” Caceres says.
https://www.wired.com/story/p4x-north-korea-internet-hacker-identity-reveal/
And also
It also doesn’t help that the Republican Party have outright praised Russia, which means they’re already inside.
All the white hats and intelligence people I know are actual mmmericans that hate the bad guys. I don’t understand, knowing that, how this is the outcome. Cognitive dissonance I suppose
ah yes. the plethora of yourtownname/times,bugle,journal,herald,etc.
This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
They’ve been doing this since 2010, and ramped it up like crazy in 2016. Is this news?
This has been and still is ongoing important news
It’s the Denver Guardian from 2026 all over again
Color me surprised. Information warfare is the 6th generation of warfare. The 7th is drones and such :| a new cold war has been going on for longer than most think, what some might call world war 3. Subtly, to the masses.
To get the the motivation in people that could fix this… you have to have something called faith in the current system or at least partial faith that the American system is heading towards a brighter future. It’s not though, the entire military industrial complex, big pharma, the way government politicians are bought and paid for… the entire system is systemically corrupted, on all levels, it’s so systemised now that you could teach it in university… a course on the purely corrupt system….
You need to want to defend your country in order to defend it
